July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Hugely popular hip-hop artist Jay-Z has announced a new record titled Magna Carta Holy Grail, and in a bold move, it will be available first to owners of Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones at no cost.

The way the promotion works is a little convoluted, but we’re sure Jay-Z fans won’t care. Owners of Samsung’s Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4, and Galaxy Note 2 are eligible to download a free app on June 24 from the Google Play store. The first million people to download the app will get access to a free download of Magna Carta Holy Grail on July 4, which is 72 hours before the album is generally available.

This is a smart strategy on Samsung’s part. Big fans of Jay-Z’s might be tempted to make the Galaxy S4 or Galaxy Note 2 their next phone due to the promotion while existing Samsung fans get a free new album to rock on their phones. The only downside might be to Jay-Z, who could be alienating fans of his who have smartphones not made by Samsung. We’re guessing Samsung gave him enough cash to make it worth the risk.

Magna Carta Holy Grail will be Jay-Z’s follow-up to The Blueprint 3, which was released about four years ago. A behind-the-scenes video about the album reveals Jay-Z has worked with all-star producers and musicians including Rick Rubin, Pharrell, Timbaland, and Swizz Beatz on the new record.

Check out the video below for more.

Screenshot via Samsung Mobile U.S.A./YouTube

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Discovering new music online is a pain, more so months after I try to pull up the songs I liked across several streaming media services. (My thought process goes as follows: Did I add that song to YouTube as a favorite? Did I just “like” the song from a video I barely watched on YouTube? Or was this something I heard on Vimeo … or am I totally wrong and this was on Pandora?”)

Piki, the new music service from the creators of Turntable.fm, released a new version on the web yesterday that solves that problem even though it’s primary goal is to provide a algorithm-based smart radio experience that’s superior to Pandora.

The web version provides you with a bookmarklet that you can click whenever you hear a song you like on another site (like YouTube, SoundCloud, Rdio, Turntable.fm, or even Pandora). It then identifies the song and pulls it into Piki, essentially making it a more functional musical bookmarking service. It’s nice because that means you don’t have to keep up with your favorite songs on multiple services, and unlike a regular bookmarking site, your picks actually feeds into Piki’s musical discovery engine.

“We try our hardest to determine the song you’re listening to on other sites with our own technology,” said Piki and Turntable.fm cofounder Billy Chasen in an interview with VentureBeat. He added that not all songs can be identified due to the way each streaming service encodes their music. Still, this is a nice feature that none of the other streaming music services offer.

Piki launched an iOS app last month that provides a different spin on music discovery via algorithms. The service enables you to pick the best songs you’re listening to and then provides a smart radio station based on the “picks” of other users. Unlike Pandora, the service uses its algorithms to match you up with people who have similar music tastes instead of songs that sound the same, and it enables you to alter what gets played on a single station rather than providing you with separate stations comprised of a few genres or artists. It also has some cool features like the capability to capture/recognize songs that you hear (sort of like Shazam or SoundHound).

The web version’s bookmarket is a nice way of tying Piki’s goal of capturing music you like as you hear it — and doing so without stepping on all the other streaming music services out there. You can still enjoy all those other services and just use Piki as a bookmarking service. And the more songs you add, the better Piki’s discovery algorithms will be when you do use it as a music service.

“We’ve actually been working on a web/desktop version of Piki parallel to the iOS app for about a year and a half, and there’s been several versions of the interface,” Chasen said. “Mobile is an important portion of Piki, but there’s a lot of people working at their desks during the day that just want a lean-back listening experience that doesn’t come from their phone.”

The final version that launched today is very similar to what you’ll find on the iOS app in terms of user interface. The sidebar still presents you with controls for “tuning” the type of songs that play on your station, and the album artwork is prominently displayed as is the user who originally “picked” the song. Visiting a user’s profile on the web lets you toggle the frequency for how often you want a particular user’s picks to pop up on your station as well as sample their musical tastes.

The web version of Piki does handle importing your own music differently. You can’t just navigate to your iTunes music folder. Instead, Piki only lets you chose from songs you’ve uploaded on Turntable.fm after you’ve linked your account. There’s also a message that instructs people not to go crazy with adding every song they own, either.

“We’re really trying to get people into the habit of only picking their favorite songs of the moment … just your jams, not an entire album,” Chasen explains. “So if users pick songs only once or twice a week, that’s OK for what we’re trying to build with Piki.”

Chasen said Piki’s development team (which along with Turntable.fm is part of Stickybits) plans to launch an Android version of the service in the near future.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Streaming music powerhouse Spotify has acquired playlist and song discovery application Tunigo, which will help Spotify bring in more employees that can improve discovery.

Tunigo offers several music discovery features and playlists for any activity you might want to do. It has its own Spotify app, which has been in the top 10 app list since the Spotify app platform launched. It also has iPhone and Android apps.

“Tunigo helps users find great music for every moment, and we’ve been working very closely with Spotify over the past few years,” Tunigo CEO Nick Holmstén said in a statement. “This is the perfect match from a music discovery perspective. We’re passionate about music and technology and looking forward to further innovating within the music discovery space.”

The terms of the acquisition were not revealed, although Tunigo had reportedly raised about $3 million in funding. Spotify told us that Tunigo’s app will remain inside Spotify and that its team will move to Spotify’s offices in Stockholm and New York.

Photo via Tunigo

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Ever felt like your favorite music app just doesn’t get you? With its latest iPhone app, Songza wants to get to know you better than ever and help find the perfect music for your mood or activity.

Songza is best known for curating playlists with more intelligence than that of Pandora or other radio services. For example, the app knows what day and time it is and pairs that with info with your current activity (working, relaxing, exercising, etc.)

On top of improving performance, the new iPhone app takes this intelligent playlist a bit further by letting you tell the app what you are specifically doing rather than it giving you pre-set options. In the App Store, Songza says:

Doing something special? From the Concierge screen on iPhone or iPod Touch, shake your device and tell Songza exactly what you’re up to; Songza will then find the right music to make it better. For example, you could enter ‘Entertaining’ and Songza will find you music to soundtrack the perfect party.

While the company has a decent web app, its mobile apps are the arguably the best way to interact and experience the service. The iPhone app has been downloaded more than 6 million times to date and has a 4.5 out of 5 rating in the App Store. It also has apps for Android and Kindle Fire.

Songza is based in New York City and was founded in 2007. The company recently raised $3.82 million in new funding, according to an SEC filing. (The company had “no comment.”)

Check out a few more photos from the new iPhone and iPad apps below.

Photos via Songza

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

After a month of speculation, Twitter has finally launched a full-fledged application for the iPhone and web dedicated to music discovery, the company announced today.

Twitter bought the music app We Are Hunted last year with the intention to use that startup’s tech, which focuses on music discovery and finding new music to listen to. Now that tech is on display in the new Twitter #Music app.

“Today, we’re releasing Twitter #music, a new service that will change the way people find music, based on Twitter,” We Are Hunted founder Stephen Philips wrote in a blog post. “It uses Twitter activity, including tweets and engagement, to detect and surface the most popular tracks and emerging artists.”

