Spotify

Lady Gaga has made quite a career as a Madonna clone, something that the Queen of Pop was fine to tolerate until she decided it was time to kick-start her music career again this year. At that point, emboldened by a general opinion that Gaga was a similar but lesser product than her, Madonna earlier this year referred to Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ as ‘reductive’ – an accurate but nonetheless scathing term … especially in an age where computers with sophisticated software can dissect songs so easily to show their origins and similarities. Now, just one week after claiming the…

If you are contemplating signing up for a streaming music service, or are unhappy with the one you are using, chances are one major consideration is the music library. While ‘music discovery’ is all well and good, ultimately we all want to just want to listen to music. Now we hear of a new service developed by Matt Montag called ‘Music Smasher’. As the screen at top shows, you simply enter some terms and the site searches across all of the major streaming services. According to Montag: “I developed it to simplify the task of searching across Spotify, Rdio, Grooveshark,…

Late last year I heard about the MidemLab competition for promising music startups, which had finalists in the ‘music discovery’ category as follows: Music Discovery, Recommendation & Creation ChartsNow.mobi (UK) – mass market mobile music service MPme by Apsmart (UK) – curated internet radio musicplayr (Germany) – music discovery & blogging Navegas (Germany) – connecting the world of music tool Rexly (USA) – social discovery & recommendation Songs2See by Fraunhofer (Germany) – music game development SoshiGames (UK) – game-based social music discovery Twusic by LemonLab (Belgium) – Twitter music application Watzatsong (France) – crowdsourced music search engine WhoSampled (UK) –…

Earlier this year Lady Gaga released an album that sold over a million copies in the first week, then plummeted by a historic 84% in the second week before fading into nowheresville. As I noted, nearly HALF of her first week sales were generated by the ‘giveaway’ at Amazon (99 cent full album) and other freebie pack-in deals that were counted as sales. It was a rather obvious ploy set up to falsely generate an impression of a larger event than happened – and considering how terrible the album is, perhaps that was the ONLY way to get people to…

Less than two months ago Facebook had its big f8 event where they launched their music integration amongst other things. At that event Spotify was heavily features alongside MOG, Rdio and others. I think that everyone expected some degree of success – I mean, folks already share EVERYTHING (often WAY too much) on Facebook … so why not this?!? And the results have been phenominal, with a report at Mashable saying: Facebook users have shared their listening activity more than 1.5 billion times with their friends, says Facebook’s Casey Maloney Rosales Muller in a blog post published Tuesday. “Developers have…