Music Ally

Rdio is set to be one of the more intriguing music startups of 2010 – it’s a streaming subscription service set up by Skype/Kazaa founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom. It’s still in stealth mode, but has today launched an iPhone app – presumably for members of its private beta, although the app is publicly available on Apple’s App Store.

Here’s the description: “Rdio is like carrying a giant MP3 player in your pocket – you have unlimited and unrestricted access to all the music, and you get to select exactly the song, album or artist you want to hear. And you can skip, pause fast forward as much as you want. Build your collection and compose your playlists on rdio.com and listen to them all on the go. Or search for just the right song when you’re out and it will start playing instantly.”

The app promises the ability to build unlimited playlists, as well as get notifications when “your collaborative playlists are updated”. Sounds like it’s going to be a viable rival to Spotify and Pandora in the year ahead.

The app is free to download, although you need a Rdio login to make it work. All four of the screenshots published on the App Store are after the jump (click for the bigger version of the montage). For more on this year’s crop of music startups, see our The A to Z of Digital Music Startups in 2009 post, which has over 160 of ‘em. (more…)

US streaming music service Pandora has doubled its size to 40 million registered users in 2009, and is apparently adding 600,000 new signups a WEEK at the moment.

Half of those new users are coming from mobile, says the company, with iPhone alone accounting for 10 million of the company’s users. TechCrunch suggests that Pandora now accounts for 44% of all internet radio listening hours in the US.

What the article explaining all this lacks, of course, is any sense of how much money Pandora is making from this huge growth – and how that stacks up against its licensing costs.

Still, the stage is set for an intriguing battle with Spotify next year, and Pandora deserves plenty of credit for its success in increasing its user base so rapidly.

The Muppets are hot again this week, thanks to their cover of Bohemian Rhapsody going viral on YouTube – it’s getting a digital release this week too.

But we’re more excited about the spin-off iPhone app: The Muppets Animal Drummer. It’s a rhythm game that lets you drum along with Animal, as well as a free play mode where you (and he) “rock out” to the songs in your iTunes music library. “Louder! Faster! Drum! Drum! Drum!” says Animal in the press release.

Amazing. We’ve just been drumming along to Nick Drake’s ‘Pink Moon’… You can get the app here.

We’ve been fans of the RjDj iPhone app since it launched: it turns the ambient noises of the real around you into generative music, using the iPhone mic as an input. Now the company behind it has launched a branded version for UK electro-pop artist Little Boots.

The app – Little Boots Reactive remixer – includes three ’scenes’ based on songs from her debut album: Meddle, New In Town and Remedy. Each scene lets you hear the song in different ways depending on what noises are around you, and how you move your iPhone.

On the branding side, there are also preview clips of other songs from the album, access to Boots’ website, blog, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and Twitter pages, and some of her videos. There’s no shortage of iPhone ‘remix your fave artist’ apps, but we like the twist that RjDj’s technology gives this one.

UPDATE: Boots herself has been talking about the app. “its something we’ve been working on a long time and has developed into a lot more than I ever dreamed of at the start,” she says. “I hope in the future we can take it even further and build a great community through it.”

Max Lousada, chairman of her label Atlantic Records UK, is also pretty chuffed. “By continuing to refresh the application’s content we’re fostering her following’s on-going engagement with the album as well as offering an evolving product through which new fans can discover this remarkable talent,” he says.

We last wrote about uPlaya when it launched its ‘music intelligence’ service, giving artists and labels feedback on the hit quality of their songs. Now it has an iPhone game, which gets people to listen to songs and get points for guessing which ones are most similar.

Meanwhile, Phanatic is an app for fans of US jam-band Phish, which lets them search the setlist of every gig the band has ever played, and get stats on the fly while at gigs. YouTube videos are also linked in.

Another app, Music God, claims to be the first ‘music library tag analyser’, digging into the play stats of a user’s iPhone or iPod touch to reveal all manner of stats – total cost, favourite song, and even ‘music library weight if put on 60-minute cassette tapes’.