The Twitter Music app lets you see songs that have been tweeted by artists and people you follow on Twitter. You can also use the app to listen to music other people follow. Twitter uses rapper Wiz Khalifa as an example — you can search for his name and then see the artists he is following. When you find a song you really love on Twitter Music and want to share, you can compose tweets from inside the app.

Songs playing on Twitter Music come from three sources: iTunes, Spotify, and Rdio. The songs playing will by default pop up as a preview in iTunes, but if you login with either Spotify or Rdio, you can listen to the song in full on those services.

The service is available first in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Access to the app will be rolling out to all Twitter users over the next few hours.

Twitter says it also wants to bring the app to more countries and eventually launch an Android counterpart to the iPhone app.

Check out a few more photos of Twitter Music below:

Top photos via Twitter

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Popular online radio service Pandora has launched a Windows Phone 8 app, with the added bonus of hearing no advertisements with songs through the end of the year.

Pandora offers its service across nearly every platform it can to reach the widest audience possible. The service has more than 150 million registered users in U.S., but it has struggled to make a profit. The biggest news coming from the Pandora camp as of late was the resignation of long-time CEO Joe Kennedy. This happened just as Apple is reportedly looking to stomp on Pandora’s turf with its own radio service.

But today Pandora’s focus in on the future, with the addition of Windows Phone 8 to its lineup. The company writes in a blog post:

For the last six months or so we’ve been working hard to bring Pandora to the Windows Phone 8 audience. Happy to announce the day has finally come.

While of course Pandora on Windows Phone 8 features the same listening experience you’ve come to expect from us, we really wanted to embrace the unique features of the Windows Phone 8 platform. For example, you can pin your favorite stations directly to the Start screen. Even cooler, the tiles are live and show you what’s currently playing without having to actually launch the app. If you have kids, we’ve also integrated into what Microsoft calls “Kid’s Corner” – just launch Pandora from that starting point and we’ll make sure that no explicit content plays during that session.

From a design perspective, we constantly strive to keep the Pandora user experience as easy and consistent as possible across an ever-increasing variety of platforms — computers, mobile phones, tablets, set-top boxes, cars, and more — all while taking into account the additional capabilities and design patterns of each individual platform. With its visually flat elements and unique panorama concept of navigation, designing for Windows Phone 8 while keeping our consistent Pandora aesthetic was an exciting challenge and we’re thrilled with the results.

The best part of the Pandora experience for most users, however, will be hearing no annoying ads while listening. Microsoft is actually footing the bill so Windows Phone 8 users don’t have to hear ads.

While the app isn’t available as of this writing, Pandora said the app will be available some time today in the Windows Phone Store.

Top photo via Pandora

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Streaming music service Rdio has made its service available in seven new countries — Mexico, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, and Austria — and has opened up free music streaming to users in Brazil.

Rdio has had trouble collecting new listeners compared to competitors Spotify and Rhapsody, and so it has been expanding its service all over the world to find more people to jam out to its 18 million song catalog. In late January, it opened up a free music streaming option to the U.K., Canada, Australia, and 11 other countries to get more people on board. Rdio is now available in 24 countries, some with free streaming and others only by paid subscription.

“Rdio is the best product on the market for discovering music, and we will continue to improve that discovery experience by developing smarter tools to surface artists and songs our users love,” Rdio CEO Drew Larner said in a statement. “By opening the social circle to seven new international markets, we’re making Rdio an increasingly global way to play, discover, and share music.”

By comparison, Spotify is available in 23 countries with free and paid options and has more than 5 million paid users. Rhapsody is only available in the United States, but it has accumulated more than one million paid users and will finally launch in Europe this year. Rdio has never released its paid user numbers, but it is widely suspected to be less than one million.

Rdio’s free music streaming is not unlimited, and you eventually get cut off and need to pay. Rdio in the U.S. costs $5 a month for web streaming, $10 a month for web and mobile apps, and $17 a month for family pricing. Pricing in other countries varies.

Additionally, Rdio also used today to launch a minor update to its iOS app. The new version of the app features a full-screen player and “social listening” so you can see which of your friends have listened to what albums.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Music streaming service Rhapsody has launched a sleek new app for Windows Phone 8 — just a week after competitor Spotfiy launched its app on the same platform.

Rhapsody is the oldest player in streaming music in U.S. and it has more than a million paid users in the U.S. But it has lost mind share to Spotify, which is raising copious amounts of money to build buzz and acquire customers all over the world. Still, Rhapsody keeps collecting new users and will soon launch in Europe. High-quality mobile experiences will also help.

Version 3.0 of Rhapsody for Windows Phone is specifically built with Windows Phone 8 in mind and has a lot of improvements for people looking to rock out with the service’s more than 16 million tracks.

Heres’s what you’ll get in the new version of Rhapsody for Windows Phone 8:

• Offline playback of downloaded tracks, albums, and playlists.
• Support for My Music, including the ability to add or remove tracks, albums, and artist—plus check out other people’s libraries.
• Add and remove stations from My Stations.
• Add and remove playlists from My Playlists.
• See your listening history.
• Improvements to audio playback, album art, and search.

Rhapsody doesn’t offer a free version of its product like Spotify, so it focuses its efforts on the experience of its paid subscribers. It costs either $10 or $15 per month depending on your needs, but most folks will be fine with the $10 plan.

Photo via Rhapsody

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Streaming music service Rdio has finally launched its free-streaming option in countries outside of the United States, a sign it is serious about fishing for new users around the world.

Services like Rdio and Rhapsody have struggled during the past few years to get as much attention as Spotify, which puffs its chest often and has celebrity endorsers. Spotify has offered users a free version of its product for quite some time, which has helped it get to 20 million users around the world. Rhapsody has more than a million paid users in the U.S., but it is just now beginning to look at international expansion. Rdio doesn’t disclose its user numbers, but it is at least available in 17 countries and needs more exposure.

While Rdio has offered some free streaming of its service in the United States since October 2011, the service hadn’t opened that feature up in the other countries Rdio is offered.

Rdio will now offer up to six months of free streaming in the United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden. Interestingly, Germany and Brazil have paid Rdio service but will not get a free option.

Like other services that offer on-demand music streaming, Rdio’s free streaming is not unlimited; you eventually get cut off and need to pay. The free streaming allows you to get familiar with the benefits of streaming from a catalog of more than 18 million songs.

When you get cut off, Rdio in the U.S. costs $5 a month for web streaming, $10 a month for web and mobile apps, and $17 a month for family pricing. Pricing in other countries varies.

Rdio screenshot via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This is a guest post by writer Andy Meek. This story was updated with a comment from Imogen Heap. 

Imogen Heap, the statuesque singer-songwriter who scored a massive hit on her own with the a cappella “Hide and Seek,” is a gadget and technology super-fan.

The Grammy-winning artist constantly is advocating for, supporting and even helping develop new tech toys that serve all manner of purposes, from connecting her more closely to her fans, to elevating her own music to simply using tech to perform music-related tasks.

Those tasks include jogging. At the moment, she’s working with Intel to develop a jogging app. “I love jogging + music but I can’t listen to music when I run,” she tweeted about the so-called “generative” music app. She explained further on her Facebook page, saying that she has been working on and off over the last few months on an application that plays “music that changes according to the intensity of your run, building and growing over the distance, interacting with you and the outside world. The music you hear will never be the same twice yet all threading on musical themes and a feeling that is related to the app.”

