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Beats Music Launches API For Third-Party Developers

Beats Music

Beats Music

As reported by CNET, Beats Music, the music steaming service that launched two months ago as Beats Electronics’ sister company, has introduced an API today. Available here, the Beats Music API will allow third-party developers to integrate their apps with Beats Music to access a catalogue of over 20 million songs and, more importantly, other features such as search, recommendations, playlists, and curated content.

If you’re willing to pay $100 a year for music, which in my experience for all the world’s music is a tremendous bargain, you should have access to music anywhere you might want it, in your car, house, anywhere,“ Beats Music Chief Executive Ian C. Rogers told CNET in an interview.

A new entry in the music streaming space, Beats Music launched to a substantial marketing campaign that saw a Super Bowl ad and various celebrity endorsements; unlike the major players in the field (Spotify and Rdio), Beats Music comes with a single paid tier that allows for unlimited, high-quality streaming at 320 kbps for $9.99 per month. Beats Music doesn’t have ads, and, this point, it has an iPhone app, a somewhat limited web app, and it lacks native apps for the desktop and tablets.

What differentiates Beats Music are the curation efforts that CEO Ian Rogers – a longtime music industry personality – wants to put at the center of the Beats Music experience. Over the course of the past year, the company has built an editorial team of music experts and critics who curate songs and albums in playlists and collections that are then automatically suggested to users. On top of curation, Beats Music allows listeners to receive songs based on their current mood and activity through a feature called “The Sentence”.

All these features are exposed in the API that Beats Music made public today. As the company writes:

Beats Music believes in being as open as possible, because we think the best ideas come from you. This is why we’ve decided to open up nearly all of our REST resources, which we use ourselves, to everyone.

The Beats Music API comes with fairly common functionalities such as artist and track lookup, audio playback (with two bitrate settings), search, metadata retrieval, and library management, but it also enables developers to access more specific aspects of Beats such as individual options for The Sentence, artist popularity, personal recommendations for “Just For You” items, featured Highlights and Editor Picks, new releases, and playlist subscriptions.

Beats Music’ API appears to offer a solution to, effectively, access all the functionalities of the official Beats Music app. Documentation (including terms of service) can be viewed here.

This week, Apple showed Beats Music among the list of initial partners for their CarPlay initiative. With Beats Music entering the crowded space of music streaming and radio services, an API may help the company gain traction among third-party developers quickly, enabling them to feature the service’s library and editorial aspects on a variety of devices and platforms. Just yesterday, music steaming service Spotify reported the acquisition of The Echo Nest, a music data company used by hundreds of online music services, including Rdio and MOG, which was acquired by Beats in 2012.

Apple Releases iTunes Festival 5.0 with New iOS 7 Design, SXSW Streaming

Apple pushed version 5.0 of its iTunes Festival app on the App Store today, updating the app’s UI for iOS 7 and the upcoming iTunes Festival at SXSW, which starts next week on Tuesday, March 11.

The app, which can be opened on iTunes or the App Store through this link, isn’t however available for download at the moment. While the link redirects to the app’s iTunes page that shows updated screenshots, icon, and changelog, the app can’t be downloaded, as iTunes returns an error that says that the item is “temporarily unavailable”.

According to recent speculation by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, Apple was preparing an update to the iTunes Festival app to launch alongside iOS 7.1, which, according to his sources, will be required to run the updated app. On iTunes, technical requirements for iTunes Festival 5.0 don’t mention iOS 7.1 and report that “iOS 7.0 or later” is required, though the fact that the app can’t be downloaded may indicate an early release by Apple.

Update: According to initial reports via Twitter, it appears that the updated iTunes Festival app can be downloaded on some international App Store and run using the current version of iOS – iOS 7.0.6.

Retro Game Crunch Collection Released, Includes Seven Games

In November 2012, Shaun Inman, Rusty Moyher, and Matt Grimm launched a Kickstarter campaign for Retro Game Crunch, a project to develop and release six games in six months. As we wrote when the campaign was launched:

Each month backers (of $15 or more) will submit and vote on a theme and Shaun and his team will build the game that gets the most votes… in 3 days. Based on player feedback and Shaun and his team’s original aspirations, they will then polish and perfect the game for thirty days. Backers will then get to download a complete version of the game. This will happen each month for 6 months.

