Pureplay of the Day: LoudCity
Today’s POTD spotlights pureplay aggregator LoudCity (www.loudcity.com), which, like larger players RadioTuna and Live365, enables and hosts personal Internet radio stations. Continue Reading
Month: November 2013
Website Spotlight: NASH FM
NASH FM is a country-music broadcast cluster operating in several markets, extending onto the web with a unified website template that accomplishes basic goals more cleanly and attractively than many others. NASH FM’s site design is better organized and more pleasing to the eye than some radio group templates that are applied to dozens or hundreds of stations. Continue Reading
Pandora releases holiday listening metrics (while promoting Christmas stations)
In a press release this morning that serves as an advertisement for its holiday music stations, Pandora revealed some Christmas-season listening statistics.
We’ve been tracking the early rollout of Christmas music on terrestrial, subscription, and pureplay platforms, noting that there seems to be significant demand for holiday music in early November. Commenters in iHeartMusic’s Christmas stations jubilantly greeted their appearance a couple of weeks ago. Continue Reading
The real threat of Google Music on Apple devices
Last week’s drop of Google’s All Access music subscription app into Apple’s app store was a milestone moment in both the music-service wars and the larger tech-ecosystem land grab. We had fun with our “Google invades Apple” headline, and every media site covering the convergence of music and Internet hit the same note.
The invasion metaphor is apt, more than just for its imagery of two tech/media giants engaged in business warfare. Google’s Play Music All Access, awkwardly-named thought it might be, offers a more complete music platform than Apple does — and likewise for Spotify, Rhapsody, Pandora, and Rdio. Continue Reading
Pureplay of the Day: Herald.FM
With the tagline, “The Messenger of Good Music,” you can expect a broad programming range. Herald.FM (www.herald.fm) covers alt rock for the most part — Arctic Monkeys, Mumford & Sons, The Vaccines, Lana Del Rey, and Bleached have streamed through our speakers today. Continue Reading
RAIN Hotspots: Week of Nov. 11 – Nov. 15
The top five most-read articles this week. Continue Reading
Weekend Perspective: Week of Nov. 11 – Nov. 15
RAIN’s Weekend Perspective summarizes the week’s important events for a weekend catch-up, and revives your aching synapses for coming week. NEW & BETA Google Glass eases into music: Google’s streaming music service might be coming to the jazzy wearable computer.… Continue Reading
Streaming continues to erode “album release” concept
We noticed the new Hunger Games soundtrack album as a streaming playlist in iTunes Radio, which supported our repeated observation that “album release” no longer has much meaning. In the years when radio was the only mass-market music discovery venue,… Continue Reading
Beck issues complaint against Spotify number … we’ve lost track
Not to trivialize business issues for musicians, but the “Spotify debate” rages on which increasing repetition. Some of the publicized outbursts against Spotify result from musicians being asked about it by journalists. The latest high-profile musician to take a club… Continue Reading
Songza updates features and adds Songkick partnership
Streaming music service Songza updated its personalization features in a new iOS app which dropped into the Apple app store this week. Users can now see a list of their thumbs-up song votes, and play them as a playlist. That… Continue Reading
Google invades Apple
Long rumored and finally accomplished: Google dropped its tortuously-named Google Play Music All Access app into the iOS store today, extending its subscription service to Apple mobile-device users. (The launch was announced by Google here.) Pointless, you say, because Apple… Continue Reading
Soundcloud celebrates five years; releases impressive stats
SoundCloud, the audio upload site sometimes positioned as the audio version of YouTube, turns five years old this week. The company blog celebrates the milestone, and mentions a few eye-opening usage statistics. Upload traffic is intense, with an average 12… Continue Reading