Another startup is wading into the crowded waters of music streaming today: Radical.FM, a web-based service that combines on-demand streaming and curated radio stations with a platform for artists to create and broadcast their own public playlists. But while companies like Pandora and Spotify build out businesses based on advertising and subscription services, Radical.FM is trying something a… → Read More
Google has reached a new arrangement with European music publishing entities which will give it access to 5.5 million tracks spanning 35 countries, including artists like Lady Gaga and Rihanna. The arrangement was made with Armonia, one of the largest alliances of music publishers in the world. This should help Google expand the availability of its music content offerings. → Read More
Digital music platform Chromatik is today launching its web and iPad applications for learning, practicing, recording and collaborating on music with friends, bandmates, teachers, and others. The company has also expanded on its seed round from earlier this year, and now has just over $2 million in funding from Learn Capital, 500 Startups, Kapor Capital, Launchpad LA, MuckerLab, and Bruno… → Read More
It sucks being in a band. No, no, playing music and the groupies seem great, but updating all your web presences one by one with your new songs or videos must be a drag. BandPage Connect wants to make it as easy as Guitar Hero. The musician profile platform now lets you update your BandPage, and any site or app tapped into the Connect API auto-syncs, including WordPress and a dozen other sites. → Read More
The music streaming juggernaut that is Spotify continues to gain momentum, although today was possibly more of a gentle acceleration than a turbo charge: today the company quietly launched its service live in Ireland and Luxembourg — two markets that may not be known for being music streaming powerhouses but are significant all the same for filling out the startup’s European footprint. (And, of… → Read More
Lots of people today already use eBay and its ticketing site StubHub for ticket event purchases and trades; today eBay extended and further formalized that role, with a new global partnership with AEG, the sports and entertainment venue giant, to provide ticketing, merchandise sales, and sponsorship for AEG events across eBay and its StubHub and PayPal subsidiaries. Financial terms of the deal… → Read More
Senzari, the Miami-based streaming music startup offering an alternative to Pandora in both stateside and international markets, is today announcing it has acquired Berlin-based wahwah.fm. Founded in 2010 by Philipp Eibach, wahwah.fm is a location-based music app for iPhone that previously allowed users to broadcast their own personalized radio stations, which nearby folks using the app could pick… → Read More
Streaming music startup 8tracks is officially relaunching its iPhone application today, which offers a much-needed (and really well done) user interface revamp. For those who remember the earlier version of the app out last year, it will be as if you’re getting a brand-new application altogether. 8tracks 2.0, as the update is being called, introduces a number of new components, including… → Read More
We are still waiting for official word on when Spotify will make the move to a browser-based version, or port its App Center to its mobile app. But in the meantime, third parties continue to build out their presence on Spotify’s platform — perhaps a sign of more activity coming soon. The latest of these is Soundrop, a creator of listening rooms and social-jukebox-style services (a la… → Read More
I love streaming music and I’m an avid user of Spotify for this purpose. I was pretty delighted when I saw that Taylor Swift’s new album “Red” was available for listening when I opened up the app. I listened to the whole album, and I gotta tell ya…it’s pretty damn good. But then something happened, it dissapeared. And then it came back. Then went away again.
Apparently, Taylor Swift doesn’t… → Read More
As a man who is interested in independent films, I find that sourcing soundtracks for these projects is difficult. That’s why there’s StereoBot.com, a new service that allows filmmakers, students, app designers, and presenters to buy licenses to innocuous-sounding music for use in projects. The central interface is the search system. To find a song or snippet, you enter a topic –… → Read More
DoubleTwist, the popular desktop and mobile alternative to iTunes, has just launched a social sharing feature which allows its users to post what they’re listening to on Facebook or Twitter. Alongside the message text, the post also includes a link that, when clicked, will take visitors to a custom webpage offering an artist bio, news, concert dates, and the corresponding music video. → Read More
Berlin-based music startup Musicplayr, which offers a service that allows users to collect and listen to songs from YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, DailyMotion and music blogs, is now exiting its private beta period, and opening up to all users worldwide, including those in the U.S. The company is also announcing a €500,000 seed investment led by Lars Langusch of Holzbrink Ventures. It’s the… → Read More
7digital is one of the oldest players in the digital music industry. The London-based company announced today that it has raised $10 million from two public technology companies. Even though the company is already profitable, it plans to expand its open platform strategy to power even more music services. 7digital is the key element behind Samsung’s Music Hub or the upcoming BlackBerry 10 App… → Read More
Deezer, the web-based music streaming company that has just picked up $130 million in funding from Warner Music owner Access Industries and Idinvest, is gearing up for another announcement on Wednesday. There, it will lay out more details about what it plans to do with the cash injection — the largest ever for a French startup — and, we have heard, unveil a new user interface and other features. → Read More
Jelli, the crowdsourced social radio platform, is today announcing $9 million in additional funding, in a round led by new investors Intel Capital and Relay Ventures. The round also saw participation from existing investor First Round Capital, as well as individuals including Roger Ames, former Chairman of EMI Music.
