A year after it launched as a skunkworks project inside music data company The Echo Nest, trendy social music site This Is My Jam is “looking at options” for going independent — as well as getting ready to launch some fun new site exploration features. Read more »
Last.fm ‘scrobbled’ your music tastes in order to recommend tunes you may not have heard. Co-founders Felix Miller and Martin Stiksel, who have since moved on, reckon their new service, Lumi, can do the same for general web content. Read more »
The security breach that led to millions of Last.fm passwords being compromised happened at least three months ago — and remained undetected, despite the fact that the company suspected in May that it had been targeted. Read more »
First LinkedIn, then eHarmony, and now possibly Last.fm. As the number of sites falling victim to password hackers continues to grow, the questions are flooding in about how these incidents are connected, and who might be the next target. Read more »
The audio file is no longer the product when it comes to digital music. Instead, the experiences built around it are, and services like Spotify, Facebook, Topspin and others are leading the way into this new era of dynamic, interactive and social music. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Berlin’s Tape.tv has teamed up with Spotify to help fill the void left by the old, music-oriented MTV. But underneath the hood, its approach could be another interesting example of how onerous music rights in Germany have sparked a different kind of music startup. Read more »
The emergence of the big data phenomenon is fundamentally changing everything from the way companies operate to the way people interact to how the world deals with outbreaks of infectious diseases. Here we highlight 10 case studies illustrating how big data is changing the world. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
iTunes may be great for syncing your iOS devices, or buying songs, movies, apps and books, but it’s not exactly the most nimble music player anymore. Here are five great Mac-compatible alternatives that focus on the music, without the bloat that iTunes brings. Read more »
Last.fm is returning to its roots as a music data and discovery service, launching a new product that lets users tap into a database of independent artists and musicians with a click. Read more »
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek took the stage at Spotify’s first-ever press conference to expand the music streaming service’s Facebook integration t… Read more at paidContent »
Brightcove VP Rags Gupta explains why music start-ups should test the waters across the pond before coming to the U.S.: “According to conventional wisdom, consumer start-ups should move to San Francisco for access to capital, talent, and ideas. But if you’re launching an online music company, consider London or Berlin.” Read more »
According to figures from IE Market Research, there are currently 832 million paid users of digital music worldwide, with that number expect… Read more at paidContent »
Being the most popular is not a good enough business model, it seems, when it comes to music mobile apps. Pandora, the music-streaming app,… Read more at paidContent »
Twitter is opening an office in Dublin, which has become notorious as Europe’s haven for American technology businesses, thanks to its lenient business taxes. But can a new program in London tempt engineers to join new startups, rather than the big names? Read more »
Europe’s web scene is now thriving, and we’ve compiled a list featuring some of the best and brightest European web startups — what we’re dubbing the GigaOM Euro 20. Depending on how closely you watch Europe’s online scene, some of these companies may be familiar to you. Others you may not have heard of. But all of them are worth watching closely. In this report, we profile the 20 startups that we feel best represent Europe’s current tech scene. We have organized our list around perception, and as lists go, it is intended to be a guideline rather than a rule book. It’s not exhaustive, and clearly, with such a diverse and vibrant continent as our playing field, it never could be. Companies mentioned in this report include GetJar, Huddle, Made.com and Songkick. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The second quarter of 2011 was a fast-paced one for the connected consumer segment, with every sector of the digital media landscape — music, e-books, online video and gaming — experiencing significant events and changes. Media consumption, purchase and management continued its shift towards the cloud, ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
EXCLUSIVE: Clio might not be the most familiar name in the world of music recommendation — but its system is one of the most intelligent. And now the Philadelphia service has strengthened its hand by signing a major deal to provide its services to Hollywood’s biggest studios. Read more »
As Turntable.fm has shown, a new era of social music may be upon us, one that is less about scaling wide, but more about going deep. The third era of social music is about immersion as sites add more immediacy and intimacy to the experience. Read more »
All sorts of media have been disrupted by the online world: music, video, news, books and more. But after years of digital revolution, the rarified world of visual art remains largely untouched. Enter one British startup that thinks it can change all that. Read more »
In the four years since CBS bought online radio service Last.fm, the site hasn’t changed radically. Now, however, the London-based music service is looking for its second act — and product chief Matthew Hawn tells GigaOM what that might mean. Read more »
Rhapsody has probably garnered the most attention for speaking out against Apple’s new subscription plans, but Last.fm co-founder Richard Jones probably takes the cake for most direct denunciation. Speaking in an IRC chat, Jones said “[A]pple just f****** over online music subs for the iPhone.” Read more »
The hype surrounding mobile music continues despite the lack of evidence that the space will ever generate much in the way of revenues. But carriers still have a chance to use music to attract new consumers and keep the ones they have. Read more »
Type in the name of an artist, select a song, and you’re presented with a playlist of 150 music videos, based on music filtering algorithms from Last.fm: That’s the gist of a new mash-up that combines Google Instant-like search with YouTube videos and Last.fm recommendations. Read more »
The folks behind the music video jukebox Sonicswap are at it again, this time launching what could soon be every Nexus One user’s best friend. Tunevision compiles music video playlists based on your Last.fm, iTunes or Sonicswap usage data — users can also start from scratch […] Read more »
A service called Strings, which launched today, is trying to find and collect all the different ways you can track yourself online. Strings is not about socializing and sharing that information, like the Twitter-for-credit-cards Blippy, but about privately harnessing it. Read more »
A few years back when big media companies were snatching up web startups for exorbitant prices, old-fashioned concepts like corporate synergy were not a priority. Many acquisitions came with promises to leave startup’s brands, products and leadership alone. That didn’t end up working so well. Read more »
“Audio Scrobbling,” as defined by Last.fm, is the act of submitting to a central database the details of what songs you’ve been listening to (what album, by who and when you listened). Scrobbling to Last.fm is the main reason I use the service these days, especially […] Read more »
Twitter is a remarkably flexible application -– an efficient news service, a way to keep up with friends, a replacement for RSS feeds, a resource for links worth sharing, a broadcast medium and two-way method of social interaction (if not quite a social network). But I’m […] Read more »
It’s been a busy September for the digital music business. Steve Jobs reappeared onstage to introduce the iTunes LP format and a series of new iPods. Anticipation grew around European streaming music service Spotify, which is due to arrive on U.S. shores in the coming months. […] Read more »
Is it time for a Last.fm for TV shows and movies? That’s the question a new online video platform called Whiwa.net is raising. Whiwa is a video community based on scrobbling –- the act of automatically tracking your media consumption habits and sharing them with the […] Read more »
