Tagged: musicsoftwareandsites

Songbird is like an open source version of iTunes that handles just about everything that program does, while swapping out the iTunes store interface in favor of the world's music blogs. You can stream music from those sources directly within the program (try that with iTunes' browser), purchasing whatever music you encounter there that strikes your fancy from multiple sources: Amazon, Amie St., eMusic or iTunes. Or, if a blog or other site offers songs as free downloads, those are gathered neatly at the bottom of the screen as well (see screenshot to the right). [...]

Songbird is like an open source version of iTunes that handles just about everything that program does, while swapping out the iTunes store interface in favor of the world's music blogs. You can stream music from those sources directly within the program (try that with iTunes' browser), purchasing whatever music you encounter there that strikes your fancy from multiple sources: Amazon, Amie St., eMusic or iTunes. Or, if a blog or other site offers songs as free downloads, those are gathered neatly at the bottom of the screen as well (see screenshot to the right). At [...]

An CNET music site called "Juke" was plowed under in advance of its launch by CBS Interactive, but the conglomerate has not sworn off the launch of new music sites entirely. CBS's radio division announced its Play.it music streaming service on Monday, which allows listeners to create customized stations, play artist-themed stations or listen to over 340 traditional channels from CBS Radio and AOL Radio. Listeners to the terrestrial counterparts of the stations had already been on-board, as had curious testers, as part of the site's start-up-style beta launch. Play.it is somewhat [...]

It may be a mallrat paradise of punk and pop culture, but Hot Topic can smell the future of music coming just fine, thanks. So it has decided to embrace it with an online music social called ShockHound.com, which offers DRM-free MP3s, webisodes, reviews, merch, concert and more to Generation Xbox. So far, it's got its ears in the right place. ShockHound is following up its Tuesday launch with a free double-bill that's hard to beat, sending stellar noisemakers No Age and Titus Andronicus on the road for free shows in New York, [...]

Steve Jobs' dogmatic "one price fits all" for music sold at the iTunes store faces an unlikely challenge -- from Apple itself. Jobs has held firm to his 99-cents-per-song rate with one brief exception despite pressure from the major labels to charge different prices for music depending on demand and other factors. But Apple's own App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch already allows artists and labels do an end-run around those pricing restrictions and experiment with alternate pricing models and even ad-supported music. Apple receives 30 percent or so of [...]

From a founding member of post-rock pioneers Slint to ax shredder for new-millennial metalheads Dead Child, David Pajo has played either side of the sonic spectrum against the mainstream. So it stands to reason that his recently published Halloween-themed Imeem playlist would be an esoteric freakout perfectly built for the horrordome. Of course, Pajo isn't just about metal: The tireless musician , above at far left, has crafted solo vehicles like Papa M and starred in groups as varied as The Palace Brothers, Stereolab, Royal Trux, The For Carnation, Matmos, Tortoise and more. But his Imeem [...]

Today has been largely about EMI. First, we reported that the venerable music behemoth, which has scared off acts like Radiohead and lost over a billion dollars in the first quarter of the year, will sell music through airport kiosks . Then music blog Idolator posted a rant arguing we don't know anything about the music business. We weren't the only targets; BoingBoing also made the cut. In a Monday diatribe called "' Wired' Blogger Not Afraid to Look Stupid ," Idolator called me out for Friday's post, " EMI Badly Wounded, Bleeds [...]

Mufin, the latest music-recommendation engine, is going to tell you what to listen to, and it doesn't care what you think. Computers have been telling us what to listen to for years -- at least since Amazon first told us that if we like X, we might like Y. But humans always have a hand in those recommendations: Pandora hires music experts, while Apple's Genius and CBS's Last.fm use collaborative filtering that notices when songs, artists or albums appear in the same collections. On the other hand Mufin -- the core of [...]

Although peer-to-peer networks are as legal as e-mail, much of their traffic involves the distribution of copyrighted music without protection. Qtrax has long sought permission to offer a peer-to-peer-style network by leveraging Usenet as a secondary back-end for its centralized music service. Until today, it had succeeded only in licensing the official catalogs of EMI and Universal Music Group for US users -- not including the "gray area" music that's available on file sharing networks. Today represents another baby step forward in the long march of Qtrax , "the world's first free and legal peer-to-peer music [...]

If you're throwing a Halloween party this year or you just want to get in the mood, consider the Halloween-themed station Slacker launched today. As with other Slacker channels, this one lets you skip up to six songs per hour and transfer the station to a Slacker portable device even if you only have a free account. The embeddable Slacker Halloween Radio station can be customized by clicking the Heart and Ban buttons and plays music by 120 artists including Bo Diddley, The Doors, Black Sabbath, MIA, The Specials, Neil Young and Whodini. [...]

