Music Ally

“If Pandora had a love child with Last.fm, its name would be Grooveshark Lite,” says Mashable, about Grooveshark’’s new music streaming service. It’’s the latest personalised music service, which lets you type (more…)

As a quick extra to our coverage of Warner Music Group’s latest quarterly results last week, the company’s official filing has put a number to its investments in music websites Imeem and Lala. WMG invested $15 (more…)

Bands sleeping with fans? Perish the thought! Oh, you mean on their sofas. That’s the idea of Better Than The Van - a website that hooks up touring artists with free places to crash for the night. “Any abuse or weirdness will result in the user’’s account being terminated,” say the Terms of Service, which helpfully also suggests carpet is a more suitable sleeping surface than hard wooden floors. Anyway, the site could be genuinely useful for smaller bands looking to tour the US on a budget-the likes of Jeffery Lewis have been known to crash on fans’ floors while on tour and appeal to them via My Space Blogs. This looks like the next step for  lo-fi touring musicians. (although it would be quite fun if J-Lo’s record label uses the site for her next tour too). Probably beats sleeping between a spare tyre and bass drum at least …possibly!
Link: http://betterthanthevan.com/

If your iTunes library is a mess, TuneUp wants to help. It’s a plug-in for the iTunes application that analyses your library and cleans up the tags and cover art, via a partnership with Gracenote. Recommendation features are also built in, along with links to YouTube videos and eBay auctions based on your playlists. (more…)

It’s a really simple site, too. You simply type in a Last.fm username, and get served up with a customised channel of YouTube videos based on that user’s tastes. “This started as just an experiment, and it will probably stay that way,” says creator Tim Bormans. Enjoy.

Tudou, China’s largest video-sharing website has secured $57 million investment from a group of investors including IDG Technology Venture Investment, Granite Global Ventures and General Catalyst Partners. Tudou plans to use the cash to build up its online infrastructure for this summer’s controversial (more…)

All the young people are spending today in an orgy of Facebook chatting (the site’s IM feature has just been turned on globally), but what about 35-55 year-olds? Apparently they’re a bit long in the tooth for Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. At least, that’s the pitch for GetBack Media, which is a new social network (more…)

Music widgets provider Sonific is to close down on May 1, due to what CEO Gerd Leonhard describes as “the unworkable music licensing situation and the resulting lack of solid revenue modeling”. The company says it’s looking for a new business model, but in the meantime is open to acquisition. Leonhard has slammed the labels as part of the (more…)

Michael Robertson’s MP3tunes has introduced a tiered subscription model for its music locker service. The first 25GB of space for users’ songs will continue to be free (and ad-supported), but if they want up to 50GB of space, they’ll need to pay $39.95 a year (the price for 100GB and 200GB is $79.95 and $139.95 respectively). What about existing users (more…)

We were quite excited about This Is My Jam - it sounded like a mixtape site except with proper DJ-style beat matching malarkey, allowing us to construct the seven-hour Britpop mix the world has been crying out for. However, while the site is slick enough, you can only use 20-second clips of songs, making it (more…)