As part of the app-in-progress, Heap also has asked fans to send her snippets of cheers and encouragement, because she wants to drop something along those lines into the app to cheer on the user after they’ve reached distances of a certain interval. An assortment of sounds from fans that Heap has collected – the requisite attaboys and you-can-do-its – can be heard at this Soundcloud page.

The effect she’s going for here reminds me of “Scape.” That’s a new app from Brian Eno, the composer and producer who’s worked with acts like U2, Coldplay and Paul Simon. It’s available in the app store now, and it’s a minimalist little gem for which the user touches the tablet screen to create random beeps, dings and pleasant sounds that randomly combine to form incredibly tranquil soundscapes.

Like what Heap is creating, Eno’s app – produced with Peter Chilvers – also is a “generative” music product. An example of it in action:

Heap’s jogging app, meanwhile, is only the latest in a line of tech-fueled endeavors for which the British musician has been getting some big exposure. Another example: outlets like Wired – as well as the TEDGlobal conference in Scotland in 2011 – detailed a pair of high-tech musical gloves Heap unveiled.

Fans and audiences at her shows know that Imogen’s concerts are often part performance, part mixing session. She’s generally alone, and she’ll lay down a percussive track, then run to a different machine and produce some ambient noise, pick up a keyboard and play a few notes, layer her own voice over itself a few times – all mixed live.

It’s a frantic exercise, and she was inspired by gloves at MIT’s music lab which do that work for her. Using hand gestures, arm movements and finger flutters, she can create a wide array of sounds, and the visual effect is akin to watching Imogen serve as her own musical conductor.

“My brain…exploded with possibilities after being inspired by Elly Jessop and her VAMP glove in 2009 during my visit there [to MIT],” Heap told VentureBeat. “I set to developing my own pair with Tom Mitchell from UWE as soon as I got home and we are now a core team of six based in London, Bristol and Berlin.”

Pick up around the 5:30-minute mark to watch her get going:

Learn more about the team that built the gloves here.

Andy Meek is a journalist in Memphis who frequently contributes to outlets including Fast Company, Forbes, Politico, and several tech blogs.

Image credit: University of the West of England

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Streaming music service Rhapsody has launched an attractive new iPad app that could steal a little attention from its biggest rivals, the company announced today.

Rhapsody reached one million paid users in the U.S. far before Spotify did, but Spotify has attracted more attention during the past year or two, thanks to celebrity endorsements and a push to rapidly innovate its products. Spotify has five million paid subscribers and 15 million free users around the world. Rhapsody, on the other hand, has been more methodical — it only offers its service to paid users in United States and focuses on their needs.

While Rhapsody has had an iPhone app for a long while, today’s launch of an iPad app could bring a few more people over its service, especially those who like lounging with their iPads at home. Paul Springer, senior VP of worldwide product and design for Rhapsody, writes:

Our customers are going to be big fans of the latest tablet additions to Rhapsody’s growing product suite. Rhapsody has never looked or sounded better. We built this app from the ground up optimizing for speed, reliability and an effortless discovery experience for our members. We obsessed – and will continue to obsess – over making this the best way to enjoy music on your iPad, whether you listen through the internal speakers, headphones or external speakers using our Airplay and Bluetooth integration.

Rhapsody has more than 16 million songs available on its service and costs $10 per month. Rhapsody for iPad lets you use the service 30 days for free.

Check out the new Rhapsody iPad app from the Apple App Store here.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Streaming music service Spotify is bringing the Spotify Apps third-party ecosystem to its new web-based player and mobile apps in January, a move that should make it easier to discover music in Spotify’s many applications.

Spotify chief product officer Gustav Söderström told me today after Spotify’s New York event that the third-party apps that have been available inside Spotify’s desktop app — which includes great apps like Pitchfork, Soundrop, TuneWiki, and We Are Hunted — will indeed be moving to the web and mobile apps.

“We’ve been working on this for more than a year,” Söderström enthused. “I can’t wait for people to experience it.”

We’d heard previously that Spotify Apps would head to the iOS and Android platforms eventually, but we did not have a timeline. Now we know Spotify Apps should land on mobile and the web player early in 2013.

The first three apps integrated with the web player are Pitchfork, Songkick, and Tunigo,  Söderström said. Other apps should be announced soon. “We have convinced a bunch of others to get on board, but we don’t have timing yet,” he said.

As a big fan of Spotify Apps (check out five of the best Spotify Apps), I believe they are essential to the future of the service. The apps greatly simplify finding new music from a variety of publications and music labels. They also can help connect you with other people who like the same music. It will be exciting to see how these apps function inside web and mobile.

Spotify also used the event in New York today to announce that it now has 5 million paying subscribers and that its web app would be available to most users in January. The event also featured a lively back-and-forth between former adversaries — Metallica’s Lars Ulrich and Napster cofounder Sean Parker — talking about piracy and the future of music.

Facebook wants you to know that its 13-month-old Open Graph platform, the platform that allows app makers to create experiences that give them exposure through Facebook Timeline and Ticker, is every bit the big deal it promised at launch. The company today touted new stats around the crop of Facebook-enhanced music applications to prove its point.

Since late September of last year, Facebook members have streamed 62.6 million songs for a total of 22 billion plays through Timeline music apps. These applications, as you’ll recall, connect to Facebook to allow members to seamlessly share what they’re listening to with their friends, and to listen along with friends’ selections.

Facebook’s role in creating a fabric between the people who use Timeline music apps and their friends on the social network is proving to be a boon to third-party app makers, the company iterated once again.

Internet radio playlist app 8tracks is doing especially well. “8tracks users generate four million shares back to Facebook weekly, resulting in 65 million story impressions, with Facebook now ranking as one of 8tracks’ major sources of referral traffic,” Facebook’s Lincoln Hochberg wrote on the company’s developer blog.

Songza, an application for finding pre-fabricated playlists based on mood and setting, is also seeing a big bump in referral traffic from Facebook. Facebook sent 1 million referrals to the service in a 30-day period, Hochberg said. Facebook-connected users also listen about 20 percent longer than other users, he added.

UK-transplant Spotify is also apparently continuing to see healthy growth from Facebook’s connective tissue, though the social network did not share any specifics on growth.

Altogether, Facebook said that song plays through Timeline apps have amounted to about 210,000 years worth of music. I’m not exactly sure what that statement means, but doesn’t it have a nice ring to it?

Photo credit: Yutaka Tsutano/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Intoxicating indie rock band The xx and Microsoft have released a brilliant visualization app that tracks how a stream of the band’s new album Coexist spread virally around the world.

The visualization shows how music spreads insanely fast around the world thanks to social networks and email. The xx originally shared the link to a single fan, and soon after that person shared with friends, the number of people listening to the album stream explodes on the visualizer.

The Coexist visualization app is built in HTML5, as Microsoft (and many other companies) is trying to push more web developers and publishers to have their sites work without plug-ins.

