Interesting news/reviews/deals from the portable audio market
Y! Music vs. Pandora vs. Last.fm vs.Soundflavor: obviously a bit biased since it’s written by the director of personalization for Yahoo! Music, but still a good wrap-up of what each of these services has to offer. What Yahoo! has got going for it is the huge amount of listener preference ratings they’ve collected over the [...]
Mobile music store review: video review comparing Sprint Nextel’s and Verizon Wireless’s music stores.
New Yahoo! Music Engine with tons of improvements: an excellent update to YME with a slew of functional (and even cosmetic) improvements. (Also, huge props to Ian Rogers for writing a changelog that’s funny and witty.)
New sharing features for Pandora: you can listen to samples of the members’ favorite tunes, add their stations to your list, subscribe to their latest stations or faves via RSS, etc. Read our presentation of Pandora, and remember, they’ve introduced a free version a couple of months ago.
From the ‘power to the people’ department: Tunecore gets your music up for sale on iTunes (all regions) and Rhapsody. You don’t grant them any rights or give them any percentages from your sales. Just a nominal fee, as illustrated in the example. [via]
RealNetwork’s RealMusic service launches in the UK: subscriptions cost £8.50/month, single track downloads £0.99 and full albums £7.99. Radio, music videos and ringtones are also part of the service’s offering, which is PC/Mac compatible.
Interesting tidbit: according to the article, we should expect to see more European branches of RealMusic surface during the coming year.
Music stores brand awareness is an iTunes & Napster game: “American downloaders aged 12 and older are nearly equally as likely to be aware of Napster 2.0 and iTunes on a top-of-mind basis (31% vs. 27%, respectively); when prompted with actual brand names, more than four out of five (79%) of downloaders recognize the Napster [...]
Google an artist/album/track, and a link comes up at the top pointing to the “More music results” page (example), with the artists, albums and tracks that match your query (example).
Clicking on an “artist” results takes you to the artist’s page, lists his/her albums and related info (example); clicking on an album page gets you the [...]
MTV & Microsoft’s digital music service to launch in 2006: called Urge (remember when we posted it about it back in August), it’ll be integrated into Windows Media Player and will come with a 2 million songs catalog.
Original content and MTV network programs is where it’s at, I think (considering how popular MTV’s shows are [...]
Amp’d offering $.99/tune downloads for your cellphone and computer: they’ve got a library of 200K songs and you gotta give them props for going again the tide that wants you paying a ridiculous $2.50 for a song on your cellphone.
Thing is, they’re paying $1.25/tune for licensing costs… what’s the business model here, for this MVNO [...]