streaming-music

Entertainment: Is it a rent-to-(never)-own market?

Even as the decline in DVD sales--both in the U.S. and abroad--has accelerated since 2006, DVD rentals through services such as Netflix (adding 25 percent more customers since 2008) and Redbox (adding 500 machines per month) have been booming.

The reason, as The Economist surmises, may be a shifting view on how consumers prefer to consume entertainment:

The real worry (for the movie industry), then, is not that people are abandoning DVDs but that they are abandoning the notion of owning them.

This is perhaps exacerbated by an industry that can't seem to make up its mind … Read more

ClickOnRadio beats Shazam at identifying songs

How many times have you whipped out your iPhone and fired up Shazam, only to have the song end too soon to get a reading?

There's a fallback app for that: ClickOnRadio Pro, which not only streams radio in real time, but also shows real-time playlists for over 2,600 stations.

In other words, if you know the name or frequency of the station, you can easily find the song you wanted to identify. For any given station, ClickOnRadio ($1.99) shows every song that played for the past 2 hours.

(Interestingly, it lists the ads as well, which … Read more

Hulu's first live-stream concert: Dave Matthews Band

Hulu will live-stream a concert for the first time: Dave Matthews Band at New York's Beacon Theater on June 1.

The online video hub, which announced the event Thursday, will be the only place streaming the concert live, at least legally.

Pop culture brush-up: the Dave Matthews Band was really, really, really huge in the '90s, known for lengthy live jams, for a Phish-like cult following that skewed more preppy than hippie, and for "Ants Marching," which was inescapable if you ever got anywhere near a frat house between 1994 and 1997. People generally loved them or … Read more

Not just for streaming

Imeem Mobile is a free music streaming application for the iPhone that bears a resemblance to similar offerings from Pandora, Last.fm, and Slacker. The application offers the ability to stream, search, and purchase music over Wi-Fi or cellular connections.

The most distinguishing feature of Imeem's music application is cloud storage. The Imeem app allows you to call up any song or album in your home media collection and play it without the restrictions associated with most services (i.e. limited skips, and the inability to play songs from the same artist back-to-back).

In order to stream music from … Read more

Hands-on with Imeem Mobile for iPhone

The music discovery Web site imeem.com officially launched its very own iPhone app on Thursday, May 14. Imeem's app is free and bears a resemblance to similar offerings from Pandora, Last.fm, and Slacker, offering the ability to stream, search, and purchase music over Wi-Fi or cellular connections.

But before you write off the Imeem app (download) as some late-arriving Last.fm wannabe, there's one killer feature to be aware of: cloud storage. Apps like Last.fm will go so far as to create personalized radio stations based on a random selection of songs from your collection, but the Imeem app allows you to call up any song or album in your collection and play it without the restrictions associated with most services (i.e. limited skips, and the inability to play songs from the same artist back-to-back).

In order to stream music from your personal collection, you first need to upload your music to imeem.com from your desktop using its free Mac/PC-compatible client. Now before you go thinking that you can upload that 300GB iTunes library to Imeem and stream it anywhere in the world, there's a catch. Imeem won't charge you for the first 100 songs you upload to the site, but anything more than that will require a VIP service ($29.99 per year for up to 1,000 songs, or $99.99 per year for up to 20,000).

Beyond the appeal of streaming your music collection form the cloud, the rest of the Imeem application falls somewhere between the simplicity of the Pandora app, and the more personalized, social approach of Last.fm. The main menu screen offers… Read more

Sony adds streaming, lyrics to its artist sites

Free, on-demand streaming music is a rising tide: since the start of 2009, I've covered relatively new services like Spotify and Just Hear It, and there are plenty of established players like MySpace Music, Imeem, and Grooveshark.

Instead of trying to stop the tide, Sony Music has wisely embraced it: starting today, the company will introduce streaming music players on the Web sites of its most popular artists, including popsters like Kelly Clarkson, John Legend, and Jacko himself. It makes perfect business sense: instead of letting some third party like Imeem sell advertisements against high-demand music, Sony can sell … Read more

Five apps that solve common iPhone problems

The iPhone famously solves many of life's little problems--you can't decide where to eat, you've got nothing to read, you need to update your Facebook status right now--but who's going to solve the iPhone's problems?

For instance, maybe it's low on storage. Or it's having trouble connecting to a Starbucks hot spot. Here's a list of five common iPhone ailments and the apps that aim to cure them.

You're running out of storage. Apple may have a 32GB iPhone waiting in the wings, but how does that help you and your … Read more

Real's Rhapsody: Streaming to change the music biz

AUSTIN, Texas--At South by Southwest here, I had a short but interesting conversation Wednesday afternoon with Tim Quirk, the vice president of music programming for Rhapsody, wedged in around a set from Jersey punks Titus Andronicus (who had very tight and well-constructed songs with incredible energy and some interesting triple-guitar work, but I don't know if the singer's going to make it another three days).

Quirk, who's been with Rhapsody since before it was acquired by RealNetworks, suggested that streaming music on demand will change the mechanics of the music business because artists (and other stakeholders) won'… Read more

Slacker Radio blows onto BlackBerry Storm

When Slacker Radio first introduced its streaming Internet radio app for the BlackBerry, it only worked on standard BlackBerrys running version 4.3 and above. Starting Wednesday, the free app gets touchy-feely with a brand new version for the BlackBerry's touch-screen Storm.

Slacker Radio for the Storm brings with it everything we loved on the Curve and Bold, including its best feature ever, caching a song to play offline later. It also throws in some touch-screen specials, like support for landscape mode.

The app still serves U.S. customers only on the BlackBerry and iPhone.

To get it, go … Read more