“The Coexist site is built exclusively in HTML5, and we’ve engineered the experience to work plug-in free on all modern browsers, and in particular Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8,” Microsoft marketing manager Steve Lake wrote on Microsoft’s blog. “As with each project we undertake, this is yet another opportunity to step back and rethink what’s possible on the web. With The xx, it was about blending music, art, and technology – creating beauty in simplicity.”

Coexist is available for purchase today in the U.S. and streaming on Spotify. Based on a few listens, it’s easily one of my favorite albums to be released this year.

What does music streaming startup Spotify got hiding up its sleeve? Apparently an all-new web product that will let people stream music in the browser, and follow the listening habits and playlists of music influencers.

Spotify makes mobile and desktop apps that allow people to listen to music on demand and play radio stations of algorithmically selected tracks. Spotify, which maintains a library of 18 million songs, has more than 4 million paying subscribers and a total of 15 million active users.

The startup has experienced a healthy growth spurt ever since it launched in the U.S. and became buddies with Facebook, but it’s yet to release an easy-listening experience that works on the web. Currently, Spotify links, even the ones appearing on Facebook, direct the user to open the Spotify desktop application, which makes for a very clunky experience.

That’s all about to change, as Spotify is preparing to launch a browser-based version of its service, according to a TechCrunch report.

Few details are known about the Spotify web app, but sources told TechCrunch that it will include new features for finding music. The startup may also be exploring a lower price point for its mobile subscription plan.

Spotify declined to comment on this story.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

In a strange turn of events, streaming music service Grooveshark has had its Android app removed from the Google Play store just days after it showed back up in the store.

Grooveshark would not tell us the reason why Google kicked the app out. However, we suspect it has something to do with its constant legal battles with major music labels. Grooveshark doesn’t have broad licensing agreements to play the majority of its music (like Spotify and Rdio do) and relies on DMCA rules, just as YouTube does.

Grooveshark has filed a notice with Google and is attempting to get its app back in the Google Play store. A company spokesperson writes:

We have filed a counter-notice and are working with Google and their Google Play reinstatement process to get our app back in the market. Until then, our Android app remains available for all at http://mobile.grooveshark.com/android, and we thank all the users who continue to support open music, open markets, and open Internet.

As mentioned in the statement above, Grooveshark craftily launched an HTML5 web app for streaming music through iOS and Android web browsers in response to bans from some app stores. Looks like Android users will once again be reliant on that mobile app or a direct download from Grooveshark for listening to music with the service.

A Google spokesperson told us that Google has not been working with Grooveshark to get the app reinstated in the store, and that it removed the app because it violated its Google Play policies. Google said it notified Grooveshark about what policy the app was violating and provided details about how it can appeal Google’s decision.

Google would not tell me what policy Grooveshark was violating. My personal guess is intellectual property. Google’s policy states:

Intellectual Property: Don’t infringe on the intellectual property rights of others (including patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, and other proprietary rights) or encourage or induce infringement of intellectual property rights. We will respond to clear notices of alleged copyright infringement. For more information or to file a DMCA request, please visit our copyright procedures.

Shark on beach photo via gadgetdude/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Naming that tune has been the name of Shazam’s game for more than decade. But should you confuse Shazam for a predictable, tired old company, you’re even more clueless than the perplexed person who can’t place a familiar track.

Founded in 2000, London-based Shazam is mostly recognized as the go-to mobile music application for song identification. It’s mobile applications have a following of 225 million people worldwide (90 million in the U.S.), who put it to use at least 10 million times per day.

Shazam’s London office.

Not content with owning the small but cozy category of mobile music discovery, Shazam has spent the past two-and-a-half years pushing forward with a strategy designed to remake the company as a modern-day media mogul. It’s recently taken to the television airways with Shazam-enable broadcasts and advertisements. But that is only the first part of a multifaceted Shazam media blitz that includes a move into retail and other sectors — in due time.

“We’ve got many ambitions and ideas about how we can make this more ubiquitous and be more helpful in people’s everyday lives,” Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher told VentureBeat in an extensive interview.

To fully grasp where the company is headed, one first has to understand its past.

The app that almost never was

Today’s mobile user takes for granted the complexity of Shazam’s audio fingerprinting technology. They also likely have no clue that it was developed when cellphones were quite stupid and investors in the U.S. were bewildered by mobile as platform.

The first inkling of the Shazam idea came from MBA students Chris Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, and Dhiraj Mukherjee in 1999. The students took their idea to Dr. Avery Wang and Professor Julius Smith at Stanford, and the duo worked on building the algorithm. But the technology had to cross an ocean before it could find its legs.

“The reality at the time, when they were seeking their first initial funding, was that in North America the investor sentiment was very much focused on the Internet … whereas in Europe … mobile services were more established,” Fisher said, explaining why Shazam was eventually established in London. “People were much more taken with SMS.”

As a mobile proposition, Shazam was successful in terms of fundraising in London — while it hadn’t been successful in the States, he said.

Another obstacle facing the fledgling company, Fisher detailed, was that digital music had yet to develop into a category.

“ITunes didn’t exist at the time. People were only buying the very first iteration of ringtones … and even then that was still very early on in the lifecycle,” Fisher said. “There wasn’t significant interest in investing in music specifically as a mobile service, so the company was really forced to launch directly to consumers … and start educating people about Shazam.”

The company went forward with a direct-to-consumer offering in the U.K. in 2002. Consumers could dial the short code 2580 from their mobile phone, then hold the phone up to capture music playing in the background. Shazam would then analyze the track and send an SMS back with the song identification. Along with offers to sell the consumer a matching ringtone (everyone wanted ringtones back then), Shazam could begin to build a real business.

An inflection point

Shazam spent the next few years as a cool service for music discovery, but it would take a few more years before it could provide people with additional reasons to use Shazam, beyond just finding out the name of a song.

In 2003, company executives debated whether its technology was more valuable as a direct-response marketing tool or as a music-identification service. Music won out, but those early ideas were not forgotten, said Fisher.

Source: Pocketnow.com

AT&T Music ID service, powered by Shazam

In the meantime, Shazam moved away from a direct-to-consumer approach to reach more people and monetize its service through relationships with carriers and manufacturers. The company formed strategic relationships with AT&T (MusicID) and Verizon (Song ID) and was working directly with handset manufacturers. Its apps were preloaded on many devices as a white label or cobranded service.

By 2007, markets had shifted in Shazam’s favor, enabling its first major reinvention.

As Fisher tells the story, four key factors came to together to enable the company to move beyond song identification.

• People starting becoming acclimated to the idea of buying digital content.
• The movement toward unlimited data — a single monthly fee that gave you all the bandwidth you could use.
• Meanwhile, better mobile devices with music players were hitting store shelves.
• And finally, prices for media on mobile platforms were finally on par with what consumers were used to paying for content in stores or online.

“That, in our minds, was an inflection point for the company,” said Fisher, citing the company’s capability to sell tracks on mobile directly to the consumers who were identifying songs.

But Shazam, the brand, was still one Apple-sized jolt away from real recognition.

The Apple bump

The word “Shazam” has been co-opted by the general population. Perhaps you’ve asked a friend, “What’s that song?” to which your friend responded, “I don’t know. Shazam it.”

