Amazon has been selling digital music to shoppers for a while now. Amazon and Shazam have announced a new tie up this week that sees Amazon MP3 begin using Shazam charts. The purpose of the charts on the Amazon MP3 service is to help music fans find up and coming tracks and artists making music […]
If you’re not already fully signed up to the likes of Spotify, Rdio MOG or the rest, there will soon be another music option: the French streaming service Deezer will launch in the US in 2014.
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Earlier this week, Bob Dylan graced us with an interactive music video for "Like a Rolling Stone" that featured more than a hundred faux cable channels you could click through. Today, the seemingly omnipresent Pharrell is giving you another reason to love music videos yet again, with a 24-hour vid for the song "Happy."
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Kim Dotcom built his reputation on free services — much to the chagrin of some people — and he’s revisiting that turf with his upcoming music offering, Baboom. As he explains in an interview with Wired UK, the service will be an “iTunes-Spotify hybrid” that both sells music and offers it for free through ad deals. However, its approach to ad-supported tunes is bound to raise eyebrows — users will install a browser plugin that replaces web ads with those from Baboom, paying surfers with cash that they can spend on songs. Typical users could earn 10 free albums a year through their browsing habits, Dotcom claims. The tech luminary will demonstrate the concept by soft-launching Baboom with his own music in January, following up with full service a few months later. The business model is intriguing, although it may face stiff resistance; we can’t imagine that rival advertisers and website owners will enjoy losing revenue.
[Image credit: Thierry Ehrmann, Flickr]
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, HD
Via: MusicWeek
Source: Wired UK
From the audience, this instrument looks like a typical grand piano. Then the maestro takes his seat and begins to play. It’s a sound nobody has heard before, because this instrument, designed by Leonardo Da Vinci five centuries ago, has just been built for the very first time. And it sounds heavenly.
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Leonardo da Vinci was considered to be one of the greatest inventors and was also an artist, so we can’t say that we’re too surprised that some of his creations blended technology and art into a since creation. The viola organista was one of his creations, although it was merely a concept which was never built, at least until today thanks to a Polish musician by the name of Slawomir Zubrzycki who spent a good 5,000 hours making this instrument a reality. Speaking at the instrument’s unveiling at the Academy of Music in the southern Polish city of Krakow, Zubrzycki was quoted as saying, “This instrument has the characteristics of three we know: the harpsichord, the organ and the viola da gamba,” and sure enough we’re finding it a bit hard to disagree.
The result is an instrument that has the ability to make it seem as though a small orchestra was playing, although in reality it’s pretty much a one man show. Surprisingly enough it sounds pretty good, although we can imagine how difficult it must be playing it, and that one would probably need some pretty decent music theory and practice to pull it off. If you’re wondering how the end result sounds like, you can check it out in the video above. Pretty amazing, huh? How many of you guys would love to have a go at this thing?
Leonardo Da Vinci’s Viola Organista Gets Brought To Life original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Leonardo da Vinci invented numerous devices that he never built, including the viola organista — a machine-like instrument that combines a harpsichord, an organ and a viola da gamba. This 500-year-old idea is now a reality, however, thanks to Polish musician Slawomir Zubrzycki. His 5,000-hour project faithfully recreates da Vinci’s concept, using a keyboard to press steel strings against moving wheels wrapped in horse hair. The results are sweet-sounding, despite the seemingly odd approach; as you’ll hear in a debut performance after the break, Zubrzycki effectively becomes a one-man string ensemble. While it’s doubtful that you’ll ever find a viola organista in the local music shop, the one-off creation proves that da Vinci knew how to blend technology and art.
[Image credit: Tomasz Wiech AFP/Getty Images]
Source: AFP (The Age)
After celebrating its 15th birthday
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Nokia’s Music service has been a secret weapon for Lumia owners — they get ad-free radio streaming on their phones at no extra cost. The company is driving that advantage home today by rebranding the service as Mix Radio (reflecting the service’s main feature) and launching an updated music app to match. The new Mix Radio client centers on Play Me, a personalized stream defined by a few favorite artists. There are also Pandora-style thumbs-up and thumbs-down votes to refine the selection, and it’s now easy to share mixes through email, Facebook, text messages and Twitter. As before, avid listeners can spend $4 per month to get unlimited downloads, improved quality and web listening. Current Lumia users just need to update their existing Music app to take advantage of Nokia’s smarter audio experience.
Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Mobile, Nokia
Source: Windows Phone Store
Karaoke is a fun activity for those who can sing, and is a way to passive-aggressively dole out punishment for those of us who can’t hold a tune. Singtrix is a small device from the folks behind Guitar Hero that aims to blur the line between these two types of karaoke singers, and it works […]
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