music

In case you weren't up on your blogsphere knowledge, ultra suave rapper Kanye West has a blog that'll drop some knowledge on y'all (his words, not mine.) He occasionally posts one or two sentence posts about fashion, music and the latest in tech he finds appealing. That's where we find these two interesting watch concepts.

The first, from design firm Chocolate Agency, sports the "e-paper" technology we've all come to know and love, albeit in a futuristic form that isn't anywhere near ready for prime-time. (C'mon, you've seen the Kindle'… Read more

Yahoo Music's going to join Amazon.com in offering DRM-free MP3s, either for free as part of an advertising-supported service, or for sale on a per-download basis, according to anonymous record company executives cited in this AP story.

Ian Rogers, the exec in charge of Yahoo's music service, has certainly thought long and hard about the future of the music industry, and Yahoo's got tons of traffic (which it hasn't done a very good job of monetizing, but that's another story). I like the site's search interface--it's a lot better than Amazon's, … Read more

Fresh off launching an ad-supported streaming music service for its Last.fm property, CBS Interactive is already touting success.

According to a release from CBS on Friday, there were 85 percent more unique listeners on Last.fm on Wednesday, January 23--the day that CBS Corporation and Last.fm announced the service--than there had been on the previous Wednesday. The next day, Thursday, saw an 80 percent increase from the previous Thursday, which CBS took as evidence that it wasn't just a single-day phenomenon.

Last.fm had previously offered streaming music primarily in 30-second clips. But thanks to licensing agreements … Read more

If motorized automatic faders set your heart racing and control surfaces define your creative process, Wired's got a gallery for you from the National Association of Music Merchants' show in Anaheim, Calif.

Don't miss the missile-launching machine gun guitar: Best of NAMM: iPod turntables, home studio spoils and console porn

Like most online radio stations, Last.fm has been forced by music copyright owners to behave more or less like a traditional radio station. A highly customizable radio station--users could enter a favorite artist and Last.fm would pick a song by that artist, then add in songs from similar artists--but a radio station nonetheless. Content was pushed, not pulled. Users who wanted to pick songs to play on demand either had to download them from a service like iTunes or pay for a subscription service like Rhapsody (which does let you stream 25 songs a month for free).

Today, … Read more

It's no secret: ad-supported streaming music, held up as an alternative to both paid downloads and free-for-all piracy, has hit some twists and snags. A number of well-funded start-ups, like SpiralFrog, dove into the space and few have emerged intact. Only one, Imeem, can really claim to be a success--it has licensing deals with all four major music labels--but it's still been criticized for a tepid user experience.

So it was a bit of a surprise when CBS' big announcement about Last.fm, the music-based social network it purchased last year, was the launch of a free, ad-supported … Read more

In "The Album is Dead," Mark Cuban wonders:

So the question arises, why don't artists serialize the release of songs ? Why not create a "season" of release of songs, much like the fall TV season and promise fans that Flo Rida is going to release a new single every week or 2 weeks for the next 10 weeks ?

Whenever discussions like this arise, there's always the school of thought holding that most albums only have one or two decent songs anyway. This theme is presumably a close cousin to "all current music is … Read more

I picked this book up while traveling yesterday, read a few pages in the bookstore, bought it, and have blazed through the first 150 pages in little more than a day. It's one of the funniest and most entertaining books about music, culture, and business that I've ever read.

Like a lot of suburban white boys of a certain age, Dan Kennedy dreamed about being a rock star in his youth, but reality eventually intervened and he got a corporate gig. Only in this case, the corporation was Atlantic Records--Led Zeppelin's record label, as he points out. … Read more

CBS has alerted media that on Wednesday morning, the company will be announcing "a new unprecedented service" involving social music service Last.fm, which it purchased last year. On hand will be Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of the CBS Corp.; Quincy Smith, president of the CBS Interactive division; as well as Felix Miller and Martin Stixsel, two of Last.fm's three co-founders.

So what is this "new unprecedented service?" PaidContent says it's hearing that CBS plans to use Last.fm's social recommendation engine (its "scrobbling" technology) and apply it to … Read more