For each thirty days, or each game being developed, the Retro Game Crunch team will document the game process and progress with posts, screenshots and podcasts. Backers that contribute $25 or more will also get to download the entire Super Clew Land, which is a great game, when this project ends.

This week, the Retro Game Crunch team released their first official collection, made of 7 games created during the course of the initiative and based on feedback and input from the Kickstarter backer community. The games, heavily inspired by the 8-bit videogame era and chiptune music style, are Super Crew Land (the game that started Retro Game Crunch), End of Line, GAIAttack, Paradox Lost, Wub-Wub Wescue, Brains & Hearts, and Shūten. While the games were released separately during Retro Game Crunch, the new unified release brings smaller file sizes, a single download for all games, an app launcher to easily switch between games, and support for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 4 controllers.

The Retro Game Crunch Collection is available now for $11.99 (20% off) on the Humble Store and through the Retro Game Crunch website, it’s DRM-free, and made for both Mac and Windows (a Steam Greenlight campaign has also been launched to help make the collection available on Steam). For those who didn’t follow the original Retro Game Crunch initiative, a journal with details on the development of the games is publicly available here.

Spotify Acquires The Echo Nest→

The Echo Nest, a music data company that specializes in recommendations, playlists APIs, and artist/fan understanding, has been acquired by Spotify. From their blog post:

Spotify shares the intense care for the music experience that was the founding principle of our company, and it’s clearly winning the hearts and minds of music fans around the globe. Our dedicated team of engineers, scientists, music curators, business, and product people are utterly electrified with the potential of bringing our world-leading music data, discovery, and audience understanding technology directly to the biggest music streaming audience out there.

The Echo Nest is the artificial intelligence that powers several features of over 400 modern music streaming and online radio services, including Rdio, iHeartRadio, and SiriusXM. The Echo Nest provides features that are often essential to some of these services, such as audio recognition and fingerprinting, music discovery based on listener tastes and patterns, metadata cleanup and artist bio updates, and playlist personalization.

According to The Echo Nest, the API that allows apps to use their features will remain available:

You’re about to see some great stuff from the new Echo Nest-enabled Spotify, and we’re excited to hear what you think. We’re all staying in town, our API stays up, and every single person at our company will continue to focus on building the future of music. Talk to you soon; we’ve got some work to do.

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Wello iPhone Case Will Track Heart Rate, Blood Pressure, Lung Function, and More

Wello, a new iPhone case by technology and science company Azoi, aims at providing an easy way to monitor vital signs with sensors embedded directly in the accessory. As first reported by GigaOM, Wello will become available this Fall in the US at $199.

Just like most iPhone cases, the Wello covers the back of the iPhone to offer protection for the device. Inside the case, however, Azoi built sensors and a chip that, communicating with Bluetooth Low Energy with an iPhone app, can track and archive heart rate, blood oxygen levels, blood pressure, temperature, electrocardiography (ECG), and respiration. Through a separate, attachable spirometer, Wello can also measure lung capacity and air flow; to use Wello, you just hold your phone up as shown in the promo video and wait a few seconds for the system to process data and pass it to the app.

Wello won’t offer diagnoses or prescribe medications – it’s meant to replace checkups that normally require specialized equipment at a doctor’s office, or a basic knowledge on how to operate them at home. By using a simple touch interaction and the convenience of software, Wello can store and track data digitally, finding patterns over time that can be shown to a doctor to offer a better representation of health stats. The Wello is waiting for FDA approval, and, according to today’s announcement, daily usage will grant the device two months of battery life on a single charge.

Azoi is also thinking on making sure Wello can understand physical activity data from fitness-oriented wearable devices: today, the company has confirmed that Wello will be compatible with the FitBit API, allowing Wello to sync with a FitBit and keep data in one place. The Wello app will have support for multiple users, providing a personalized dashboard for each family member.

Wello comes at an interesting time, with Apple reportedly getting ready to announce a wearable device capable of measuring health data and interacting with iOS devices later this year. More details, including a FAQ, can be found at Azoi’s website.