Music App News, Duly Noted: Announcements, Articles, Analysis

Guest post by Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.

It’s a good sign that so many people email Evolver.fm with music apps news. We’re not too surprised, given that we’re attracting a growing audience not only here, but on other publications where our articles appear: Wired.com, Gizmodo, CNET, Billboard, Hypebot, midemblog, Huffington Post, and Business Insider, for starters, with more to come.

The thing is, we can’t write articles about all of it. So we’ve decided to wrap up the best short news items into a regular Duly Noted feature. This will be somewhat along the lines of This Week in Music Apps, except it will contain news announcements and articles, instead of new music app listings – and for that same reason, you won’t find music app launches here.

5/30 Songkick launched a Tourbox feature that lets bands automate the publication of their tour dates across many of the web’s highly-trafficked networks.

5/30 ShareMyPlaylists retooled its Spotify app, presenting over 90,000 playlists in several new ways: recommended and featured playlists; genre; pop-up descriptions; and a playlist generator (that last feature is apparently powered by The Echo Nest, publisher of Evolver.fm).

5/29 Grooveshark’s Beluga lets bands learn about who is listening to them, but anyone can use it; just enter a band name here (read our exclusive interview with the Grooveshark CEO).

5/24 Pinzee lets you hear music customized for your location by “gather[ing] all kinds of location-specific data — much of it text — and then choose the songs using this data.” We couldn’t get much more than that out of them, but it does appear to work to an extent, however it works.

5/16 In case you missed it, the gTar people came to our New York office for a video, interview, and demo.

5/21 Spotify launched in New Zealand and Australia.

5/21 Paul Lamere (of The Echo Nest, publisher of Evolver.fm) identified the cities with the most musicians per capita, and Marketplace Tech Report noticed. Would you have guessed that Beverly Hills tops the list?

5/20 Spotimy, which scours the web for new music and correlates it with music on Spotify so you can catch up on the latest releases by barely lifting a finger, added a Random Album Generator for when you’re not sure what you want to hear — other than that you want it to be new.

5/17 The innovative Tabletop iPad app was updated to version 1.5, and no longer costs a dollar — instead, it’s free. We describe it as putting a studio’s worth of gear on the iPad. New features including CloudSeeder, which “connects musicians to the SoundCloud social network in a new way” as well as — by user request – a bundle of all the in app purchases for a single discounted price.

5/17 Goodnights wants you to know that “the future of tickets is here,” by which it means that bands, venues, promoters, and anyone else who’s putting on a show can sell tickets using QR codes, while allowing promoters to track which posters, ads, employees, people, and/or graphical interfaces sold the most tickets. Although Goodnights is focused on Canada, it recently scored $250K and hopes to expand.

5/16 In response to our article entitled “Potential Goldmine: Branded Artist Apps Could Make Money and Please Fans,” Slacker mentioned that it has artists curate radio stations, which indeed is part of our app idea nobody has built yet.

5/16 Gumroad wants us to check out its platform for letting bands (or anyone else) sell music, photos, apps, and other stuff. We meant to consider it for our article about powerful music apps that should make middlemen nervous.

(Photo: Flickr/UK Ministry of Defense)