pandora

Physical music formats were so 20th century, so we put our music on computers. But even that was too much of a burden, so music is going up, up, and away, into the cloud and streaming. The iPod Classic is firmly rooted to the ground, and I like it that way.

I can live without Siri, iCloud, a camera, iOS 6, a Lightning connector, Bluetooth, AirPlay, or any of that jazz to keep the Classic's 160GB storage capability, and the Classic's "classic" 30-pin connector that still works with gazillions of docks and accessories. Is there another … Read more

The music industry is still in rough shape, based on data released today by the Recording Industry Association of America. But U.S. digital revenues continue to climb, helped by the growth of so-called "access services" such as Spotify, YouTube, and Vevo.

And the bigger picture shows that the beaten-down industry is stabilizing. Recorded music sales slipped 0.9 percent from 2011 to 2012, totaling $7.1 billion. That's roughly in line with the total sales for the last few years.

Sales from digital formats, meantime, rose 14 percent from 2011 and last year surpassed $4 billion … Read more

Google hasn't budged from the No. 1 spot when it comes to its desktop and mobile audience, according to ComScore's latest rankings, but the companies with the most mobile growth are ones that have been struggling to keep investors happy.

Groupon, Zynga, and Pandora's mobile users grew more than twice as much as their numbers for desktop users, according to ComScore's February measurement for the top 50 digital media companies. Of course, the three companies -- which have seen their share of management shakeups and disappointing earnings this past year -- had much smaller numbers to … Read more

Google wants to "Keep" your notes.

Yesterday Google introduced Keep, the new mobile and Web-based note-storing service that looks to take aim at products like Evernote. Boasting a simple, easy-to-use interface, Keep will work with Google Drive so that all notes are synced across different platforms. Users can edit their notes from either their phone or the Web and the information will be saved everywhere. You can also use voice dictation and photos to help enhance each note you take.

The BlackBerry Store has topped 100,000 apps, 30,000 of which were just added in the last … Read more

Pandora has tuned up a Windows Phone 8 app that's both free and ad-free.

Available as of today in the Windows Phone store, the app offers all the standard features for Pandora listeners.

You can create up to 100 different stations based on your tastes in music. You can tell Pandora what you like and don't like by giving each song a thumb's up or thumb's down.

You can filter certain songs that you won't want to hear and flip on a switch for higher-quality audio. Existing Pandora users can log in with their current … Read more

Do you have any photos or videos on your smartphone you'd like to hide from the general public? Pandora offers to put them into a password-protected box so no one can see them but you. It works exactly as advertised, but it's nowhere near as dynamic as other lockbox apps.

Though it has a name like the music-streaming app and a logo like Dropbox, it's confusingly neither. That means it can cleverly hide in your app menu without raising the eyebrow of someone looking through your phone. When you first use the app, it drops you right … Read more

Pandora CEO Joseph Kennedy announced today that he is leaving the music-streaming company after nearly 10 years at the helm.

He didn't say why he was stepping down, only that "the time is right."

"As part of our board discussions of the road that lies ahead, I reached the conclusion and advised the board that the time is right to begin a process to identify my successor," he said in a press release. "There is a tremendous market opportunity ahead and I look forward to continuing to work with all the great people at … Read more

Pandora Media, the company behind the Web radio service, posted big fourth-quarter revenue gains as advertising revenue jumped 51 percent from the year-ago period.

At the same time, the company's losses widened 78 percent to $14.6 million.

"Pandora has been hiring top talent in local radio markets to further increase our share of the $15 billion radio ad market," Pandora Chief Executive Joe Kennedy said in a statement. "We are now effectively the largest radio station in almost every major market and begin fiscal year 2014 with extraordinary momentum."

Separately, Kennedy announced that he'… Read more

Apple's long-rumored streaming music service won't be arriving until this summer, or later according to a new report.

Citing sources, The New York Times says that Apple's still wrangling with Sony over licensing rights, adding delay to the service that Apple had originally aimed to launch last month. Those people now believe that negotiations will be sorted out in time for a launch this summer, or later in the year.

The report goes on to say that the service was being designed to come preinstalled on Apple's devices instead of an additional app that needed downloading … Read more