music discovery
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Pandora Modes gives you more listening options for music stations
Pandora is giving you more control over your listening experience. Starting today, the streaming service will offer a new feature called Pandora Modes. Designed to help you fine-tune the types of songs that come up on your favorite stations, Pandora Modes gives listeners the ability to pick between different styles of music discovery. It's available to both free and premium users.
Spotify tackles the paralysis of choice through friends
Here's the weird thing about choice: it breeds indecision. And the more choice you have, the harder it is to simply settle on something... anything. It's a serious challenge facing streaming services like Spotify that put literally millions of options at your fingertips. Today the Swedish company is unveiling its latest effort to master the art of content discovery. The idea is actually pretty simple (and honestly I'm amazed the company hadn't thought of this earlier). You'll now find a Top Tracks in Your Network playlist under Top Lists. This playlist, obviously enough, collects the most played tracks among the people you follow over the last seven days. The hope is this will not only highlight that new Run the Jewels album that all of your friends are listening to, but it will also let you know when that one friend keeps listening to Go Your Own Way on repeat.
Shazam takes its music discovery powers to the Mac
Shazam has already covered ground on mobile platforms such as iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8, but now it is prepared to bring its media identification software to more devices. And it all starts with Apple's line of personal computers. The newly minted Shazam for Mac, naturally, features the same discovery tools which have made the app as popular as it is today, with the main differentiator being that it's new for desktops and laptops. Once installed, the application performs in a rather subtle way, running its trademark ID work constantly in the background, if you allow it to. On the home screen, additionally, it only takes a spot on the menu bar to let you glance at recently discovered media. We say "media" because Shazam isn't just capable of recognizing music playing around you, but also other stuff like TV shows -- this is something that's also possible on the smartphone/tablet apps.
Shazam is now more social and better-looking on iOS, Android is next
As part of an ongoing major redesign on mobile, Shazam has just rolled out a new version of its iOS app. Adding to the changes we saw last month, today's update focuses on offering improved social sharing features, an even better lyrics experience and a more polished UI throughout the application. Users will now see in-depth artist biographies, redesigned album and song pages, as well as the inclusion of videos for songs. Shazam also points out that the app was also tweaked to have enhanced audio recognition and suck a little less power out of your iDevice -- much like Skype did recently with one of its apps. The update is initially only available for iOS, but the Android crowd can expect these revisions to come "in a couple of weeks."
MTV Artists iPhone app wants to help you discover new music, provide a deeper connection with musicians
The number of media discovery apps keeps getting bigger by the day, and the latest to join the frenzy is MTV. Simply dubbed MTV Artists, the newly announced iPhone application is loaded with a vast amount of music-focused features, including detailed artists pages and the ability to search for tracks by simply typing in lyrics. What's more, MTV also suited the app with Sound ID, a Shazam-esque function which can quickly identify songs -- this is particularly useful when you're trying to find out who sings a tune that you may be hearing for the first time. MTV tells us that Artists is more than just another music discovery app, noting that the idea is to connect users with artists by way of in-depth profiles, which contain things such as image galleries, videos and tour dates. MTV Artists will only be available for iOS (iPhone-optimized) at launch, but the network did say that an Android version is in the works and set to come "sometime in 2014."
Twitter launching #Music app for iPhone alongside new service today (update: now live)
We had a strong suspicion that Twitter's new music service would figure into the company's "big announcement" promised for today, and that is indeed the case. The company confirmed on Good Morning America this morning that its #Music service will be launching on the web later today with a separate iPhone app in tow. As expected based on the company's acquisition of We Are Hunted, the service is focused largely on music discovery, letting you find music that's popular with your friends or those you follow -- specifically, music shared from iTunes, Spotify or Rdio at the moment. According to Twitter, the web version will be rolling out over the next few hours, with the service currently offered in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Twitter also says that it hopes to roll the service out to Android devices in the future, but unfortunately isn't offering anything more specific for the time being. Update: The iPhone app is now available in the App Store. If it's not turning up in searches for you, this link should work. Most should also now be seeing the web-based version at the source link below.
