Music

Could a teenage girl undo what Microsoft hoped would be the Zune's iPod-killing feature?

Microsoft has long hoped that its MP3 player's wireless music-sharing abilities would help it gain precious ground on Apple's market leader, though that notion has hardly yielded any magic bullets. And now Kristyn Heath, a 16-year-old from the San Francisco Bay Area, has reportedly come up with the concept behind a device called "SnoopTunes" that lets iPods beam their music as well.

Moreover, unlike the Zune, "this one doesn't limit you to three days or three plays," according … Read more

Well, the music offerings at South by Southwest are heating up, and we'll keep you posted on the good ones. I mentioned BurnLounge in a Hoooka, which is a start-up that lets you sell music through a MySpace widget. BurnLounge, which has been around for a while longer, has a similar model: create your own music store, choose the music in it (WMA format), add your own reviews and recommendations, and (optimally) profit. But until this point, it had been just that--standalone personalized music stores, lacking additional functionality that most people think of when they think of new Web … Read more

Ah, the digital age. It's brought us so much, and without it, I'd be jobless. So for obvious reasons, I'm very appreciative of the existence of digital music. One of its perhaps lesser-known benefits is that with it, any Tom, Dick, or Harry with a sense of rhythm can be a musician. And that's not a bad thing, although certain traditional musicians may beg to differ. Personally, I think anything that adds variety to the creative landscape is positive, although there are certainly exceptions (William Hung? Seriously?) Anyway, if tinkering with audio and making your own … Read more

What do you get when you take the ex-CEOs of Musicmatch, Rio, and iRiver America and lock them in a room with a stack of data about the digital-music landscape? How about a revolutionary new music service and a portable device to go along with it?

Enter Slacker, a company chock full of digital music experts (mostly transplants from Musicmatch and Rio), and its two babies: Slacker.com (an online music service) and the Slacker portable device. That's quite a few Slackers, and it's also the point. As it turns out, about 70 percent of music enthusiasts don't want to spend hours creating the perfect playlists, which means most of you are slackers just like me. (Ha!) To break it down even further, 51 percent of MP3 player users update their content only once a month or less, and 46 percent don't update more often because they don't have time. Several services have aimed to address this issue, such as MTV Urge with its Auto-Mix feature and Rhapsody with Channels. … Read more

Toshio Iwai, the designer of beloved Nintendo DS music game Electroplankton, has been showing a prototype of his jaw-dropping Tenori-On instrument since 2005. Last week, Yamaha announced plans to turn this Star Trek-worthy digital sound toy into an actual shipping product, retailing with an estimated price tag of around $1,000. For most consumers, that is an insane price for a beautiful sound toy, but electronic musicians and artists are falling all over themselves for this thing. The Tenori-On is a touch screen grid of white LEDs that allows you to compose music by activating little squares that trigger built-in … Read more

Virb is a new social network launched yesterday by the same people who created indie-band publicity site PureVolume. Virb has been in private beta since late last year and is now open for anyone to join. Similar to most new social networks these days, Virb has a clean and slick look, quite contrary to social networking juggernaut MySpace. Virb is gunning to be the do-it-all network. Where MySpace focuses on music, Virb does that, but tacks on group sections for photography, fashion, sports, and writing too. The problem is that both the site and the content aren't there yet.

Similar to Trig, which I wrote about in January, Virb promises to provide everything to everyone without fulfilling a way to do it. It's the "if you build it, they will come" mentality that's not necessarily a bad thing to have with a social network, just disparaging when you click on a link with no content on the other end. As it stands, clicking on many of Virb's group areas takes you to a placeholder page. The two sections that are up as of me writing this are music and videos. Both of these sections work well and have some really great content--music in particular, which has themed band pages with downloadable tracks that look more like something on the iTunes Store than a social network. The team definitely pulled some design cues from Purevolume, but that's a good thing.… Read more

Needless to say, we're fairly sick of all the alarm clocks that continue to flood the market, regardless of how sycophantic they may be. So we thought that we'd perhaps feel differently about a clock that lets us compose our own music to awaken us. We were wrong.

Hammacher Schlemmer's "Desktop Music Composer" has seven plastic modules of varying colors and shapes that provide sounds of different instruments depending where they're placed--up to 1,159 variations, to be exact. But as Ubergizmo says, "It will probably take a lifetime to find a tune … Read more

There's no denying it. Hoooka has a killer name. Its motto ("Take a hit, pass it on") is pretty good too. But this new side project of the Indie 911 social network, which launched in beta earlier this week, isn't particularly momentous. The central concept behind Hoooka, according to the company, is enabling "both artists and fans to play, share, promote and sell their favorite digital media."

But that's really nothing new. Amie Street, which we covered a while back and then revisited more recently, is an independent music retailer that features embeddable … Read more

Break out those leisure suits--this sound system may be new, but it looks right out of 1974.

The "Gene Sound TAS-100" ("Gene Sound"?) combines digital and analog music in a system that can play and record old LPs and CDs as well as MP3 files, according to Newlaunches. The all-in-one system, made by Seagrand Japan, goes for an affordable $170.

There are a lot of systems that convert old and new recording media, but few have the distinctively retro look of this one, at least from this particular era. Regardless of how it sounds, you'… Read more