To celebrate its fifth birthday this week, Spotify posted an infographic of intriguing usage statistics. A million years of streaming in five years of operation — 200,000 years per year, 17,000 years per month — is fun to ponder. One… Continue Reading
Mere days after Samsung launched its Wave WiFi-controlled speaker system (RAIN coverage here), with Pandora and TuneIn onboard as presets, Bose brings to market a similar product — but with differentiating features that more clearly position it, and the category,… Continue Reading
Connoisseurs of electronica find no better pool in which to dive deeply and slake their unquenchable thirst than DI (Digitally Imported) Radio. (www.di.fm) Started in 1999, when founder Ari Shohat began streaming his favorite music from a college dorm room, DI now presents 55 channels of finely categorized, human-curated electronic music. No selection algorithms are crawling around DI. An emphasis on refined quality is reflected not only in the listening music streams, but also in the darkly atmospheric product design (web and most mobile systems), and the sonic level of its high-bitrate streams. read Continue Reading
South of the border: After a recent expansion of its streaming and cloud-serving music service to a half dozen European countries earlier this month (covered in RAIN here), the irregularly named Google Play Music All Access is now accessible in… Continue Reading
A venerable Internet radio station, Radio Paradise (www.radioparadise.com) is a perfect example of trusted human curation in the independent music streaming space. Operated as a cottage business since 2000 by Bill and Rebecca Goldsmith, the Radio Paradise studio is located… Continue Reading
The cost of content is a shared issue in terrestrial, webcast, and pureplay balance sheets. Music licensing costs come as a patchwork of statutory and negotiated agreements. Stakeholders on the music content side include composers, performers, and labels. Three organizations… Continue Reading
What’s your pleasure, a dashboard that allows you to plug in your personal devices with their data plans for streaming music on the road? Or a self-contained connected dash with its own Internet connectivity and embedded apps? In the first… Continue Reading
In an increasingly crowded field of general streaming platforms hosting immense catalogs of music to serve the long tail of listening demand, two trends are emerging. First, services whose relationship to their catalog artists is keyed to non-financial values. For… Continue Reading
Every few days rumors are published about the impending launch of Beats Music. We know it will be soon. We’ve heard that there will be a subscription component — possibly all-subscription, like Rhapsody and Google All Access. We don’t know… Continue Reading
The marketing is impressive, the collateral design is dazzling, and the product itself is … slightly baffling, at first. BBC Playlister is a new feature woven throughout the BBC online music experience. The top layer is a tagging function, whereby… Continue Reading
Pureplay of the day spotlights adventures in off-road listening. The population of Burma (officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar) is about 60-million — less than Pandora’s base of active listeners. Only one percent of Burma’s population has Internet… Continue Reading