Ever since the early days of Record Store Day (RSD for short), I’d wondered why there weren’t more collaborations between record stores and radio stations on a day heralding the importance of local, independent businesses and media. Over the years various radio stations did set up tables at record shops during Record Store Day and […]
I am trying to wrap my brain around the latest American Public Media venture: YourClassical.org. The press release we received for this “Classical Lifestyle” online radio service boasts the following channels: Relax: Classical music to help you keep calm and carry on. Perfect for yoga, meditation or a frustrating commute. Energy: Lively classical masterworks that […]
Monday Jay-Z’s newly acquired TIDAL streaming music service pulled back the curtain on its relaunch, but just a little bit. As predicted, TIDAL is adding a compressed music service, competing with the likes of Spotify, to accompany its lossless CD-quality HiFi service. The compressed service is $9.99 a month, while the lossless version is double […]
Rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z is throwing his hat into the streaming music arena with his acquisition last week of the Swedish company Aspiro and its two music services WiMP and TIDAL. WiMP is a Spotify competitor only available in Scandinavia, Germany and Poland. TIDAL is a CD-quality lossless service available in 31 countries world-wide, including […]
TIDAL–recently acquired by rapper/entrepreneur Jay-Z–is one of two uncompressed streaming music services available in the US. Instead of serving up tracks compressed using so-called “lossy codecs” MP3, AAC or Ogg Vorbis like Spotify, Beats Music or Rdio, uncompressed services stream full CD-quality music for higher fidelity. Deezer’s Elite service beat TIDAL to the uncompressed punch […]
Take our poll on whether AM/FM radio still helps young musicians. After sitting through the Celebrity Economy in Music panel at last week’s SXSW, which featured economist Paul Krugman and the principals of Arcade Fire, I sat down outside and collected my thoughts. If touring is overwhelmingly the main way that artists make their money, […]
In the world of streaming music services Amazon Prime Music is more like the bubble gum in a pack of baseball cards. It’s not the reason you buy the pack, but you’ll probably chew it anyway. Introduced last year, Prime Music serves up commercial-free, on demand music to subscribers to Amazon Prime, which also has […]
I spent last week at the SXSW conference in Austin. This post begins a series of articles about what I saw and heard, and what I think it might mean for radio. I’ll get to radio soon, but first I want to narrate my way through one of the conference’s highlights, a panel titled “The Celebrity Economy […]
Every now and again I check in with the Spinitron blog to see what kind of music is getting play on college and community radio stations. To my surprise, two of the top five album or tune titles for last week referenced bears; a third mentioned caves and claws. The top Spinitron disk for February […]
Channel surfing on cable or over-the-air TV you may have come across Bewitched, Columbo or other “classic” re-runs on a station that calls itself MeTV. This successful Chicago-based upstart network that airs its nostalgic programming on digital television subchannels across the country is dipping its toes into the radio pool. Today MeTV parent company Weigel […]