Yet had Shazam stuck with its business-to-business, white label approach, the verb-ification of its name would have never happened.

Enter Apple.

On July 10, 2008, a little more than one year after the release of the first iPhone device and a day before the launch of the iPhone 3G, Apple put out version 2.0 of its iPhone software. Along with that release, Apple opened an application marketplace that included roughly 500 applications. One of those first applications was Shazam. Shazam had just 15 million users at the time.

The first native Shazam application for iPhone allowed people to discover, buy, and share music by holding their phones up to music for a few seconds. The technology worked similarly to its old SMS service but without the clunky limitations of text messaging.

“That’s when, for the first time in North America our brand, was really accelerated into the market,” Fisher said.

A few months later, Apple ran a television ad for the iPhone 3G that centered around Shazam. The ad changed everything.

“That had a huge impact in terms of awareness of the Shazam brand,” Fisher said. “That was the beginning of our recommitment to a fully fledged consumer strategy.”

By late September 2008, Shazam’s iPhone application had been downloaded 1.5 million times and its audience had climbed to 20 million people. Between October 2008 and October 2009, Shazam added another 30 million listeners.

The instant success of Shazam’s iPhone application was also an accidental one. The company, which had a prior relationship with Apple, had little clue that the hardware maker’s mobile software marketplace would be capable of building brands overnight — no one did, Fisher said. Shazam, asked by Apple to build a consumer-facing application, went along with the company’s plans. It merely hoped that it could benefit a bit from the PR activity surrounding the launch of the App Store.

“We never imagined the success we’d have and how quickly our brand would develop in the North American market,” Fisher said.

Shazam did make one critical decision. The company decided to make its first native application free for consumers to download. Eventually, Shazam would pivot to a freemium model to support its operations, but the free application served the company well in attracting an onslaught of attention.

The essence of Shazam’s application remained the same as it propagated to Android in October 2008 and to BlackBerry in February 2009. Meanwhile, its popularity surged, enabling the startup to start thinking even bigger. It started by setting its sights on additional media, beyond mobile.

To big screens and beyond

Shazam’s Hollywood-sized dreams are perhaps most evident in its partnership with NBC to Shazam-enable all of the network’s Olympics programming across NBC, NBC Sports Network, MSNBC, Bravo, and CNBC properties.

U.S. viewers used the company’s mobile applications over the 17-day period to tag television content several million times. Why would they do that? By simply holding their phones up to the TV screen, they could get second-screen extras such as video clips, athlete stories, match results, and medal counts.

The broadcast strategy, however, was first witnessed by consumers tuning into Super Bowl XLIV in February 2010. Those viewers caught a glimpse of the very first television commercial optimized for tagging.

The general idea behind Shazam’s move to TV was to position itself as a media engagement company. The company hoped it could apply its technology to make content of all types, not just music, taggable, and to connect people to brands in the process.

And while this particular strategy was only kicked into high gear in early 2010, it was the same direct-response marketing strategy first discussed in the company’s board room seven years ago.

“The reality was we were a startup that was resource- and cash-constrained at the time and had this momentum in music,” Fisher said. “In February 2010, we felt … we had the capacity in the company to start building out these new relationships with brands and broadcasters. That was a reflection on maintaining our focus for a period of time, and then starting the execution of a broader strategy.”

Waiting seems to have paid off in more ways than one. Shazam has picked enough people over the years to help it dominate in the emerging second-screen category.

Shazam has been very successful in its television efforts, said Heather Way, a senior research analyst with Parks Associates.

“I think that they’re in a good position if we’re talking about synchronized content from the TV to the mobile screen,” she said. “A lot of that comes from there built in ‘footprint.’ They already have their app on a lot of devices … so they have that brand name. People know, ‘I’m going to Shazam it.’”

Way studies digital media advertising services and platforms for Park Associates; she’s been following the second screen movement, centered around Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology and services, for the past year. Advertisers, content owners, and service providers, she said, have shown a strong interest in leveraging the second screen — aka your mobile phone or tablet — to sync content from the television to the mobile device.

Many companies provide the ACR technology such as Audible Magic or Civolution, but Shazam brings with it the added promise of helping content owners monetize second screen experiences, Way said.

Networks and brands are taking notice. Shazam has run more than 100 television campaigns on behalf of major brands in North America during the past 18 months.

Consumers appear to be taking notice too. More than 27 percent of people who Shazamed Super Bowl XLVI ads went on to purchase products from their mobile device, Fisher said. Forty-six percent of people who watched one unnamed ad went on to watch it again.

While not yet profitable on the television front, Shazam believes that if it can craft second-screen extras that people actually want, then it can help broadcasters move ratings. But do people actually want these extras?

“The hard part is actually working with content owners and creative agencies to come up with meaningful experiences … that people haven’t experienced before,” he said. “That’s what’s taken the time, and that’s actually paid huge dividends.”

Crafting the experiences is easier said than done.

Shazam may be investing heavily in developing compelling, “magical” user experiences, as Fisher indicated, but the company seems to have missed the mark with this year’s Super Bowl, when roughly one-third of all ads were Shazam-enabled. Viewers experienced hiccups when attempting to Shazam some ads, while others were confused by the process. One blogger characterized the whole effort as a “fail.”

“From here out, it’s going to be a matter of ensuing that those experiences provide value to the consumers so that they continue to Shazam while they’re watching TV,” Way said. “There’s a lot of buzz around TV companion apps and ACR, but really what it has to come down to is consumer use case.”

Another challenge for Shazam and the industry is one of mass appeal.

“I don’t think anytime soon … that masses are going to Shazam while they’re watching TV. I think there’s going to be pockets of consumers who are going to find that interesting,” Way said. “Will it have the scale that advertisers and content owners are used to through traditional TV? No.”

If Shazam, the media engagement company, can tackle television in the way it has music, could it also make physical spaces more engaging? That’s certainly an objective.

Retail: Shazam’s next frontier?

The company is looking at retail as its next category and has field-tested campaigns, including one with Old Navy that offered promotions to shoppers who tagged audio in stores.

The value proposition for consumers here is much less clear, Fisher admitted, so the company is working through how it can make in-store shopping experiences better. Still, early results have been impressive, he said.

“What we want to be is the go-to application on people’s devices when they want to engage with content around them,” Fisher said. “Whether that’s music, or whether it’s television, or whether it’s being in a retail store, we want people to think of Shazam as making it as easy as possible for them to engage with that brand or content owner.”

If Fisher has it way, “Shazam it” could come to mean something entirely new in the years ahead.

Photo credits: Ketharaman Swaminathan, Pocketnow.com; caribb, paz.ca/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Streaming music service Pandora reported better than expected revenue gains in its second quarter fiscal year 2013 earnings report.

The company’s revenue for FY13 second quarter was $101.3 million, a 51 percent increase compared to the same quarter last year and $20.5 million higher than the previous quarter. The bulk of revenue came from advertising, $89.4 million, with premium subscriptions accounting for $11.9 million. Yet Pandora’s profits are still down, with a $5.4 million net loss for the quarter compared to $1.8 million year-over-year.

