Archive for: music streaming
It has now been confirmed that Myspace has closed on its acquisition of Imeem, the music streaming service. It is paying a fire sale price of $1 million, sources familiar with the situation tell me, and could pay up to $7 million to $9 million in earnouts for key employees, who will likely include CEO Dalton Caldwell.
The deal basically values Imeem at around $8 million, even though Sequoia and Warner Music have already pumped $25 million into the venture.
I dont understand why Myspace thought it was a good idea to purchases Imeem! Was it just about the users who are still active on Imeem, cause it definitely wasnt about the technology or the earnings potential.
Sky Songs is the new music streaming and download service from BSkyB which will be launching on Monday. Sky has been developing this music service for the past nine months and the service seems to be shaping up ok, but there isnt really anything to innovative here!
The Sky Songs service is not free to use, but it does have some decent features which might be useful to a certain type of client.
Sky Songs is web based
For most people services list Spotify aren’t able to be used at work, mainly because it is a downloadable application which most corporate IT departments tend to lock down. However, because Sky Songs is web based it should be a lot more accessible at work, unless your miserable IT department blocks the specific URL.
Sky Songs recommends music
Unlike services like Spotify, Sky Songs has the ability to recommend music too you. Once the Sky Songs interface is loaded you will see playlists created by its team of music journalists They range from introductions to new genres to topical playlists, such as memorial collections for recently deceased celebs. Sky Songs also includes a recommendation engine, powered by Gracenote, which will react to the songs you’re hearing with a decent suggestion of other tracks you might like.
You can mark your own favourites
With Sky Songs you have the ability to build playlists and then mark your favourites with a simple heart icon. Once you’ve picked a few favourites, the service will collate them for you, putting all your favourite artists in one place, as well as your most-loved genres and albums. Think of it as an auto-playlist generator, it’s much quicker than building a list of songs by hand, and means all your favourite sounds are just a couple of clicks away.
Sky Songs integrates with iTunes and Windows Media Player
Sky Songs doesn’t just stream music, you can use it to buy tracks to own too. They’re downloaded as DRM-free MP3 files, and will even drop into the correct place on your computer for iTunes and Windows Media Player to find them.
When you first set up your Sky Songs account, you’ll be asked which music management software you use. From then on, all your downloads will automatically appear in your existing music library, ready to be synced to your iPod, iPhone or MP3 player.
It offers more, for less
This is a biggie, and will certainly be the decider for some people: Spotify is already under pressure from cheaper streaming services, and Sky Songs increases the competition even more. It’s offering unlimited streaming from £6.49 a month which also gives you one £6.49 album or 10 tracks to download and keep. Compare that to Spotify’s £9.99 price tag, with no extras included.
Most people im sure would probably agree that Apple’s iTunes software isnt a lightweight application. I was wanting to put together a great list of free alternatives to iTunes that are actually worth checking out.
Foobar 2000 – A digital music management program for Windows users. It works with Windows 2000, Windows Vists , Windows XP and Windows XP 64 bit edition. To use this program you will need 32 MB of RAM and a display with at least an 800 X 600 resolution. This program is compatible with MP1-4, MPC, AAC, WAV, SND, WMA, Ogg Valis, WavPack, AIFF, CDDA, FIAC/Ogs FLAC and AU. It also supports full Unicode and Replay Gain. Other great features include third party development potential and keyboard shortcut that are fully customizable.
Froddle Pod – Froddle is not as feature rich as iTunes but it provides access to the main features that iPod owners need: It can copy music and videos from and to an iPod which is definitely the main feature that any iTunes alternative should support. The software can also backup and restore all data that is stored on an iPod. Another feature is music normalization for all or selected music on the iPod.
Songbird – Built on the Firefox platform and works with iPods and other media players. In addition to many great features, Songbird has a plenty of add-ons, and because it’s open source, clever programmers will be adding more as time goes on.
YamiPod An interesting iTunes alternative, because you don’t have to install it on your computer at all. Just copy it to your iPod’s hard disk and then you can manage your songs from any computer running Mac OS X, Windows or Linux.
Winamp – Sometimes called the grandfather of Windows music players, Winamp is a full featured music manager, with integrated iPod support and will even play iTunes protected files if QuickTime is installed.
Amarok – A great iTunes alternative for Linux and Unix users. It works with a wide variety of portable music players including: iPod, Creative Zen players, iRiver iFP and T players, Nomad players, generic MTP players and generic USB players. Some of the features that this program has that you are going to love include: album covers, wikipedia integration, last.fm integration, superior visual effects, lyrics support and music tracking capabilities.
