While listening to a Spotify playlist from music discovery service We Are Hunted, I came across an intriguing artist I hadn't heard of before: Montag. I starred the song, called 'True Love', and a bit later went back to explore more of Montag's music. It turns out he is in...
You knew it had to happen, but it still stings. With Amazon’s complicated update of its Cloud Player digital music service, the company has made its cloud-based music-locker service much less friendly to users who don’t want to pay for a subscription.Amazon’s announcement Tuesday made it sound like the online...
Senator Patrick Leahy offered an amendment to the now-stalled cybersecurity bill that would allow Facebook users to automatically share the titles of movies they rent through Netflix. His proposal would strengthen ecommerce at the expense of a decades-old bill that keeps video rental record private. Guess what? The Vermont Democrat also...
Facebook posted it first quarterly earnings statement post-IPO yesterday and one number pops out: 84%. That is the percentage of revenue the company made from advertising, representing $992 million of the total $1.18 billion it brought in during Q2. To maintain stable growth, Facebook must diversify its revenue stream and...
When the iPhone welcomed third-party apps four years ago, the music industry, like everyone else, scrambled to find a revenue-generating angle. Band-specific apps began rolling out, highlighting musicians in the App Store. They haven't exactly been smash hits, but this app category still has potential to promote not-so-starving artists. If...
The popular TV drama Breaking Bad returned to television last night for a fifth season. The premiere was accompanied by a flood of tweets, check-ins and status updates across a variety of services, as has become standard during big entertainment events like this. At the same time, the Breaking Bad premiere demonstrated...
All-you-can-read magazine subscription service Next Issue landed on iOS this week. After seeing mixed results with the iPad to date, traditional publishers are eager to learn whether this Netflix-style model can propel them into the digital future. There's a chance - if the smorgasbord approach can overcome three problems. The idea...
Apple is planning to overhaul iTunes, according to recent reports. Hallelujah! Apple's clunky, archaic media player is long overdue for an upgrade. iTunes used to be a necessary evil for managing music on an iPhone or updating the operating system on Apple's mobile devices, but with the arrival of Spotify and...
Ten years ago this month, Napster filed for bankruptcy. The peer-to-peer filesharing network succumbed to an all-out legal war waged by major record labels, but not before popularizing downloadable digital music and sparking a heated debate about music piracy and its consequences. Today, that argument rages on, at times just...
Sales of digital music surpassed disc sales for the first time last year, spurring the music industry's dawning awareness that this digital thing isn't going away. Executives at Universal Music Group (home of Gotye, Kanye West, Lady Gaga and numerous other hit makers) and EMI (for whom the Beatles are...
Choosing music that someone else would like is more complex than suggesting toaster ovens or even movies. The reasons we like a song are highly subjective and can hinge on very specific, sometimes subtle characteristics. Thus music recommendation is a hard problem whose solution would simplify and brighten the lives...
In 2012 we've seen amazing growth in the Consumer Cloud, meaning cloud computing for everyday users. There are three main categories in the Consumer Cloud: storage, sync, and notes. Dropbox, Apple's iCloud and Evernote (respectively) have been the most impressive performers in each category so far this year.Note that the cloud -...
File sharing, MP3 players and online stores transformed the way we listen to music. Now the cloud is bringing even bigger changes. Pandora is the rock star of cloud-based music services, with a clear lead in streaming audio. But - true to music-industry form - a crowd of younger, hungrier...
When's the last time you purchased a CD? For an ever-growing number of consumers, the last time they pulled the cellophane off of a CD jewel case is but a distant memory. Many high school-aged kids have never had the experience, and likely never will. Instead, music consumption has moved online...
It's hard to look at Airtime, the video-chat service founded by Napster bad boys Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, and not think of Chatroulette – a forerunner that was beloved by nude exhibitionists and therefore abandoned by nearly everybody else. Much of the discussion around the unveiling of Airtime today refers to Chatroulette. But Airtime reminds...
"Study the past if you would define the future." Confucius, Chinese philosopher.In this new ReadWriteWeb series, we look back on products that were important innovations of their time. But this isn't merely nostalgia. As Confucius said, we'll make it relevant by identifying lessons to apply now and in the future. We...
The cord-cutting revolution is growing. People are ditching their cables boxes in favor of streaming videos through their smartphones, tablets and services such as Roku and Apple TV. In reality though, these are not real cord cutters. They still pay bills to the cable companies that deliver broadband Internet access...
Facebook's Open Graph is too tempting for app developers. All they need is the slightest bit of permission from the user, and then they can go nuts posting all kinds of app activity for all that person's friends to see. Some apps can't resist the chance to promote themselves, and...
It's been nearly two months since the latest iteration of Apple's tablet started shipping. In that time, those of us who rushed out to buy a new iPad have been peering into a display with an incredibly high resolution. The intial response to the iPad's retina display was mostly one of...
Frankly, some of us were pretty glad to hear that Facebook's social reader apps aren't working. So-called "frictionless sharing" seems to put Facebook first, publishers second, and readers and users last. John Paul, Jon and Robyn discussed this trend in today's RWW Hangout On Air.Here are links to the posts...
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