Music

Tiny Budget, Big Effects

How do you make a performance by a laptop musician compelling? Eye-popping graphic design.READ»

Fast History: The End of Woodstock, 1969

Forty years ago this morning, Jimi Hendrix brought down the house to close the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Bethel, New York. Decades later, amid a new era of change, things look suspiciously similar: America is embroiled in ...READ»

Want to Save the Planet? Stop Buying CDs, Start Downloading Music

It seems intuitive enough that downloading music would be less carbon-intensive than buying a CD that has been transported in a truck and wrapped in multiple layers of plastic. Now a study (PDF) funded by Intel and Microsoft and ...READ»

Is the Album Dead? Radiohead Abandons It for Single-Track MP3s

Radiohead's an interesting band--musically the guys seem to follow their own path to innovative sounds. And now they're also following their own path to publishing music, and ditching the album format in favor of single-track ...READ»

All Points West Music and Arts Festival

The summer music festival circuit has mostly come and gone, but with Lollapalooza still to go in Chicago next weekend, All Points West is carving out a place in the summer schedule, with headliners like Jay-Z, Tool, and Coldplay ...READ»

Does Fighting Piracy Fuel Innovation?

A new study suggests that the key to outsize growth and innovation is a strong protection of copyrights and other intellectual property. Is its argument convincing?READ»

Fingerbeat: Turn your iPhone/iTouch Into a Beat Machine

Fingerbeat, a new iPhone/iTouch app, puts the power of a recording studio in the palm of your hand.READ»

Why Spotify's Legal Music Service Could Beat the Revamped Pirate Bay

Legal music-sharing service Spotify just revealed that it's apparently five to six times more used than its nearest rivals. That's a pretty astonishing measure of success, and the site has big plans. In fact, it's likely to beat a ...READ»

Tweeters Buy More Music--Twitter's Halo Effect?

Users of Twitter buy more music than people who don't Twitter. This seems to be a classic halo-effect, but is it actually being caused by Twitter?READ»

The Kanye Curriculum: 7 Ways to Be a Success

Eds. note: We're re-publishing this slideshow from June in light of Kanye's actions during the VMA awards this past weekend. Whether or not you believe his interruption was a staged publicity stunt, these excerpts from his book, "Thank You and You're Welcome," will shed light on his attitude about the music business, and business in general.READ»

The 10 Most Creative People in the Music Biz

1. DeAndre "Soulja Boy Tell'em" Way, rapper/producer The 18-year-old Web wunderkind took a crazy song and dance, and propelled it via YouTube and MySpace fame into an Interscope recording contract and platinum ...READ»

Palm's Pre Syncs With iTunes, but Apple May Squash the Link

Palm's Chairman, speaking at the D7 conference yesterday, confirmed that the Palm Pre has a neat trick: It syncs with iTunes just like an iPod would. While that's handy, Apple isn't likely to tolerate the situation for too ...READ»

Europe Loosens Digital Downloading Rules While U.S. Suffers Audible Magic's Wire-Sniffing

Yesterday Europe moved to smarten-up its legal music downloading rules to dissuade piracy, but today we learn that P2P illegal content-sniffer Audible Magic is being adopted by more U.S. universities--the punitive flip-side of the ...READ»

Microsoft's Zune HD Revealed, Stirs Up Even More Rumors

After months of rumors, Microsoft suddenly pulled the covers off its upgraded Zune personal media player late yesterday. It's called the Zune HD, and it's unashamedly gunning after the iPod touch. Does it have a shot? It ...READ»

MP3 Players to Get Emotional, Play Mood-Sensitive Tracks

If a couple of new ideas on the personal media player front become mainstream, then it's possible that your next-gen MP3 player will be able to sense your mood. And, in a limited way, it'll empathize by choosing appropriate ...READ»

Friday Fun: Remix This Cold War Kids Song 625 Ways

To promote their new song, "I've seen enough," the Cold War Kids produced a regular music video. But they also hired Tool of North America to create an interactive version of the video, which lets you remix the song while ...READ»

Napster Returns as Best Buy's Streaming Music Muscle [Updated]

Napster, the original file-sharing site that set the digital music world into a tailspin, is making yet another phoenix-like return to life from the ashes of its former self. This time it's as a music streaming site, and it's got Best ...READ»

Glue: The Next Marketing Tool for Creatives

Glue is a free Firefox add-on that lets you take your social network to every major site you visit. At heart, it's a semantic Web tool: it can "read" and contextualize the content on the sites you visit, and serve up your ...READ»

De La Soul Partners with Apple and Nike to Release First Album in Five Years

You may have forgotten about Apple's tiny, wireless iPod-linked in-shoe pedometer, the Nike+, but the runners who've chalked up 100 million miles haven't. And neither has Nike--it just partnered with De La Soul to release a new ...READ»

My Secret Love for Rhapsody

I exist mostly in an Apple ecosystem: I work on a Mac, call on an iPhone, and work out with a Shuffle. And yet, here I am, spending more and more time on Rhapsody. Rhapsody, Real's subscription-based music service, is my tech life's ...READ»

Beatles Discography Finally Gets Digital Remastering, Due 9/9/09

Some audiophiles would argue "let it be," but the Beatles' discography is finally being brought fully into the digital 21st Century: Apple Corps Ltd. and EMI Music have just announced that the completely re-mastered ...READ»

Why David Byrne, Arcade Fire, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are Psycho Marketers, Q'uest-ce que c'est?

After David Byrne and Brian Eno self-released their album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today last August, they generated profits equivalent to a label advance. How? Software marketing, of course. We’ve all seen a ...READ»

How NPR Became the Hippest Way to Discover New Music

Podcasting. Live concerts on-demand. Full previews of albums. Original performance videos. Curated streaming in 100 different genres. It's not on YouTube. It's on Npr.org/music, a fast-growing site launched by the nonprofit as a way ...READ»

• Will NPR Save the News?

Seven Tiny Tech Stories That Will Be Huge

Progress isn't all breakout products and scientific coups. In fact, some of the most salient indicators of the direction of technology come in re-directions of products and services we use every day. Here are seven subtle changes to ...READ»

Will Kids and MP3s "Ruin" Music Recording Quality?

A Stanford professor conducted research on perceptions of recorded audio, and he discovered that today's youth actually prefer the "imperfect" sound of a digitized MP3 recording over a more perfect audio reproduction of the ...READ»