Items tagged with Songs
For whatever reason, there are certain songs that, once heard, tend to play over and over again in your head. It's quite annoying, and try as you might, there's no easy way to purge the unwanted tune from memory, or so we've always thought. Well, guess what? Not only is it possible to get one of these so called "earworms" to wiggle on out, it's as simple as chewing on a stick of gum. So says a new study on the subject conducted by researchers at the University of Reading's Centre for Cognition Research and School of Psychology & Clinical Language Sciences. What the study found was that chewing on gum interferes with articulatory motor programming. In doing so, the number of unwanted musical...
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Ever wanted to stay in a Hard Rock Hotel? Holding off just got a touch more difficult. Starting this week, guests who visit one of the company's many hotel locations will receive a complimentary playlist of tunes to accompany their stay, giving them a piece of Hard Rock to take back to the real world once the joy ride is over. The program, which is aptly called 'The Sound of Your Stay,' is available at all of the company's hotel locations. It was designed in collaboration with BMF Media Group, and it works like this. Upon check-in, guests will receive a pass to download ten free, specially selected songs on iTunes. Users will get to pick from three playlists: SUN, which has songs that mesh well...
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You know what we haven't heard much about lately? Piracy. It used to be all the rage, but after iTunes (and pretty much every other online music store) went DRM-free, it seems those stormy waters have calmed. Or, on second thought, maybe no one was talking about it. New research from the University of Hertfordshire over in the UK has found that an alarming amount of 14 to 24 years olds are still pirating an insane amount of music. How insane? Try 8,000 tracks for each person that puts on their eye patch and heads out to the digital sea. Now, we should warn you that these numbers can't be taken as 100% true. The research involved a survey, which was commissioned by none other than UK Music, so...
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DRM, or Digital Rights Management, never did go over well in the court of public opinion. To the music industry at large, DRM was a mostly futile attempt to lock music down to certain players or systems, thus making it something harder--in theory, anyway--to freely distribute. In reality, however, those who were circumventing the rules in the first place just kept doing what they were doing: circumventing the rules. Meanwhile, honest music buyers were saddled with tracks that had all sorts of limitations, from where they could be played to how many times they could be burned onto a blank CD.Slowly but surely, music outlets began to turn their back on the RIAA's favorite technology, and while...
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MySpace Music was expected to be successful, but this successful? It was launched at 12 AM EDT on Sept. 25th, and despite that short period of time, it has already streamed over a billion songs (and yes, we have contributed to that streaming). In comparison, (though obviously not fair as iTunes is a pay service, while MySpace Music streams for free) it took Apple nearly 3 years, from April 28, 2003 to February 23, 2006, for its one billionth music download. MySpace hasn't provided info such as username, song played or the like, but it did say the following: We’re extremely pleased with the launch of MySpace Music—clearly our users around the world are engaged and excited about the new music experience...
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A common knock on the wildly popular Guitar Hero console gamer is that it's a shame that people don't just learn how to play the guitar instead. It's easier to play the actual guitar than many songs on Guitar Hero on its most challenging setting, after all. Perhaps the critics were wrong about Guitar Hero siphoning off interest in the actual instrument. Six of the top twenty iTunes podcasts are guitar tutorials by iVideosongs.When possible, iVideosongs gets guitarists who actually wrote popular songs to explain each riff in detail. At the very least, the instructors are professional guitarists with in-depth knowledge and a nice way of imparting it. The focus is on the guitar, but the site includes...
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Radiohead recently broke away from not only their record label, but from the entire recording label paradigm and decided to release their new album, In Rainbows, over the Internet for the very fair price of whatever you wanted to pay, including nothing at all.With a price like 'free', you'd figure that piracy would be virtually eliminated. Think again:“But for hard-core music pirates, even free hasn’t been enough of a draw. According to music industry analysts, hundreds of thousands of Web users who frequent copyright-infringing file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay and TorrentSpy, have chosen to download In Rainbows illegally, distributing their contraband around the Internet just...
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As the launch of Apple and Starbucks' partnership nears (October 2nd) Starbucks has announced a promotion running from October 2nd to November 7th, in which customers at participating locations can download the "Song of the Day" (selected by Starbucks, naturally), free from iTunes.From Oct. 2 to Nov. 7, baristas in the company's more than 10,000 U.S. stores will hand out about 1.5 million "Song of the Day" cards each day. The cards can be redeemed at Apple Inc.'s online iTunes Store.Thirty-seven artists with featured songs include Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell — the first two to sign on with Starbucks' Hear Music label — along with Joss Stone, Dave Matthews, John Mayer, Annie Lennox and Band...
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Perhaps signalling another nail in the coffin of DRM, Universal Music Group has announced that it will begin a test program of DRM-free music sales, starting August 21st and lasting through January 31st of next year. Surprisingly, the songs will not be available through iTunes, which has already been selling DRM-free music from EMI, though for a higher price than normal ($1.29 vs. 99¢). Universal, the world’s biggest music conglomerate, said it would offer albums and songs without the software, known as digital rights management, through existing digital music retail services like RealNetworks and Wal-Mart, nascent services from Amazon.com and Google, and some artists’ Web sites.The...
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Apple recently made an announcement that its iTunes online music service has reached the 3-billion-downloaded-songs mark. In fact, Apple’s iTunes Store recently outshined both Amazon and Target and took the number three spot in the list of America’s largest music retailers. Apple’s vice president of iTunes, Eddy Cue, stated, “‘We’d like to thank all of our customers who have contributed to this incredible milstone.’” Some may feel that the 3 billion mark isn’t such a big deal. After all, iTunes was started about many years ago, and at 99 cents per song, the revenues generated would be a little under $3 billion over a period of about 6 years. On the other hand, we shouldn’t forget that iTunes...
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