Music

After years of hitting sour notes with artists, Pandora seems to have struck the right chord at last. The Internet’s biggest streaming-music service, Pandora unveiled its first hand-in-hand partnership with music creators and distributors on Wednesday through Merlin, a group representing more than 20,000 independent labels worldwide. Pandora will use its recommendation engine to match Continue Reading →

Samsung’s streaming internet radio service Milk has been free of advertising since its launch, though as part of a new update has added the option to pay to skip more tracks and download music to play without an internet connection. The new “premium service” runs $3.99 a month, and upgrades users from six song skips Continue Reading →

It’s not uncommon for companies to arrive to the mobile market late. Sound identification service Shazam wasn’t late to mobile; it was late to the desktop. The company’s audio tagging technology has operated solely from Shazam mobile apps since 2008 (before that, it was a dial-up service). Only now, with the launch of Shazam’s first Continue Reading →

Spotify has updated its iOS app with an equalizer feature that offers 22 audio presets, including electronic, hip-hop, acoustic and classical among other options. The music streaming service is also letting users manually define their own equalizer settings within the app. The update is still rolling out to all iOS users on Tuesday, but once Continue Reading →

Spotify just updated its Android app’s Spotify Connect feature to let the app act as a remote to control other devices playing Spotify tunes. Now you can hook up your tablet to your home speakers and control the jams with your smartphone. The Spotify change log in Google Play states the following: “Want to use Continue Reading →

Based partly on a previous filing by Google about an unnamed foreign company it tried and failed to buy for $4 billion to $5 billion and a line I had in a story that noted that a top exec at the search giant had expressed interest in buying Spotify — the Journal is reporting that Continue Reading →

One of the major complaints with Amazon Prime Music, the company’s new streaming music service bundled in with its Amazon Prime membership program, was its lack of song selection, and especially current hits. On Wednesday, Amazon took a small step towards remedying that problem with an announcement of an expansion of the Prime Music service, Continue Reading →

The largest record labels are closing in on a deal for a stake in buzzy digital-music service SoundCloud, in exchange for an agreement not to sue the startup for copyright violations, according to people with knowledge of the plans. SoundCloud, a Berlin-based company with more than 250 million listeners a month, is negotiating with Universal Continue Reading →

If you like the idea beyond Forgotify, a web app that surfaces music that has never been played on Spotify, but want more control on what you discover, then you may be interested to hear of The Long Tail — an app that pulls the 50 least played Spotify tracks of any artist into a Continue Reading →

In a sign of growing consolidation in the digital music business, Google announced on Tuesday that it had bought Songza, a three-year-old app that competes with Pandora and others in making customized playlists of recommended songs. The price was not announced. But a person briefed on the deal, who was not authorized to speak about Continue Reading →