The exodus of high-profile music services from music-technology provider The Echo Nest picked up momentum today as music service Rhapsody and its subsidiary Napster announced that they will “wind down” their partnerships. They join Rdio, which peeled away from The Echo Nest soon after it was acquired by competitor Spotify. Continue Reading
Napster — one of the most loved, loathed, and lasting brands in the history of online music. The Napster brand is audaciously being used by Ryan Lester, a college student taking some time off for personal projects. Lester has put up Napster.FM, implicitly arguing that a brand’s trademark does not extend across top-level domains — dot-com and dot-fm, for example. Continue Reading
The General Manager of Rhapsody-owned Napster Europe caused some raised eyebrows, confused head-scratching, and probably an internal memo or two, when he was quoted in an Inquirer interview saying that streaming platforms will always be mainly discovery tools for buying CDs. The remark clearly didn’t play well, so Schliesche went back to The Inquirer to revise the record. Continue Reading
British rock band Oasis has yielded to time and trend, adding its 10 albums (representing over 70-million album sales) to Spotify, Rhapsody, Deezer, and Rdio. As usual with announcements like this, but rarely mentioned, YouTube already carries Oasis extensively, with full albums, live performances, official videos, and the band’s own YouTube channel. Continue Reading
Music service Rhapsody upgraded its Android app with something called Track Match, to solve the music-recognition need within its full-featured subscription platform. It’s a good idea — you hear something, tell Rhapsody to identify it, save it in your library. How well does it work? Continue Reading
Rdio, competing for audience in a crowded online-music market, made significant workforce reductions to lower costs. Layoffs are reported to have carved out about a third of the company. In the wake of the layoffs, Rdio made confident noises about its future destiny, but it looks like a rocky road from here.
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Spotify has partnered with Vodafone Ireland, one of many country-specific branches of the international telecom giant. The deal is another instance of a music service joining a telecom carrier in a synergy that benefits both companies. Continue Reading
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
Music service Rhapsody’s net revenue and gross profit declined in two year-over-year measurements, according to an SEC filing by joint-venture partner and former parent company RealNetworks. Net loss also deepened in both timeline comparisons. Rhapsody separated from its subsidiary relationship… Continue Reading
In the conforming world of subscription music services, many of which share the same broad features, it is easy to assume that they exist in parity, competing on the basis of design rather than function. But then one of those… Continue Reading
RAIN’s Weekend Perspective summarizes the week’s important events for a weekend catch-up, and revives your blasted synapses for coming week. PARTNERSHIPS The Echo Nest partners with Getty Images: Music services that use The Echo Nest’s intelligence technology will be able… Continue Reading
It is a busy month for Rhapsody, the godparent of music services. During October the Internet jukebox launched new “radio” features that enabled artist-centric listening (trailing some other services by a few years, but still), closed an important partnership with… Continue Reading