Posts tagged with "music"

Soundflake Review: A Music Player for SoundCloud

While my daily music listening needs are mostly fulfilled by Spotify1 and my personal library in iTunes Match2, I do follow a couple of artists on SoundCloud and I enjoy using the service to play a variety of mashups and records from independent creators that I can’t find anywhere else. I’m not a huge SoundCloud user, but I’ve always had an affinity for the website’s interface and the company’s focus.

Created by Stefan Kofler and Patrick Schneider, Soundflake is a new SoundCloud client for iPhone that wants to provide a better experience than the official app through a modern design, advanced features, and gesture controls that make managing playback and sharing a faster and more intuitive affair. After trying Soundflake for about a month, I don’t see why – as an occasional SoundCloud music listener – I would go back to using SoundCloud’s app for iPhone.

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Rdio To Start Offering Higher Quality Streams→

In a post published on their official blog last week, music streaming service Rdio has announced that they’ve started a conversion process to offer their entire catalog in higher quality:

As the initial step in this program, Rdio has begun to convert its entire existing catalog to the AAC format and will deliver 320KbPS as our new standard — without increasing our price. In addition, and as part of our ongoing commitment to the artist community, Rdio will work closely with artists and labels from around the world to continue to raise the bar higher on streaming quality where sufficient network bandwidth exists, and to improve stream delivery in markets around the world where network quality and bandwidth are often inconsistent.

Since its launch, Rdio has always streamed at a highest quality of 192kbps, with variable bitrates for mobile devices. Rdio is the latest music service to start offering 320kbps streams, as both Spotify and Beats Music already provide higher quality to paid subscribers (Beats Music included the option since day one).

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Beats Music’s First 100 Days→

Yinka Adegoke, writing for Billboard:

Two of music’s most successful brand marketers, Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, are in the hot seat as label sources grouse that the first 100 days of the duo’s subscription streaming service, Beats Music, has been a disappointment and soon will face competition on the mobile platform when Sprint begins bundling Spotify with its “Framily” plans.

According to Beats Music CEO Ian Rogers, the company is doing fine and the problem has been converting iOS users to paid subscriptions.

I still believe that the human curation Beats is doing for music recommendations offers great value, but the service needs to be available internationally and on more platforms. Spotify is available in several countries outside the United States, has desktop and mobile apps, and, more importantly, it has mindshare after years of existence. For some people, Spotify is synonym of “legal music streaming” (when I was using Rdio, I would always introduce it to my friends as “an app like Spotify”).

If Beats Music doesn’t want to offer a free plan, they should aim at people willing to pay for streaming services through new software, international rollouts, and exclusives. Last week, they released an update to their iPhone app with better social integrations and App Store subscriptions. iTunes will undoubtedly make it easier to subscribe to Beats Music, and I’m hoping that the company will find a way to grow its userbase quickly without compromising on the original vision.

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Twitter #music Shutting Down→

Mike Beasley:

According to a pair of tweets posted on the official @TwitterMusic account, the app will be removed from the App Store later today and all streaming service will end on April 18th—one year after the app first launched.

Twitter #music launched on April 18, 2013. The #music app wasn’t necessarily bad – it had some interesting touches and design details – but its implementation of streaming was confusing, as I noted in my original article:

As a daily music listener, the 1-song limitation is confusing and anachronistic. It feels like Last.fm all over again: in spite of its direct plug into Rdio and Spotify, Twitter will only play one song from an artist – their “top” one, according to Twitter – then move on to the next one. Why is that so? Do they expect users to always want to listen to just one song and jump from artist to artist all the time? I understand this for #NowPlaying, which is a Twitter-like feed for single songs in your timeline, but I can’t seeem to find a good motivation for this choice in other areas of the app. Why wouldn’t I want to listen to three songs from an artist I just discovered while, to use Twitter’s parlance, I keep engaging with him on Twitter?

Twitter never put much effort into #music after that; in the meantime, new on-demand streaming services have arisen and Apple has built iTunes Radio directly into the iOS Music app. It appears, then, that Twitter #music will follow the demise of Ping, Apple’s social music recommendation service that never took off.

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Tuner for iPhone Turns YouTube Into A Music Player

Tuner

Tuner

Every time I go out with friends and we start talking about music, there’s always that one guy who wants to play a song and he does so…using YouTube. In spite of the relatively low barrier to entry for services like Spotify and Rdio (both available in Italy with free plans), the convenience of using YouTube as an audio source is indisputable (on top of that, add the fact that most people have a high tolerance for YouTube ads – or ads in general). Personally, I prefer a dedicated music streaming service or my iTunes Match library, but I do rely on YouTube for the occasional live performance or unreleased demo tape that I can’t obtain legally anywhere else.

Tuner is a music player for YouTube videos: with a simple search feature, it uses YouTube as an audio source, turning videos into songs you can listen to on your iPhone.

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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.