Related to the funding news, Jelli also detailed its growth over the past… → Read More
Ping was scheduled for unceremonious termination at the end of September, and now it’s definitely gone dark. Clicking on the Ping link in the iTunes sidebar now returns an error, if it even still appears there. Our own Josh Constine foretold its demise back in September, and now it’s gone, both on mobile and the desktop. → Read More
One rumor that was nearly forgotten amid the iPhone 5′s launch and iOS 6 media circus was that Apple was reportedly looking to release a Pandora-killer soon. The streaming music service would be a natural next step in the progression Apple’s taken with digital music, but it looks like licensing issues may have stepped in the way once again. → Read More
Singer-songwriter-rocker Neil Young has been talking about problems with modern audio codecs for decades. He was angry at CDs back in the 1990s and most recently he lashed out against MP3s and digital audio compression at a popular tech conference, saying “My goal is to try to rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years. We live in the digital age and, unfortunately… → Read More
High-end Danish speaker company Libratone makes some quirky clothed speakers, and the latest, the Zipp, is no different. But like most things, appearances don’t always tell the whole story.
The Zipp, it turns out, is different than anything else available for a number of reasons. Sure, it has an interchangeable collection of Italian wool sweaters and a unique 360-degree array of ribbon-based… → Read More
With Shazam infiltrating our TVs, showing up in Super Bowl ads, and passing 200 million users, you just might think that the market has its music-identification king. But SoundHound would beg to differ. Just three days after Shazam’s announcement, the music search and discovery app has responded by quietly releasing some numbers of its own. No official announcement, no hubbub, just a press… → Read More
Now it’s easier than ever to start your own radio station and earn money on the ads thanks to Radionomy. Today the European do-it-yourself online radio platform with 13 million listeners is scrapping its desktop software and relaunching as an all-browser based service. → Read More
Back in March, VEVO rolled out a huge new redesign, which saw the major-label-owned music video giant add continuous playback and beef up its personalization and social features. Thanks to tight new integration with Facebook’s Open Graph, VEVO quickly saw a big increase in the number of videos watched and shared via the social network. Simultaneously, the company has been making a serious push on… → Read More
New iOS app Timbre wants to help get you out to more concerts, by giving you a glimpse at shows nearby along with a free preview of what exactly you’ll be getting if you buy a ticket or pop into a free show. It does so with a product that’s remarkably simple, without any requirement to login or even associate one of your social network accounts to get started, and it’s free.
What Timbre… → Read More
When it comes to music discovery, technology and the Internet opened a lot of possibilities. Yet, and this is what Serendip is all about, music curation by your friends or knowledgeable people are frequently much more valuable than what you could get from an automated service. Today, Serendip is launching out of private beta and is now available for everyone.
The service aggregates all the… → Read More
Add one more distribution partner to Spotify’s list as it seeks more scale for its music streaming service to make it more profitable: Deutsche Telekom, owners of T-Mobile, says that beginning in October, it will be making 18 million tracks from Spotify available to its 35.4 million customers in Germany, with the data usage associated with the streaming not counting against subscribers’ data… → Read More
As the Web is stuffed with more and more content, we’re increasingly in need of good curators to help us discover the things we’ll love amidst the noise. Flipboard, for one, rose to popularity by transforming your favorite digital news sources into a socially-curated mobile magazine. Shuffler.fm is on a mission to do the same for music discovery, combining Flipboard’s successful formula with a… → Read More
While ebooks and digital music are becoming the dominant way of consuming books and songs, only a few digital retailers have become important players in this space. reKiosk is trying to bring to the web the buying experience that was lost along the way thanks to a service that promotes independent artist and provides advice in the style of independent booksellers and record store owners.
Aziz… → Read More
Tech-Crunch DISRUPT! With Disrupt SF coming up in less than three weeks, perhaps you are starting to hum our memorable Disrupt music in your head. Tech-Crunch DISRUPT!
We are debuting new custom tracks at the event, but you can get a sneak preview in this post. You can also freely download and remix this music. Send us your best remixes and we will play our favorites during Disrupt. We are… → Read More
If part of the game in streaming music is to have the biggest catalog of tracks, then today Rdio made a significant move to turn its volume up to Spotify levels, and gain some street cred with indie fans in the process: it announced two key deals with CD Baby and TuneCore, both independent music aggregators, that ramps up its total track number to 18 million songs, and adds some 250,000 new… → Read More
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