The cost for licensing all its streaming music is one of the largest contributors to Pandora staying in the red. Pandora is one of the world largest Internet radio services, which allows people to create customized stations based on an artist, song, album, or genre by voting on what they do and don’t want to hear. The company offers a free ad-supported version of its smart radio service as well as premium subscription-based version. Pandora is also facing increased competition from a number of popular competitors like Spotify, which launched its own smart radio features earlier this year.

“This quarter exceeded our expectations as our strong momentum continues with both listeners and advertisers,” said Pandora Chairman and CEO Joe Kennedy in a statement. “In particular, this quarter demonstrated that our mobile monetization strategies are working.”

Mobile is one area where Pandora is doing very well, bringing in $59.2 million in mobile ad revenue for an 86 percent year‐over‐year increase. The company is also pushing get its music service into more automobiles while slowly but steadily building an advertising sales workforce to steal business from the local radio ad market.

Pandora’s financials might be largely unchanged compared to the last few quarters (record revenue growth while failing to turn a profit), but at least people are still listening. The company grew the total number of listener hours (amount of time people actually spend listening to Pandora content) to 3.3 billion for the fiscal quarter, an 80 percent year‐over‐year increase. The company also saw 54.9 million active users for the quarter for a 48 percent year-over-year increase.

The continued user growth and higher level of listener hours is one thing that could be keeping Pandora’s stock price from sinking even lower. The company experienced a setback earlier in the month when Wall Street downgraded its rating, causing the stock to dip below $10 per share. For now, it’s been able to hold that number, but investors don’t seem overly convinced that Pandora can overcome its high music licensing costs to actually turn a profit.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Despite being hounded by lawsuits from the biggest U.S. music labels, Google has reinstated popular streaming music service Grooveshark’s Android app in the Google Play store.

Back in January, Grooveshark craftily launched an HTML5 web app for streaming music through iOS and Android web browsers in response to being banned from some app stores. The company has been in legal hot water with the major music labels because it doesn’t have broad licensing agreements to play the majority of its music and relies on DMCA rules, just as YouTube does.

The company’s official statement blames the app’s initial removal on “rogue apps” instead of legal issues. The company wrote in a statement to VentureBeat:

After working closely with Google to get rogue apps removed, we’re delighted that the official Grooveshark app has been reinstated in the Android market. Grooveshark is dedicated to helping music fans search, discover and share music while pioneering new artist promotion, distribution and monetization techniques. We look forward to continuing to build a relationship with Android and leverage this fantastic platform for our partners.

The company has two pricing tiers for listening to music through the app. The free app gives you unlimited radio station listening (similar to Pandora and Spotify), while the premium subscription ($9/month) gives you on-demand streaming of any song in Grooveshark and much more. The company writes in the app’s official description:

Always free features, no paid subscription needed:

• Unlimited streaming of over 20 genre Radio Stations, with hand-tagged selections from the millions of songs in our library.
• Launch a custom Radio Station based on any song you choose, and tailor it further to your taste by skipping and liking songs.

Features for Grooveshark Anywhere subscribers ($9/mo.) or those using the free trial:

• Free, unlimited on-demand music streaming.
• Take your music collection with you everywhere: Favorites, Playlists, Radio Stations, and the community of music fans on Grooveshark.
• Offline your most frequently played songs for uninterrupted listening even when there’s no stable connection.
• Choose from one of our genre Radio Stations or launch a personalized station based on any song in your queue, with no song skip or listening limits. Save particularly good sessions as Playlists for continued listening later.
• Create, save, and share unlimited Playlists with friends.
• Connect your social media profiles to easily share your music with friends.
• Explore Popular songs and see what the Grooveshark community is listening to.

Grooveshark on Android photos: Grooveshark

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Streaming music service Pandora has updated its popular Android app with a new interface, song lyrics, play history, and more.

Pandora’s new Android helps it stay competitive in the busy digital music landscape. With more than 50 million installs of the app in the U.S., it has a significant reach. It also gives people a reason to keep jamming to tunes on Pandora rather than other services.

The new app includes a more polished interface with the capability to better explore and assess the music you listen to. First, it has a song history, so you can review, rate, or bookmark previously played tracks. You can also see song lyrics to whatever is playing, read artist or band biographies, and view similar tracks and artists. It also claims to include various bug fixes.

The app update comes at a time when Pandora has an incredible number of users and growth but can’t seem to turn a profit. In first quarter of 2012, Pandora’s active listeners grew 53 percent to 51.9 million. The total number of hours listened to for the quarter hit a staggering 3.09 billion.

Competition has increased recently, too, with new Pandora-like apps from Spotify being launched recently on Android and iOS. There’s also TuneIn, which provides a digital access point to 70,000 terrestrial radio stations around the world.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Streaming music service Rdio has partnered with independent music aggregators TuneCore and CD Baby, bringing its catalog to more than 18 million tracks, the company announced today.

“Independent music is a vital part of Rdio’s catalog,” CEO Drew Larner said in a statement. “We’re glad to support hundreds of thousands of self-released artists by connecting their work to new music fans from all over the world.”

Rdio competes with Spotify, MOG, and Rhapsody in the streaming music realm, with Spotify reigning as the innovation king over the rest. Rdio, at least, does have a dedicated fanbase and a strong emphasis on social.

Rdio redesigned its main site in May to help keep up with its strong competition. Rdio gives listeners a limited amount of free use, and you can listen to unlimited music for $5-to-$10 per month, depending on whether you want mobile app access. There’s also $17.99 or $22.99 per month options for families.

On the mobile front, Rdio offers iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry apps. It also works with Sonos and Roku, if you’re more inclined to jam out in the living room.

Photo credit: Rdio

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Legally troubled Megaupload creator Kim Dotcom will launch his new music-focused venture, Megabox, this year, he said early Monday morning on Twitter.

Dotcom has been vigorously fighting government charges related to copyright infringement charges since January. His incredibly popular file-sharing service Megaupload was shut down by U.S. and New Zealand authorities as part of a massive sting operation against sites that allegedly enabled copyright infringement. A recent video shows the absurdly forceful raid performed on Dotcom’s house as part of the sting.

Despite being in the middle of a legal case that could end up with Dotcom in prison, he is still working hard to open a new disruptive web-based music service. Megabox will “allow artists to sell their creations direct to consumers, allowing artists to keep 90% of earnings,” Dotcom wrote in a December guest post to TorrentFreak. You can see a photo teaser of the service above.

On top of launching a new music service, Dotcom is cooking up something else. On Twitter, he indicated that something people have been waiting for is coming and will be “better” and “faster”. He writes:

I know what you are all waiting for. It’s coming. This year. Promise. Bigger. Better. Faster. 100% Safe & Unstoppable.

The tweet suggests Megaupload will relaunch this year as well, but we’ve got no details except for the tweet. No doubt the consistently vocal Dotcom will let the world know when his service hits the web.

Megabox photo: Kim Dotcom/Instagram

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Popular music streaming service Spotify has landed on the Kindle Fire, giving it yet another platform to attract users.

Spotify recently announced that it has reached more than 4 million paying subscribers and 15 million total active users. That’s a 25 percent paid user growth in just eight months. Part of that stellar growth stems from its availability across desktops, Macs, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry. Now it hopes to attract the Kindle Fire crowd to the service.

