On Monday Apple announced its much anticipated music service, called, appropriately enough, Apple Music. It essentially integrates Beats Music, which the company acquired last year, more closely with iTunes and iTunes Radio, and adds more celebrity-curated stations and playlists. Apple Music doesn’t become available until June 30, so nobody has taken it for a spin […]
The RAIN newsletter has an interesting opinion post up by Mike Spinelli, formerly at SoundExchange, now in law school studying music licensing. Spinelli’s post is titled “The ‘me’ generation: why music curation isn’t the answer.” We are all individualists now, Spinelli says. Looking at various aspects of Beats Music, he contends that “human-curated playlist are not […]
Google has acquired Songza, the curate-according-to-your mood song search and jukebox service. “We aren’t planning any immediate changes to Songza, so it will continue to work like usual for existing users,” Google’s press release says, but “over the coming months, we’ll explore ways to bring what you love about Songza to Google Play Music.” And: “We’ll […]
Late last week the news broke that Apple is buying Beats Audio for $3.2 billion. As most observers have noted, this is an unusually large acquisition for Apple, which tends not to buy companies that already have such prominent brands, for so much money. With the Beats acquisition Apple gets a successful audio company selling […]
College radio history is largely undocumented, with much lore locked away in the memories of its participants. Glimpses of the past can be found by digging into the archives of student publications, particularly yearbooks and newspapers, where radio activities were often chronicled. Luckily for college radio history buffs like myself, it’s getting easier and easier […]
We had Rhapsody, Pandora, Rdio, Slacker, Songza and Spotify. Then last year Google Play All Access and iTunes Radio joined the scene. Today producers and headphones impresarios Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine are bringing us Beats Music. Like Spotify and similar platforms, Beats offers up on-demand music for unlimited listening. In part the service hopes […]
