January 26, 2012
Grooveshark, who recently launched a beautiful new web app for their service, has been shut down in Germany. It's a sad day for German music lovers, because in Germany there are not many other options for listening to music. Spotify is not available and neither is Rhapsody. Even Google Music, which only uses the music you already have, is not available.
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January 25, 2012
Spotify continues to go from strength-to-strength. After becoming a growing presence in Europe over the course of several years, it emigrated across the Atlantic to embrace the U.S. The ultimate goal is to span the globe, and while doing so, founder Daniel Ek and his team of developers are trying to endlessly improve the service to ensure it stays ahead of the competition.
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January 17, 2012
Sometimes it feels like the entrenched music industry (embodied by the big labels) is doing everything it can to keep us feeling like pirates for wanting to download music. But no matter how much they try to keep the old model ("artist to label, label to consumer”) alive, it is actually dying. Things are changing, and artists have amazing tools for reaching listeners directly these days.
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January 16, 2012
Grooveshark has had an arduous road when it comes to mobile devices. There was an app available briefly on the iPhone, but Apple pulled it fairly quickly. They moved over to Cydia, and things were great, as long as you owned a jailbroken device. They also had a stint on the Android Marketplace. All the heat from record labels has caused a slew of problems for Grooveshark, but there is no quit in them.
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December 29, 2011
The new Spotify has arrived, with version 0.8.0.952 and higher, and adding apps to the music streaming mix. A beta version containing the majority of the apps ready for launch was made available, which gave me ample opportunity to put all them all through their paces in advance. The following five Spotify apps are the ones which I strongly urge all Spotify users to install immediately.
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December 28, 2011
With iTunes Match finally released to us here in the UK, I signed up and have been using it for about a week now. Here’s my definitive guide to exactly what iTunes Match is, and what it isn’t; as well as a quick guide on how to upgrade all your matched songs to high quality 256kbs versions. Hopefully along the way I'll answer any questions you have about the service too.
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December 24, 2011
Do you love Spotify's free version, but tired of needing Wine just to listen to the music? Good news - Spotify now offers a free version specifically for Linux users. Or at least, users of Debian, Ubuntu and their variants. Sorry Fedora fans. Spotify gives you access to millions of songs, for free. Unlike Pandora or Last FM though, you can listen to entire albums on demand.
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December 24, 2011
It looks like competition among digital music stores is heating up. Google, Amazon and Apple, three of the biggest names in the business, all have their own entries going toe-to-toe with each other. To attract more business, each is offering discounted digital albums. Google Music is leading the pack with its $4.99 “Blowout Sale.”
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December 23, 2011
Wait, isn’t radio dead? Isn’t this the era of Pandora, Last.fm, and Bandcamp? Well, according to over 10 million users, radio is alive and kicking. All of these people (between 10 and 50 million, in fact) downloaded the free version of TuneIn for Android, and it has a 4.5 rating with no less than 133,000 reviews. In a word, that is stupendous .
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December 17, 2011
After what some are calling an "accidental" launch on Wednesday, Apple has now begun rolling out its iTunes Match service around the world. Reports suggest the service has already reached the UK, Australia, Canada, France , Spain and Ireland as well as Brazil which received the service earlier this week.
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December 13, 2011
Music is a beautiful part of life. While most of us don’t make music (I envy those who do), we all listen to it. But having music play in the background while you’re working on something else is probably not the best way to listen to it, especially if it’s music you’ve never heard of before. Ex.fm is a music discovery service which we’ve covered before, but at the time, it was strictly web-based (with an optional Chrome add-on).
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December 8, 2011
Discovering a new artist, album or record label that corresponds with your tastes and expectations can be a rewarding experience. These golden discoveries can be few and far between and that’s where I turn to using a few extra tools to help hone in on the music I love. We first featured SoundCloud on MakeUseOf initially back in 2008, and while the core service largely remains the same; much has changed.
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December 7, 2011
With the recent launching of Apple's iCloud and the music streaming service iTunes Match, cloud computing seems to be the future of Apple and other computer companies. If you use multiple Apple devices like I do, you no doubt welcome the recent upgrades for wirelessly syncing data between your computer and iOS devices.
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December 6, 2011
Spotify, the music service that is taking the world by storm, is rolling out some awesome new features. They recently added support for third party apps for developers, and now they are adding some killer new features for end users. The first of these is predictive search. When a user now begins typing something into the search box, Spotify will attempt to predict what the user is going to search for and offer suggestions.
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December 4, 2011
Music service Spotify has announced recently that they are opening their servers to developers, who will be able to create apps that integrate with Spotify’s desktop app. In short, third-party developers can now expand on Spotify’s native functionalities by using Spotify’s API.
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