Two new music-making apps have been released for iPhone, adding to the swelling number of creative music tools in the App Store.

We wrote about Beaterator earlier in the year when it was released for Sony’s PSP – it’s a music creation tool created by Grand Theft Auto maker Rockstar Games, with creative input from Timbaland. The newly-released iPhone version has a significantly lower price of $4.99. The idea remains the same – layer beats, loops and samples and share them with the Beaterator community.

Meanwhile, Flypt lets people make their own remixes of artists including Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Rihanna and Soulja Boy. It involves using 12 preselected virtual pads to trigger samples from a song, while adding audio effects as the instrumental version plays in the background. Once done, creations can be shared online. The app itself costs $2.99, while users pay $0.99 a pop to download tracks to mess about with.

More than 10.2 million Auto-Tunes recordings have been created using Smule’s I Am T-Pain iPhone app, the company has revealed.

The popular app lets people sing along to a selection of T-Pain songs with the infamous Auto-Tune effect being applied to their vocals, then share them via Facebook, MySpace or email. The news comes as Smule launches version 1.1 of the application, which widens it out to allow players to sing over any song in their music library too.

I Am T-Pain is the most successful artist app on iPhone so far – mainly because it’s great fun in its own right, rather than simply a feed of marketing messages. Recent launches of karaoke apps from Mariah Carey and Lady Gaga show other big artists are hoping for the same success.

We noticed a funny thing today when browsing our RSS feed of new iPhone music apps. A company called Apptism has released a bunch of apps called ‘Sing Along With…’, except not with the actual artist names in the app title. They offer collections of lyrics from the stars’ back catalogues.

For example, ‘Sing Along With the Canadian Country Star’ has loads of Shania Twain lyrics. Others include:

‘Sing along with the Caribbean Queen’ (Rihanna)
‘Sing along with the Genesis star’ (Phil Collins)
‘Sing along with Curly and the boys’ (N-Sync – we like this title especially)
‘Sing along with the Poker Face singer’ (Lady Gaga)
‘Sing along with the ‘Rockstar’ band’ (Nickelback)

And so on. The correct band/singer names are all in the App Store blurbs for these apps, it’s just the titles they’ve been not-so hidden in. Whether this is a cunning plan to avoid the copyright police is unclear – the app blurbs make it clear that they’re not officially connected (and thus presumably not officially licensed) with the artists.

(more…)

With a name like that, we thought this had to be unofficial – but no, Mariah Carey-oke is an iPhone app made by UMG. It costs $3.99, and lets people sing along to four of Mariah’s songs – Obsessed, Touch My Body, Don’t Forget About Us and Shake It Off – scoring points if they do it well enough.

“There are four levels of difficulty to pass through as you master the rhymes and train your voice to sound just like Mariah Carey,” says the blurb, although we sense you may need artificial help from a dog-whistle to really nail it. News, tour info and Facebook/Twitter integration are all built in too.

Our only criticism: couldn’t they have picked more famous Mariah songs? Perhaps it’s not a problem for the hardcore fans who’ll snap this app up, but for those of us you who fancy a crack at Vision Of Love, I’ll Be There or that one with Westlife in the boat, the tracklist may be disappointing. EDIT: We’ve just twigged it’s probably because UMG don’t own the rights to those tracks.

We7 has been open about its plans to launch an iPhone app for some time now, but TechCrunch Europe has nabbed first screenshots, along with details from the streaming music company about its plans for the release.

The site claims that the app will now launch in Q1 next year, and will be tied into We7’s new premium subscription service. The app has apparently been ready for a while now, but the company chose not to launch it as a purely ad-supported product, to avoid punitive royalty payments.

It’s certainly true that a decent iPhone (or any smartphone) app can create huge demand very quickly for a streaming music service. Pandora recently revealed that 24% of its users signed up from their phones, while Spotify has seen a surge in premium subscriptions since the launch of its iPhone and Android apps.