Echo Nest is the man behind the Spotify Radio curtain
The Music Genome Project is in some serious trouble. The fancy algorithm behind Pandora is facing an increasingly popular competitor in the form of Echo Nest. The company's "music intelligence platform" and its accompanying API are already powering iHeartRadio and Nokia Music's Mix Radio. Now it's getting baked into the streaming media service du jour -- Spotify. Echo Nest's capable automated mix-making was already available to Spotify users via Echofi, but now the Swedish media company is using the tech as the basis for its updated radio service. Check out the PR after the break for a few not-so-subtle jabs at Pandora and its restrictions on free users.
Last.fm Discover delivers greener pastures of music discovery
Last.fm is going all HTML5 with Discover, a new music discovery service that lets you find artists through tag search and create playlists by dragging and dropping songs from the comfort of your browser. Once you've created a mix from the site's rolling fields of music, you can share it via Facebook and Twitter to show the world just how indie you are. Check out the new service at the source link below.
Pandora Radio's HTML5 redesign hands-on
Earlier this week, Pandora announced that it would finally be dropping its longtime support for Flash in favor of HTML5. The move is one piece of a big redesign for the site, one which will begin rolling out to Pandora One (the $36 / year premium version) subscribers in pieces, as part of a limited testing period before being made available to the service's entire massive user base. The timing could have been more ideal, of course. A day after the announcement, Spotify quickly grabbed the attention of those following the online music industry by formally launching in the US. It's important to note right off the bat, however, that these two services are not really direct competitors, in spite of how some might spin it. Spotify is an all-you-can eat subscription service, making it more akin to the likes of a Rhapsody and Napster. Pandora, on the other hand, is built largely around passive music discovery. You log-in, you enter an artist, and you let the music come to you. This redesign takes that ease of use to a whole new level. Check out our impressions below.%Gallery-128497%
Shazam and Spotify team up on iOS and Android apps
In yet another sign that Spotify has gone mainstream the company has just announced a partnership with Shazam -- the ubiquitous mobile music identification service. Under the deal, Shazamers will now be greeted with a "Play in Spotify" feature for all music discovered. The feature will be fully integrated in Shazam's free app "soon" and is available now for the premium apps on Android and iOS wherever Spotify is available, namely, the UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Spain and the Netherlands.
Switched On: The DAP, the Frap, the pap and the gap
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment: The iPod and iTunes haven't ostensibly suffered for (and have arguably gained from the) lack of a subscription music service. However, while such services have proven a tough sell to consumers at large, they have their benefits. One is the general liberation from the 30-second sample, a tiny prison of time that makes it difficult to engage in meaningful music discovery, the silver lining in the digital cloud that has been raining on the music industry for so many years. In contrast to Rhapsody, Napster and Microsoft's Zune Pass, which offer several ways within their software for subscribers to hear full tracks in which they might be interested, Apple has recently turned "out of band" for music discovery. The high-profile announcement with Starbucks at the introduction of Apple's latest round of iPods brings the portable devices to where the free music is rather than vice versa. Among Apple's portable music players, the automatic track identification works only with the iPod touch and the iPhone. However, the flat-panel televisions in New York City Starbucks locations also note PCs and Macs as suitable (and prevalent) clients for purchasing music played at the popular coffee retailer. An encouraging aspect of the collaboration between Starbucks and Apple is that the right company is making the brown product. However, one hot spot of trouble brewing in this Half-n-Half is that one can listen to the music only at a Starbucks location. This begs whether Apple would continue such a partnership when the iPhone finally gets access to 3G (perhaps to the scandalous exclusion of AT&T) or whether it or another device such as the iPod touch embrace WiMAX. But extending access to Starbucks' percolated playlists need not wait for such wireless advances. The two companies could enable access via a simple option in iTunes that would stream Starbucks' Hear Music XM station -- or an equivalent -- via any broadband connection.
