Posts Tagged with ‘last.fm’

It seems odd for this child of the 80s to type that Peter Gabriel has become a technology investor. All this time I thought he wanted to be my sledgehammer, and it turns out he wanted to be my filter instead. That doesn't sound nearly as exciting, does it?
It may not sound exciting, but the concept of directing the stream of information online and filtering the noise is about as exciting as it gets in social media right now. We [...]

All the bloggers were abuzz today with the news that Warner has required last.fm to remove their music. Silicon Alley Insider notes that contracts signed with iMeem and the coming MySpace music service included equity stakes in the company.
As for me? I don't really care. I hope last.fm tells Warner that they can take their music and stuff it. I'm watching the artists scroll by on their web site as I write this, and gee, that [...]

By now everyone is familiar with the RIAA and their collective belief that everyone online is a thief, stealing music every which way we can. The recording industry has been fighting to prove that even the premise of “making available,” putting music out there to share with no proof it's ever been downloaded, is still a violation of copyright laws, and that all the digital sharing results in nothing but losses for the music industry.
The Web 2.0 music sites beg [...]

Is it the end of old media as we know it?* R.E.M. has a new album dropping 1 April, but for those of us already using iLike with iTunes or our Facebook or MySpace accounts, we are in luck; 11 tracks from the album will be available for streaming and sharing a week from today (Monday, 24 March), one week before the album's release date.
R.E.M.'s release may be the highest profile use of digital distribution yet, and the surest sign [...]

After purchasing Last.FM for a cool $280 Million USD last year, CBS kept its plans for the company close to the vest. The company held a press conference today to reveal the direction it was taking its acquisition. Some sites have speculated that the big secret was going to be video on demand, but that wasn't the case (at least not yet).
The news from CBS today was that they were making Last.FM into a streaming audio service. After [...]

The social music and online radio site known as Jango has proved to be quite the popular newcomer, having announced today that the free service has more than 1 million listeners who have created a total of more than 3 million custom Internet radio stations.
Pretty impressive news for a service which only publicly launched just two short months ago. Even more impressive are the stats available from Compete.com, which show that Jango is already aimed at similar well-established services in [...]

We first covered Jango in late October. We published a brief review of the startup, in which we essentially laid out an admiring conclusion overall. How to sum it up? Basically, we found it to be an appealing play on the Pandora concept, one with a rather unique approach. Its feature set could also be said to harbor a few touches new to the market.
And in addition to its initial launch setup, we also received a few words about its [...]

… So what's the 3.0 model? Believe it or not, Rick Rubin knows.
When I first saw the headline for Rick Rubin's comments, I'm pretty sure I laughed out loud and rolled my eyes. But Rubin isn't someone to be scoffed at in the music industry; after all, this is a man who foresaw the popularity of hip-hop and rap. There's a reason an artist like the late Johnny Cash would turn to Rubin for a career boost; the man knows [...]

When it comes to the social side of Web 2.0 – you know, the MySpaces, the Facebooks – I’m lost. I do very well understand why such places exist, I simply cannot for the life of me grasp why they’ve become so popular, and, furthermore, managed to remain so. Baffling, really. When I consider all the time misspent maintaining relations with “friends” lists, most of whose contacts hold no real allegiance to one another anyhow, I wonder how such holes [...]