Streaming music service Grooveshark is today announcing it has signed new licensing deals with worldwide distribution network DashGo and indie label NuGroove Records. DashGo is the larger deal, representing 115 labels, more than 4,5000 banks and over 50,000 tracks. NuGroove, meanwhile, is a small label with just over two dozen signed artists.
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Streaming music service Rdio from Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, is today launching two new music gifting options – physical gift cards and online credits. Consumers will be able to purchase the virtual gift card options in $10, $25, $50 and $100 values or in user-selected amounts. Meanwhile, physical cards in the $10 and $25 values will be sold in over 600 Target retail stores here in the U.S.
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Shuffler.fm, an online Web application for music discovery, received a major update today. Now users can play mixes of their favorite blogs, browse the Web’s most popular songs and artists, create personalized channels and more.
But what has us even more excited is the upcoming Shuffler.fm iPad application, which provides a visual way to explore new music, optimized for the touchscreen interface. → Read More
Facebook is working with a number of partners to prepare for the launch of a music service – possibly called ‘Vibes’ – inside the astoundingly popular social networking site. While you wait, I advise you to check out the amazing +Music extension for Google Chrome (here’s a direct link to the extension). → Read More
I am extremely unmusical (on the verge of being tone-deaf) so I can’t decide whether this new iPhone app is good or bad: Japan-based musical instrument maker Kawai has developed a camera app that scans music notes printed on paper and plays them back in real-time. Dubbed Gakufu Camera [JP], the app is said to be the first of its kind. → Read More
I descended upon Nashville’s Summer NAMM conference/trade show with high hopes of finding a plethora of musically oriented gadgets to ease and augment the playing experience for ostensible and pro musicians alike. How did it turn out?
Well, let me first say for the record that we do cover music gadgets here; gizmos, tools and instruments with technology at their heart or portability in their design fit in with the mission of TechCrunch Gadgets. To be sure, there is a lot of innovation in the space of music gadgetry…I guess I just didn’t see a large focus on it at the smaller, summer gathering of this giant trade show organization. There was more of a concentration on standard musical instrument retailer offerings. We’ll see if I can get to the extravaganza that is Winter NAMM early next year to search some more because I have heard rumors there will be an entire mobile app/software section to explore. → Read More
Last winter, Singapore-based Bitsmedia launched a new app into the marketplace called Frenzapp that enables users to share their favorite iPhone apps with friends, joining a cluster of services taking on Apple’s Genius in the attempt to make app recommendations even better.
Yet, with a competition from other app-recommendation startups, like Chomp, Appsfire, Discovr, Zwapp, Explor, and more, Bitsmedia made a smart strategic decision and decided to diversify by bringing Frenzapp to music with a new app called, you guessed it, Frenzapp Music. The music app, which recently went live on iTunes, attacks the social aspect of music discovery by enabling its users to share their favorite music on Facebook and Twitter, allowing users to post status updates to social networks or scroll through a realtime feed of the music their friends are liking, listening to, and listing as “favorites” — and more. → Read More
VibeDeck, a web service that enables music artists to sell their digital wares directly to their fans for free, announced today that it has raised a $2 million seed round from several U.S. and international investors. The early-stage startup launched in beta just last month and plans to use this round of seed capital to ramp up hiring, expand its marketing efforts, and add functionality to its current feature set.
In its first iteration, VibeDeck aims to improve the transaction experience between artists and fans, enabling the music-makers to enjoy maximum profit margins and forge a deeper relationship with fans. VibeDeck intends to be the simple, easy-to-use, and low cost eCommerce resource for small-to-medium sized bands → Read More
The Internet, wireless technology, evolving consumer trends and other factors have merged into a perfect storm putting significant stress on the relationship between record labels and their artists, and the radio industry that plays their music. The symbiosis that kept these two mega industries functioning effectively together for decades is now gone as each is confronted with a future dependent on traversing the digital divide. At a time where it seems they should take stock of their collective challenges and plot a path in partnership, they have chosen instead to turn against each other. → Read More
Learning to play an instrument is challenging; the progress in the early stages is slow, and the exercises that help you learn are boring and tedious. It’s largely for this reason that so many people give up on their chosen instrument before they reach vaunted rock star status. So, to combat this drop-out problem, Ovelin, an early-stage startup from Finland has built a game for the iPad called WildChords that aims to provide a fun way for beginners to learn guitar so that they can get over those early humps and go on to musical glory.
Essentially, WildChords takes the Guitar Hero model and applies it to early-stage musical education. You simply download the game onto your iPad, and pick up your acoustic or electric guitar and start playing. The app uses high-tech audio technology to recognize the sound through your device’s microphone what chords you’re playing, turning your six-string into a game controller. → Read More
I’ve talked to many a musician about gadget addictions and the digital tools of their trade. Most recently, I was speaking with the KickDrums‘ management and inquiring about the gadgets the group uses for digital production and performance. Rather than doing an interview, Tilla (a.k.a. Matt Penttila) rose to the occasion and sent his own video demoing Hexler’s TouchOSC MIDI Control surface for iPad. He uses it live and in the studio. Dude made this post easy on me. Bravo for that. We should hire him. TouchOSC is not a new app, but did issue an update as of May 3. Video below. → Read More
We’ve gotten a lot of requests for our Disrupt conference theme music. Some conference attendees and webcast viewers apparently can’t get the music out of their heads and want to hear it some more. Instead of picking music from a music production library, this year we created custom tracks.