Notably, the Kindle Fire app includes free Pandora-like radio, so even if you’re not a paying Spotify customer, you can still get some usage out of the app. The radio app allows you to generate stations from artists or songs. Free users will have advertisements and won’t have unlimited skips, but premium users will have no ads and unlimited skips.

The app also includes the following features:

· Full support for Android 4.0
· Free mobile free radio
· Slide-out navigation
· Social features – check out friends’ profile pages and playlists on the go
· Artist imagery in high resolution
· Related artist view – available for the first time on mobile
· ‘Extreme’ sound quality setting for 320 kbps listening

Photo credit: file404/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Popular music streaming startup Spotify has brought free Pandora-like radio streaming to its Android app, the company announced today.

Spotify just celebrated its one-year anniversary of launching in the U.S., with Americans listening to more than 13 billion songs so far. On the radio front, Spotify has offered its own personalized radio service inside the Spotify desktop application since mid-May and added it to its iPhone and iPad apps in June.

What’s so good about offering radio on Android is that both free and premium Spotify users can take part. Previously, free Spotify users had no reason to use the Android app because you have to cough up $10 a month to stream whatever songs you wanted. Now, free Spotify users with Android phones can get some use of the mobile experience. Free users will have advertisements and not have unlimited skips, but premium users will have no ads and unlimited skips.

“The radio feature we’ve added to our Android app gives users the ability to discover, listen, like, and save tracks on the go — for free,” Spotify product manager Donovan Sung told us via email.

Check out the Spotify radio app on Android below:

Baby listening to music: TedsBlog/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

As part of an ongoing effort to bring bleeding-edge innovation back to ticketing conglomerate Live Nation, the company’s months-old investment vehicle, LN Labs, has acquired social music discovery startup Rexly.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Two of Rexly’s cofounders are joining Live Nation and opening up a new LN Labs office in San Francisco to primarily focus on mobile, cofounders Joel Resnicow, Kyle Fleming, and Bradley Lautenbach wrote in a blog post announcing the news.

“Rexly is joining forces with Live Nation Labs first and foremost because of shared values and vision,” the Rexly cofounders said. “We are all lean entrepreneurs. We obsess over user-driven design and data-driven decision making. Most important, we are deeply committed to creating phenomenal experiences for music fans, nurturing the music tech community and breathing new life into a challenged industry.”

Rexly is the San Francisco–based, angel-backed startup that makes an iPhone application by the same name for discovering music through friends.

The application connects to iTunes and to Facebook to make recommendations and provide users with a seamless way of sharing the songs they listen to on iTunes with friends who follow them. The approach is not wholly dissimilar from what Apple was doing with its failed Ping social network experiment and also overlapped with Facebook’s music sharing setup.

The deal is the second acquisition by LN Labs. In a prior conversation, LN Labs creators Eric Garland and Ethan Kaplan (pictured above) told me that they formed the investment arm to merge innovative startup culture with Live Nation’s vast ecosystem. The pair are seriously intent on making Live Nation associated with cutting-edge technology and services, and they said they were actively interested in snatching up consumer-facing products that would enhance the before, during, and after concert-going experiences.

“After we started the Labs, but before we’d told anybody what we were up to, Ethan and I started sneaking up north to court Rexly,” Garland reflected in his own blog post. “When we listened and talked, and drank some very fancy teas, we learned a lot about each other’s work and life experiences and the paths by which we’d arrived at this moment. We started to sketch out the place we’d like to build next, the place we’d be excited to come into on a Monday morning or blog about on a Sunday night.”

Rexly’s Resnicow and Fleming are now tasked with helping to make real the utopic vision outlined by Garland. “Labs is a great team of people, and great teams are even more powerful than great ideas or great leverage,” Garland said.

Resnicow and Fleming will start by recruiting iOS developers, front-end developers, mobile designers, and all-around music hackers to ramp up LN Labs’ presence in San Francisco.

Rexly’s iOS app will remain operational for the foreseeable future.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Music-focused startup The Echo Nest has raised $17.3 million in its fourth round of funding, a move that will help it improve its music platform, which powers many popular music apps around the web and on mobile devices.

Some of the coolest apps The Echo Nest powers include Spotify Radio, VEVO’s “match” iTunes scanner, iHeartRadio’s customized radio stations, Thisismyjam, and MTV Music Meter. It recently also supercharged its music platform with data from JamBase and SongMeanings to keep getting smarter. The company charges each company it works with to use its powerful “data-as-a-service.”

“We spend a ton of time trying to understand music identity and give insights to music fans,” Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese told VentureBeat. “We’ll help you understand your music better and make the music understand you.”

The new round of funding was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation by former investors Matrix Partners and Commonwealth Capital Ventures. With the new round, the company has raised about $27 million total. The new funds will mostly go toward expanding the company’s sales and marketing team but will also go toward improving its platform further.

“We’ve had a big engineering team, but a relatively small sales team,” Lucchese said.

Somerville, Mass.-based Echo Nest was founded in 2005 and has 40 employees. Lucchese said the company is now “hiring aggressively.”

Image credit: Anna Paff/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

An iOS application called Sonarflow for Spotify, which hooks into the streaming service for access to 15 million tracks and counting, promises to point you to artists and songs that you’re sure to love.

Sonarflow for Spotify, a brand new application from three-year-old, Austria-based music discovery startup Spectralmind, is one of 15 mobile products competing today for best in class in the Innovation Competition at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2012 conference in San Francisco, Calif.

“Spotify has a lot of content … you can literally play any song you wish in an instant,” Spectralmind CEO Thomas Lidy told me in an interview. “But the problem there is you have to know the name of the artist or the title of the songs. If you don’t know them, it’s really hard to find music.”

click to enlarge

And that’s where Sonarflow for Spotify comes in. Sitting as a visual music discovery overlay on top of Spotify’s catalog, the application first presents the user with three different bubbles — starred, your top tracks, and top tracks — for touch-based music exploration. A person can then pinch to zoom into any of the circles, click on a artist for additional info, and double tap on tracks to listen to them.

“The visual aspect is really our strongest aspect here,” Lidy said. “We put a layer on top of Spotify where you can see what’s there … what you can find, and what you can discover.”

Sure, that sounds like a rudimentary, hierarchal approach to music discovery, and maybe it is. But where the application shines is in its ability to recommend new artists and send a Spotify listener down an unlimited number of musical paths. A click of the search button in the upper right-hand corner will display five new artists, denoted by white bubbles, around an artist the user already knows, and a tap on an artist will pull up all available tracks for playing. You can also star the new songs you discover in the app, which in turn saves them to your Spotify starred tracks collection.

In playing with Sonarflow for Spotify, I found the application to be a fantastic vehicle for musical enlightenment. Just a few clicks in and I was listening to pleasing tracks that I had forgotten, simply because I couldn’t remember the song title or artist name, and also unearthing several new favorite artists.

The application, however, isn’t yet ideal for a lean-back, automated listening experience, as Spotify’s own new radio feature proffers, unless you’re content playing straight through the tracks of one of the artists you discover.