The millions of needles in imeem's haystack of music, videos and people just became easier to find, thanks to a new design that highlights imeem-programmed content, offers a customized discovery page for each user and bundles everything on the site that relates to a specific artist onto a single page. "What we've been working on for the past several month is a site-wide redesign," imeem head of marketing and business development Steve Jang told Wired.com. "It's been focused on solving a problem that we faced as we started to grow in traffic and started to install all [...]

"I've come up with an invention that is going to scare the music business," the stoner sampled at the beginning of Kid Koala's "Slew Test 2" slurs. "Like, the whole music business is destroyed when this invention hits the street." That invention is DRM, and it's insanely efficient at deathbed conversions. Ask the customers who bought DRM tracks from Wal-Mart: They just got a letter asking them to put life jackets on their laced tunes or lose them forever. They may never go DRM again. Wal-Mart's watered-down legalese spelled it out this way: [...]

MySpace Music has has some cool new features, but an iTunes killer it is not. The finest benefit of the new look is its playlist feature, which allows users to build playlists from search results or other people's 'lists using little Flash pop-up windows. Before the changeover, music fans had to leave MySpace and hop on Project Playlist or another site to build one and drag it back to their profiles kicking and screaming, or choose to stream only a single song. MySpace Music went with the no-brainer, and made it easier while [...]

Radiohead's remix contest for the its track "Nude" was a big deal by any measure. According to Radiohead's merchandise company W.a.s.t.e., the remix page for the track has received over six million unique visitors who cast nearly a half a million votes and listened to tracks 1.7 million times. And that was for a song that was in the waltzy, difficult-to-remix 3/4 time signature -- think "one, two, three, one, two, three" and a contest that cost $5 to enter. Building on that experience, the band has decided to unbundle another of its [...]

MySpace Music, slated for a midnight launch on Wednesday night with a greatly increased catalog of songs from all four of the world's major labels, will allow users to stream songs on-demand, import them into an infinite number of playlists for free in return for encountering advertisements, and purchase them from Amazon's MP3 store without leaving the site MySpace says it chose this path because other models out there overly restrict music. "With DRM-protected a la carte files and tethered subscription files you've got a constrained system -- the content is constrained, it's [...]

Currently valued at around $2 billion even thought it has yet to launch or land a CEO, News Corporation's MySpace Music venture has a lot to prove if it wants to take its place next to iTunes as an online music distribution titan. A good place to start? Getting music onto the service. That's been a nightmare, especially for indie labels and artists, who lately have been blocked from uploading their catalogs to MySpace Music, according to the The Register . The whole thing may enter an antitrust phase , if News [...]

I know that I've complained before about the waste of CDs, but a killer deal is a killer deal. If you still like the material thing and you're down with collecting some desert-island discs for the apocalypse, Amazon's latest promotion might not be a bad place to stop off while you're grabbing some bottled water and duct tape. Some of rock, pop and hip-hop's seminal efforts can be had for less than a Hamilton until October 2. Two discs land you a third one, gratis. If you're late on Tom Waits, his finest efforts are [...]

Rather than cloister users into its own services, Yahoo Music plans to show how much it loves them by setting them free . Soon, visitors to Yahoo Music will be able to arrange panels showcasing content from YouTube, Pandora, Last.fm, Amazon, iTunes and Yahoo's own Flickr, allowing them to customize their own jumping off point for discovering, consuming and buying music on these services. The shift in approach comes as part of a redesign of Yahoo's home page that also integrates content from outside sites that were once considered competitors. [...]

Microsoft showed us a sneak preview of the Zune 3.0 software it plans to release on September 16 with the latest generation of Zune devices, and what we saw made iTunes' simple Genius feature look like a blast from digital music's past. While iTunes serves up a text list of recommended songs within your library and from the iTunes store, adding to the more basic recommendations its MiniStore feature used to make, Zune reinvented the recommendation concept by collapsing artists, albums and fans into the same recommendation engine, more accurately mirroring the way people think about music. [...]

Long before DJ Shadow became an electro-hop legend, he was answering questions online from scrubs like me. Where did you get the guitar riff for "High Noon?" Who the hell was Colonel Bagshot? Do you owe David Axelrod back pay? Then he got too busy to bother. But it looks like he finally found some holes in his busy schedule. He's recharged the "Ask DJ Shadow" feature on his his official site , so gather up your questions and damn the torpedoes. He's ready for anything: "No question is too bizarre, too long, [...]