The music came to us all the way from New Zealand from a company called Smith & Keats Music. They have a background in creating pop hits and have earned a reputation for specializing in music for the tech industry. Other clients have included Nintendo and Sony-Ericsson.
The composers say living in New Zealand gives them exposure to a broader range of artists from around the world. In the US and other countries, the music charts are dominated by local artists. Not so for New Zealand, where they claim only the best of the best makes it to their shores. → Read More
As we’ve suspected for a long time, Apple is very close to launching an online music service which may go by the name iCloud. The basic idea is that it will mirror your iTunes collection online so that it is available on any device without clunky cable syncing.
While getting rid of those cables will be a big step forward, if iCloud is nothing more than a music locker service it won’t go far towards transforming digital music, as BusinessWeek proclaims. Apple’s iCloud will be iTunes online, with a few features that make it slightly better than Google’s Music Beta—namely, I won’t have to spend hours uploading my music collection and I will get better quality audio files for some songs. That’s all great, but I am not sure it is enough for me to pay a monthly subscription. If it’s bundled with MobileMe, it certainly would make that service more appealing, but I wouldn’t pay for iCloud as a standalone service if that is all there is to it. And certainly, this could turn out to be only one part of a revamped MobileMe service. Depending on what else will be added, iCloud could help push more MobileMe subscriptions overall. → Read More
How much do you want to make a song called “Shake Your Body?” A lot? Then you’d best get over to Burn-Studios, a new Flash-based sequencer that allows you to oots oots all day long using this wild browser based system for beat mixing. You can check out some super songs in the gallery or make your own music using baffles, drums, synths, and sequencers. I was able to make a horrible, horrible song in a few minutes so I’m sure someone out there in Internet land has already recreated Kind of Blue with a virtual 808 and a wah-wah pedal. → Read More
The Internet is a cruel, mysterious mistress. What we have here is the story of a Canadian band called One Soul Thrust, a phony baloney (I refused to believe “bologna” is the proper spelling here; that’s not even how you’d pronounce the town name in Italian…) BitTorrent site, a misguided manager, and a lobbying group that apparently does little to no research. The story goes that this band’s manager wanted to see if any pirated copies of its debut album were available via BitTorrent. His sleuthing led him to LimeTorrents, a site we all know (or at least should know by now) that deals in trickery. → Read More
Ziggybox from Christian Losert on Vimeo. Christian Losert and Paul Schengber built this wild synth that uses cigarettes as triggers for some hot house beats. The system uses a camera to sense the position of various items on the surface. Add a loosie and you get a bass drum, open the cigarette box and get some high-hat. You can modify the tempo with a dial or you can just keep smoking and listening to some phat beats. → Read More
Last week, Amazon launched its Cloud Drive, with an emphasis on music storage. While there have been a number of “jukebox” services these last 10 years (Napster 2.0, MusicNow, Virgin Digital, Yahoo Music Unlimited, MTV Urge, MOG, Spotify, Thumbplay, Rdio), relatively few “locker” offerings have emerged—although rumors of new locker services from Apple and Google sound promising. Last week, Amazon leapt ahead of both rivals in launching Cloud Drive, a service that allows you to stream, for free, any songs purchased from Amazon.
For Amazon, it makes sense to pursue a locker service: they’ve perfected cloud-based content storage and delivery for thousands of web-based startups with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon Web Services (AWS) already provides hosting and data transfer. What’s interesting, however, is that the consumer-facing Cloud Drive is actually cheaper than its existing business-facing offering. → Read More
Amazon may have introduced its digital locker music service, the Cloud Player, before similar services from rivals Google and Apple (that are widely believed to be launching this year), but that doesn’t mean it will be an easy existence. Not long after the company published a note on its Web site inviting users to give Cloud Player a try did one of the major record labels offer a warning. “We are disappointed that the locker service that Amazon is proposing is unlicensed by Sony Music,” a Sony spokesman said. Is Amazon on a collision course with the music industry, and if it is, could that be a good thing for consumers? → Read More
If the rumors prove accurate, and it certainly looks like they will, Google will introduce a mobile streaming music service à la Spotify or Rdio sooner rather than later. The big idea is that you’ll be able to listen to any song you want on demand so long as you have network access, either via Wi-Fi or 3G/4G/etc. It’s music in the cloud, in other words. Google won’t be the first company to offer mobile streaming music, but there’s something different between “small-company-launches-mobile-cloud-music-with-indie-record-labels” and “Google-launches-mobile-cloud-music-with-every-label-on-the-planet.” → Read More