Banshee – Linux users are going to enjoy what Banshee has to offer. This free download allows you to do everything that you want to do with your digital music. You can import music, organize music, play it back, share it and rip it on a CD. This is a great program for people who love their music and who want to actively manage it.
Cog – Most people using Mac OSX feel that iTunes is the best option because it was designed for this platform. However, Cog is worth a look for Mac users, because it addresses many of the limitations that iTunes has. It can be used with the following file types: Ogg vorbis, Monkeys Audio, MP3, Wavpack, Apple Lossless, FLAC, Musepack, AAC and WAV/AIFF. Some of the features that make it a worthy alternative to iTunes include: gapless playback, auto updating, preferences, Growl support, global hot keys, seeking, feedback forms, last.fm support, and smart shuffle.
ScreenTunes is a free search tool that helps users find where a song has been played in any piece of professionally-produced video content. You just type in the name of the song and it tells you all the films and TV shows in which it’s appeared. You can then listen to the track right from the results (using Grooveshark), or purchase the track on iTunes or Amazon’s online stores.
Along with acting as a search tool for individual songs, ScreenTunes can be used to look up a track by its lyrics. This also works on entire movie titles, so you can type the name to get a quick track list.
ScreenTunes is a very hit and miss service at the moment and I noticed it takes a lot time to actually load the Grooveshark section at times. Additionally, I noticed there are still lots of searches that yield zero results, I guess they will build their catalogue size over time. Clearly you get better results if it’s a mainstream track, but it’s surprising to see how many places any one song can end up.
Spotify has of course been in the news a lot lately. However, the Spotify service is still only available to users in certain countries, such as UK, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Spain and France. Thus if your based in the USA the Spotify service is currently not available for you to use, until now.
A few people have been reporting that they have used the following steps to get a Spotify account when they are based in the USA.
1) go to http://www.daveproxy.co.uk/
2) enter the following URL: https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/
3) Create your account, for UK postcode – check http://www.postcodesearch.org.uk/
Let us know if this still works in your country!
Previously we have written about Spotify’s upcoming Android application as well as their iPhone app, but currently Spotify is fast approaching its “payment due” day.
Spotify has been able to attract a huge amount of users but their free section is being used a little too much and they are now finding difficult to generate enough income to pay their major label partners by the date due.
Currently Spotify seem to be trying to increase incomes in three key areas:
- A premium service is getting much more attention from Spotify as it adds additional features beyond just “ad free” to attaract paid users.
- Spotify is rolling out by far its largest advertising format to date. It will feature wall to wall billboard ads on its music player that appear after just 5 minutes of inactivity as part of a major 3 Mobile ad campaign. (However, if I’m inactive on Spotify I tend not have the application open on my screen its just in a tab at the bottom, thus the ads showing will obviously have no affect whatsoever.
- To buy more time, the startup is on the hunt for another $40-$50 million in venture capital funding. (paidContent)
I personally use Spotify and find it pointless to upgrade to their premium service because I receive unlimited listening time, tracks, search and playlists. I know they are finding it tough to gain additional revenues and maybe moving their product into iPhone and Android markets is a better bet to increase revenues fast enough.
There is another music streaming service that we didn’t mention in our Top 10 free music streaming services and that is Spiral Frog. Spiral Frog is an ad-supported music download service which has had a huge amount of hype since launch.
Today it has been reported that Spiral Frog might be in a bit of trouble and heading towards the deadpool. These reports come from executives within the struggling company. Why is Spiral Frog in trouble? When launching Spiral Frog was in a growing advertising market in which was still yielding good CPM (cost per 1000 ads) rates, however now in the economic downturn these rates are quickly dropping. Therefore, companies need to keep increasing pageviews and presence to stay ahead of the curve. Spiral Frog has been losing a lot of traffic of late and this combined with the big licensing fees they had to pay upfront for major label catalogues means their in a lot of trouble.
There are only a couple of options that will save Spiral Frog. Firstly, a miracle could happen and they could turn around the traffic and the revenues, but that’s not going to happen. Secondly, they could get more funding and sell part of the shares, but they are running out of shares so I don’t think this would happen either. Finally, the only real option is for someone to step in and purchase the company just before they run out of money and get a bargain basement price.
To be fair in the past Spiral Frog has had a lot of issues and they have been in trouble a couple of times. This is probably what has lead to Spiral Frog getting a lot of media attention. I think Spiral Frog will be acquired by the end of 2009, its the only decent option of the company.
It has now been confirmed that Myspace has closed on its acquisition of Imeem, the music streaming service. It is paying a fire sale price of $1 million, sources familiar with the situation tell me, and could pay up to $7 million to $9 million in earnouts for key employees, who will likely include CEO Dalton Caldwell.
