The leading music-streaming startup Spotify on Thursday announced a better way to preview music using new gestures in its iOS app. Dubbed Touch Preview, the feature allows music lovers to get a sneak peek of any playlist, song, album or artist by holding down their finger to start the music playing instantly.
“It means less time looking for the perfect music, and more time actually listening to it,” wrote the company.
According to The Guardian newspaper Wednesday, Apple has acquired British media analytics firm Semetric ahead of Beats Music relaunch.
Semetric's Musicmetric analytics tool, launched in 2008, is used by record labels to track digital sales, streams and social networking statistics for artists.
It even tracks BitTorrent downloads. The service could become part of Beats Music streaming service relaunch later this year, speculates the report.
We're nearly halfway into the first month of 2015 and yet no free songs have appeared on iTunes, leading Business Insider to wonder whether Apple has killed off the promotion for good.
Conceived as a promotional vehicle to drive sales of music downloads and expose music lovers to new songs, Apple's “Single of the Week” promoting launched a decade ago, back in 2004 (three years after the launch of the iTunes Store).
The promotion has been running ever since, giving out free music every week on iTunes up until the start of 2015.
Ever since the iPod's heyday a decade ago, I was been wondering whether Apple in its pursue of miniaturization might eventually come around engineering an iPod shuffle of sorts that would be entirely embedded inside the firm's In-Ear Headphones.
But as Apple hit the brake on iPod innovation amid rise of the iPhone, my dreams have remained mere wishful thinking — up until now. A German company called Bragi has created a tiny earbuds that contain an embedded MP3 player, a comprehensive fitness tracker and a host of other features.
Apple typically handles refunds of digital purchases on a case-by-case basis and with an “All Sales Final” provision. But now, Apple's reportedly switched to a 14-day return policy for movies, TV shows, music, books and apps in most European markets, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and France, German blog iFun.de [Google Translate] reported Monday.
Apple's updated policy in these countries states that customers can now cancel their digital purchase within fourteen days from when they received their receipt “without giving any reason,” with the exception of iTunes Match, Season Pass, Multi-Pass and iTunes Gift Cards and Allowances that can't be refunded once you have redeemed the code or activated the service.
For the last six years Apple has been running its "12 Days of Christmas" promotion in the UK, and did so last year in both the UK and US "12 Days of Gifts". It joyed customers by giving away iOS apps, music, films and books over the twelve days following Christmas Day. However as noticed first by MacWorld, it appears Apple is discontinuing its holiday tradition in 2014/2015.
We're now three days out of Christmas, and any type of promotion can't be found. MacWorld reports from a reliable source that we're definitely not seeing the "12 Days of Christmas" app this year.
Apple's Beats Music, with Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre at the helm, is looking to form partnerships with artists for exclusive releases, mirroring success iTunes has had in the past, reports New York Post.
Specific artists haven't been named, however Beats Music has strong partnerships with artists already, from its promotion and endorsements of Beats headphones. Nicki Minaj frequently stars with Beats products in her music videos. Will.i.am, Pharrell, Kanye West and Gwen Stefani are said to be friends of Iovine and Beats lovers.
As first noted by 9to5Mac, Apple has expanded its social presence with a brand new blog dedicated to iTunes content and hosted on Yahoo-owned Tumblr platform.
Now available at the itunes.tumblr.com URL, the blog highlights a curated selection of movies, television shows, music and books carried on the iTunes Store.
A special emphasis is given to Apple's Best of 2014 charts that were published on iTunes last week. If memory serves me well, this is Apple's second official blog on Tumblr following odd iPhone 5c web adds and Tumblr presence which was supposed to resonate with the blog platform's younger audience.
Music is my specialty. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. Admittedly, I’m a bigger fan of analog than digital, but there are times when playing music on my iPhone or iPad is just more convenient. In those cases, a good music player, or a great streaming service is important.
The writing team at iDB put their heads together to come up with a list of the best music apps to come out in 2014. We then fought each other in a mud pit to be the one who gets to decide the best. Below is the resulting winner and runner-ups for best music app in 2014. We’ve also included the music app we think is the all-time best.
German developer Algoriddim on Thursday completed its suite of apps for DJs by releasing djay Pro for Mac. Building on djay 2 for the iPhone and iPad, the Pro edition brings 4-deck support and the full power of Algoriddim's low-latency mixing engine.
The app has some rather advanced features such as Spotify and iTunes integration, support for professional DJ hardware, high-definition waveforms, audio effects, meta data and FX purchases from iOS versions of djay and much more.
Jump past the fold for the full overview of djay Pro for Mac.
Apple's proprietary digital rights management software, FairPlay, that prevented users from loading songs from rival music stores on early iPods, did not harm consumers nor did it violate the United States antitrust laws, an eight-person jury has determined.
As reported by The Verge, the jurors have sided with Apple in a decade-long suit and have not found Apple guilty of exploiting FairPlay DRM as a lock-in preventing rival music stores from syncing with iPods. Though the iPhone maker is off the hook now, an appeal will be filed with a higher court.
Better late than never: Spotify, the popular music-streaming service hailing from Sweden, today at last gave its iOS clientproper support for the new iPhone screen resolutions so it no longer runs scaled on your iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus.
More importantly, version 2.2 has added the “Top Tracks in Your Network” playlist which shows the most played songs among the people you follow.
Top Tracks in Your Network rolling out as we speak to all users and can be found under the new Top Tracks button in the Browse section of the Spotify app.