Posts Tagged ‘Social Music’

We’ve been huge fans of social music service Grooveshark for the past year, and when we heard they were putting on a 50% off sale for the Holidays, I felt it was an obligation to share this news with you all out there.  If you don’t know, the service is a streaming music service that has pretty much every song you could ever think of.  The free version is fine, and lets you play anything from Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones to Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO, but the upgraded version lets you try some new services and remove the ads.

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China is home to a staggering consumer base and Baidu, as we’ve previously reported, is no slouch when it comes to attempting different ways to take advantage of it. Now the wildly successful search engine company and social media entrepreneurs are looking to expand even further, offering Chinese audiences legal music downloads through the recently released Baidu Ting.

The Shanghai-based corporation previously offered listening experiences through Baidu MP3, a service that came under heavy fire for its reliance on directing users to copyright-infringing websites. Baidu’s new music offering looks to rectify this mistake by starting off with a sturdy foundation: the support of several major labels.

Warner Music, Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group have all signed an agreement that will allow Baidu’s social music platform to provide users with a wide selection of content without breaking the law. These companies will receive payment in exchange for Ting’s ability to host an extensive streaming and downloadable catalog.

Luckily the service itself is, apparently quite good, offering a number of handy features. Baidu Ting comes equipped with music browsing and streaming, free downloads, popularity charts and social networking aspects like personalized playlists and more.

While Baidu Ting looks to have the recipe for success set in place, the company will still have to compete with existing Chinese music services in order to eke out its share in the highly competitve market.

Want to take a look at Baidu Ting for yourself? Either know/learn how to read Chinese or take a stroll through a horrendous, automatic translation!

Continued efforts toward translating community-based music fandom to the digital age are always welcome — even though the process can be made tricky by the fact that this type of work only succeeds when many users are on board with the same software. Frenzapp Music, like so many others, hopes to solve this common problem by becoming the go-to app for everyone’s music sharing needs.

Bitsmedia, developers of Frenzapp Music, are positioning the recent release as a companion version to their original app-sharing software, Frenzapp. Like its predecessor, Music is easy to navigate, aesthetically pleasing and laden with useful features (like seamless Twitter, Facebook and iTunes Music Store integration) and only needs widespread support to become a truly outstanding social music tool.

While it’s impossible to predict whether or not Frenzapp will catch on, its excellent design and developer pedigree make it worth a look. The app’s foundation is definitely strong enough (particularly impressive aspects of the program include streaming song previews, location-based recommendation scanning and full playback controls for all tunes stored on a user’s iOS device) but, like all software of its ilk, it will sink or swim based on its popularity.

If enough people decide to take Frenzapp for a spin we could have a beautiful thing on our hands. One of these days there must be some sort of uniting of the collective unconscious, a wondrous, universal decision to all download the same social music app. And for that hyperbolic utopia to become reality we all have to agree on the best available software. So why not check out Frenzapp Music through its iTunes App Store or official site for a start? It is free after all!

Playing music is fun but, boy, it sure does take a lot of time and energy to learn how to sing or play an instrument. BreakoutBand, a new social music website, looks to rectify this by giving everyone the tools they need to become a pop star.

BreakoutBand is a social music game/creation tool that’s meant to let anyone write their own songs through a little mix and match magic. The system is ridiculously simple to use, offering pitch-shifting and drop-down sample selection for even the most amateur vocalists and musicians. Full Facebook and Twitter sharing has been integrated alongside “star-maker” type features like weekly charts and artist bio pages.

Probably the biggest hook for users considering spending their time creating at BreakoutBand is the site’s current promotion with Old Navy. The site has just kicked off a contest wherein creators can try their hand at writing a new “theme song” for the clothing giant. Winners will be rewarded by having their BreakoutBand-based tune played in nationwide stores and linked through Old Navy’s Twitter.

I’m all for making music easier for non-musicians to explore but there’s something a little off about BreakoutBand that’ll be quickly apparent to many users. The system is so basic that there’s little room for actual creativity and the process is automated to the point where substantial interactivity has taken a backseat to immediate satisfaction.

If you’re into that sort of empowerment then take a look-see for yourself by swinging by BreakoutBand’s official website. If not then it’s back to work at becoming a pop star the hard way.

TuneWiki understands that to survive in the highly competitive world of social media it’s essential to evolve. That’s why the free music app — already doing quite well for itself on Android-based devices — is looking to expand even further through its new update.

The initial gimmick behind TuneWiki was its ability to supply kareoke-style lyrics as a song plays, something that worked to enrich the usual listening experience. BlackBerry users heavily supported the app, turning it into one of the most prominent music downloads available on App World and providing plenty of incentive for the recent interface revamp and multi-platform service expansion.

TuneWiki isn’t dropping any of the features that made it such a hit; rather it’s looking to add additional perks that bolsters the existing experience. Alongside the announcement of a desktop TuneWiki Beta, listeners can now use the mobile app to access three sections (My Music, Discover and Connected) that provide new ways to interact with others through the app.

The new Discover section is, perhaps, the most exciting aspect of the overhaul. It offers users the ability to perform creepy/cool tasks like accessing the Song Map (a geographic view with pinpoints highlighting what global TuneWiki users are listening to), friending others and managing a list of Muses (users with similar tastes that can automatically recommend their favorite songs and artists). Connected adds streaming radio support (complete with lyrics) while My Music is simply the new name for the traditional, pre-update listening experience.

Want to learn more about TuneWiki or download the free app? Check out its official page or give it a download here (its also available through iTunes and BlackBerry App World).

Apple might clinch the title as the largest social media mistake this year. Launched on four short months ago, Apple Ping is being considered one of the worst ideas of 2010.

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Big changes have been happening at MySpace over the past several months as the once dominant social networking site tries to re-orient itself in a post-Facebook world. Shortly after unveiling a slick new design this month, the Beverly Hills based company launched an all new music video recommendation app for web and iPad called Music Romeo. By beefing up their still thriving social music business, MySpace is signalling a shift away from direct competition with Facebook, where it has been steadily losing ground over the past several years. Using recommendation search technology by Australia’s We Are Hunted, MySpace’s Music Romeo represents a refreshing and necessary change in direction. Read more

There has been a barrage of apps and services lately that have focused on socializing your iTunes experience. The latest is from Kentucky-based ParkVu, called Music WithMe. This app adds social features to iTunes by publishing your iTunes music collection to Facebook, giving your friends the ability to comment, share and like individual tracks. Sounds interesting in theory, so after taking the beta for a spin, how does Music WithMe stack up? Read more

I recently had a chance to check out a new socially driven music recommendation service called Yoogli. Offering a playlist generator, artist recommendation engire, news aggregator and social network all in one, Yoogli hopes to serve as a platform upon which to share and discover new music. It also syncs with iTunes and generates playlists based on what you’re listening to, which you can then share with your friends. Sounds pretty cool, but can this young Newport Beach based company deliver? Read more

Pandora CTO Tom Conrad recently held a talk at Digg detailing the online streaming music company’s trials and tribulations during their transition onto mobile devices. His discussion outlined 5 broad lessons the company learned during this time, and how they affected Pandora’s foray into mobile. Read more