Last summer, SoundHound shared an early look at its plans for a new personal assistant app. Hound promised to have a fresh take on voice activation and control, offering a step up from the currently available crop of programs. This week, the free app emerged from beta. How does it stack up? Continue Reading
Yesh Music and John Emanuele have expanded their class-action lawsuit over unpaid royalty claims, adding Google Play Music to the growing roster of defendants. As with the suits against Tidal and Slacker Radio, the plaintiffs claim that they did not receive correctly executed notices of intent from Google about streaming their creations. Continue Reading
Rhapsody parent company RealNetworks released its financial information for 2015, including the performance for the streaming service. Rhapsody CFO Ethan Rudin did not comment on the results, but said the company has “never been more excited or optimistic about a category that we helped define in early 2001.” Continue Reading
Spotify has embarked on many efforts to provide music discovery to its audience, and the latest move in that direction is a playlist collection called Fresh Finds. The programming choices for these playlists will stem from both sides of the playlist creation coin: human curation and data-driven algorithms. Continue Reading
SFX is making plans to auction off online EDM portal Beatport as it continues through bankruptcy proceedings. It has attracted interested parties for the property and will solicit initial bids in April with an auction slated for May 3. Continue Reading
Sony music labels have filed a lawsuit in a California federal court. The suit complains that Radionomy has not paid appropriate licensing royalties for use of music recordings since late 2014. Three labels are participating in the filing: Sony Music Entertainment, LaFace Records, and Arista Records. Continue Reading
XAPPmedia released its Q4 ad load report, which saw an increase to the average ad load for Internet radio while the average time to first ad continues to drop. It found that the average ad load rose 5.7% from the third quarter to 2 minutes, 29 seconds. Continue Reading
Electronic music specialist Digitally Imported has released a status announcement of its audience growth. Double-digit increases in paid subscriptions to the listening platform have been accomplished, the result of product enhancements and new initiatives intended to drive user engagement. Continue Reading
Investment firm TPG Capital is reportedly considering an investment in Spotify. Sky News said that TPG is in talks to provide financing of as much as $500 million in loan notes, which could lead to Spotify increasing the size of its offering to up to $1 billion. These alleged fundraising plans come as Pandora continues to voice its intention to build a competing on-demand music service. Continue Reading
Tuned Global and Triton Digital have reached a partnership in which Triton’s ad-exchange technology will monetize Tuned Global’s mobile apps. Specifically, Triton’s a2x programmatic platform will transact sales across the white-label service Tuned Global offers. Continue Reading
The mobile analytics experts at App Annie are still churning out reports on 2015. This week, the company revealed the top app publishers from the year based on worldwide annual revenue from both iOS and Google Play. Continue Reading
AdLarge has announced its latest podcast ad-repping deal, partnering with ex-SNL comedian Jim Beuer to exclusively bring to market his two existing podcasts, plus others currently in development. Continue Reading