That’s going to change in future releases, Lidy promised me. Two pending features, for instance, include an auto-playlist option and a way to create playlists by drawing a path on the screen, he said.

Still, we’re only seeing pieces of Spectralmind’s intelligence in this release, Lidy insisted. The company behind the application has been working on audio recognition technology since its earliest days and is capable of capturing the sound of music to make recommendations based on rhythm, melody, or voice matches. This proprietary software technology, which has yet to be baked into Sonarflow for Spotify, will make potentially infinitely more interesting recommendations in the way of fresh, obscure, and indie artists.

“Right now, very popular artists are popping up, but some people prefer to find music that nobody else is aware of,” Lidy said. “It’s not possible with typical music recommenders, because [they] work only if the music has been listened to by many, many people before. With audio-based recommendation technology, we can bring in any song from the 16 million songs on Spotify just by matching a user’s taste in terms of rhythm and melody.”

Vienna-based Spectralmind has 12 employees and has raised $1.175 million in seed and grant funding. The company, which started its life building products for media professionals, previously released a Sonarflow application for iPhone and iPad with similar functionality pivoting around a person’s individual music collection.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Since Spotify‘s U.S. launch a year ago, the startup has turned into one of the best streaming music services available today. And with the company’s transformation into a platform for music-focused apps, the service has gotten even better.

Spotify’s desktop and mobile applications give you access to a catalog of more than 16 million tracks. The company also has begun to offer Pandora-like radio that both free and paid users can access. But Spotify’s apps take the service a step further, fundamentally changing the experience of finding and listening to music.

As of this writing, 36 applications are accessible inside of Spotify’s desktop app, with big names like Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and The Guardian providing their own apps. These desktop apps change the music-listening experiencing by providing music discovery, music reviews, social listening, lyrics, and even dating. Spotify has said it also intends to bring third-party apps inside its mobile apps, but it hasn’t said when.

We’re sure the app platform will continue to expand, but for now we’ve made a list of our five favorite Spotify apps.

1. We Are Hunted

Whether or not you follow popular music charts from Billboard, iTunes, or other sources, it’s great to be able to access popular and emerging songs. We Are Hunted is sort of a “cool Billboard” that tracks emerging music through blogs, social media, message boards, and P2P networks. It uses a well-designed, visual interface that lets you scroll through 99 trending songs with corresponding artist thumbnails. If you’re feeling like being turned on by artists you’ve never heard of, there’s the “Emerging Chart” tab. Or if you want more conventional picks, there’s the “Mainstream Chart” tab. Additionally, the app has seven different genre playlists to cycle through. You can also use the app to create a playlist based on an artist you like.

2. Digster

While Spotify offers a relatively new Pandora-like radio function to create playlists, Digster takes the notion of playlist building further with curated playlists from across the spectrum of music. You can choose from hip-hop, classical, Motown, classic rock, and everything in-between and experience classic hits and songs you’ve never heard side-by-side with more ease than ever. You can also check out Share My Playlists for more playlist options.

3. TuneWiki

The TuneWiki app doesn’t redefine the nature of listening to music, but it certainly is one of the most practical and helpful Spotify apps. The service makes it possible to see lyrics synced up in real-time with whatever song you’re listening to, making it easier than ever to figure out what the heck they’re singing about. What’s also cool is that lyrics are crowd-sourced, so if a song’s lyrics seem wrong, you can change them just as if you were editing Wikipedia.

4. Soundrop

Soundrop is easily the most unusual app on this list because it’s the only one to receive VC funding. Yes, even Spotify apps can raise money, which is a sign that the platform is strong and growing. Soundrop creates a social listening experience with “rooms” in which you can listen to music. You can browse through various artist rooms (the picture above shows the one for Sigur Ros) and talk to people about the artist. While in the room, you can also add songs to the room’s playlist and vote up songs other people have suggested. The company says its nearly 7,000 rooms have played more than 60 million songs to date.

5. Pitchfork

While Pitchfork has many loud fans and equally loud critics, the Chicago-based site is still in many ways the Internet age’s Rolling Stone. It provides a spotlight (and copious amounts of hype) for emerging artists, and the site’s aspect of picking “the next big thing” translates well to Spotify. Not only does the app provide an easy way to read Pitchfork’s sometimes long-winded reviews, it makes it easy to find new music that’s already been curated weekly by a staff of music writers. Rolling Stone also has a Spotify app with similar functionality, but it doesn’t update its selections as often as Pitchfork does.

Take a look at our gallery of other awesome Spotify apps below and let us know what your favorites are in the comments.

Woman listening to radio photo: sebilden/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Streaming music startup Spotify has added a Pandora-like radio service to its iOS applications, finally giving free Spotify users in the U.S. a reason to download the Spotify app for their iPhones and iPads.

Spotify has offered its own radio service inside the Spotify desktop application since mid-May. If you used Spotify and Pandora, it would most likely make you want to drop Pandora to make your music-listening-life simpler.

Now Spotify is bringing that radio app to the iPhone and iPad, and both free and premium Spotify users can take part. Previously, free Spotify users had virtually no reason to use the mobile app because only premium users who pay $10 a month get access to streaming music on iOS devices. Now, free users can download the Spotify iOS app and get some functionality out of it. Premium users will get radio access in iOS too, and because they pay, they have no advertising and unlimited skips.

“Our focus has always been on creating an amazing user experience,” Spotify product VP Charlie Hellman, said in a statement. “The radio feature we’ve added to our iPhone and iPad apps gives users the ability to discover, listen, and save what they like on the go — all within one app — for free.”

The updated Spotify iOS app is now available for download in the App Store. The company will add radio functionality to its Android app in the near future as well.

Check out the gallery below for more looks at the awesome radio addition:

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Streaming music service Spotify has massively updated its Android application with support for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), a new navigation bar, an Android widget, and an option for higher sound quality, the company announced Tuesday.

Spotify is now available in 15 countries, and while its iPhone and new iPad app are quite good, the service has been considerably lacking on Android by comparison. Now that will be remedied by bringing its app to more Android devices and featuring a better overall interface.

“For all our Android users, this Spotify update is a huge leap forward, said Gustav Södertröm, VP Products at Spotify, in a statement. “We’ve rebuilt it from top to bottom, making it faster, slicker, and much better looking.”

The most important part of the update is that it will finally work with Android 4.0 devices, including awesome phones like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and HTC One X. The design and navigation are also much better than the prior version of the app. Finally, my personal favorite of the updates is the inclusion of “extreme” 320 kbps sound quality, which hit the iPhone earlier this year, and is something audiophiles will appreciate.

The company highlights the following updates to the app:

• Full support for Android 4.0
• All-new slide-out navigation
• Crossfade/gapless playback settings
• Widget – control Spotify from the home screen
• Folder support – organize and order your playlists
• Even more social – check out friends’ profile pages and playlists on the go
• Artist imagery in high resolution
• Related artist view – available for the first time on mobile
• ‘Extreme’ sound quality setting for 320 kbps listening
• Play queue
• Last.fm scrobbling

You should be able to download the app shortly from the Google Play store. You must be a premium subscriber ($10 per month in the U.S.) for the app to work on your phone.

Check out the gallery below for more pictures of the app: