I apologize for what some might experience as the presumptuous headline query, but I am unable to interpret the latest SoundCloud news otherwise. Here is the lead paragraph in last week’s Bloomberg report: “The largest record labels are closing in on a deal for a stake in buzzy digital-music service SoundCloud Ltd., in exchange for […]
Czech Radio has one of the world’s largest repositories of archived radio sound. Radio Prague’s David Vaughan brings this library to our attention in a recent post. The archive goes all the back to the 1920s and includes a variety of recordings in English. Earlier this year Vaughan deployed a team of undergraduates to explore […]
The Federal Communications Commission has released a compendium of 79 Mutually Exclusive (MX) application groups for Low Power FM radio stations for states on the western side of the country. There are 248 applications all told. The FCC will now apply its points system for deciding which applicants among these clusters will actually get an […]
I had fun over the Fourth of July rummaging around the Internet Wayback and looking at old images of audioscrobber.net, Richard Jones’ early version of Scrobbling as he was joining forces with Last.fm. Here is screenshot circa November 2004. Jones was a third year student at the University of Southampton at the time he cooked this […]
Spotify’s data gathering subsidiary The Echo Nest has surveyed Spotify users state-by-state for their favorite fourth of July songs—or as Echo puts it: tunes that “are played proportionally more on the Fourth of July than during the rest of the year.” Here are some state’s Independence Day faves. For California, it’s ‘America F*ck Yeah’ from the […]
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 […]
The tech investment world is discovering 8tracks.com (we’ve known about it here for quite a while). Forbes has a huge story about the music playlist application titled “What if You Became a Big Company, But No One Noticed?” (translation: “no one” equals “people with money”). The piece cites a Comscore survey identifying 8tracks as the […]
Late as usual, I thought I’d still write up my own recollection of the legendary radio hit-meister Casey Kasem. Paul Riismandel has a great reminiscence of him posted last week. As for me, I always experienced Kasem’s Top 40 Countdown as a dreary auto-pilot affair, served up with a canned voice and a canned smile. Then, […]
Just for kicks the other day I decided to go to the Internet Archive’s Wayback browser and check out Shoutcast as it was getting hot. This screenshot is from April 27, 1999 and displays the “top ten Shoutcasts,” which seem to have been overwhelmingly Techno music oriented channels (with pop and rock thrown in). The […]
I am reading through the Federal Communications Commission’s comment proceeding on net neutrality, and am struck by how many posts make references to radio and other older technologies. Here is one: “I am sick of corporations being in charge of how I get information. You have already ruined radio and television. Do your job and […]
