Bing Sets Music Free on iPhone App

By Lonnie Lazar (5:46 am, Apr. 20, 2010)

Microsoft and its upstart search engine Bing have partnered with mobile music system developer Melodeo to bring iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users 100 great songs from every year between 1947 – 2009 – for free. Since coming out earlier in April at $1.99, the app Top 100s by Year has taken on sponsorship by Bing, been transformed into Top 100s by Year by Bing and is now free “for a limited time” on the iTunes App Store.

The app allows users to pick any year from ’47 – ’09 and hear 100 “songs that have stood the test of time to become the greatest songs for any given year” (according to the app description), streamed in random order over WiFi, 3G or Edge networks. Users can view a list of songs for any year and listen to a short preview of each, as well as buy the song on iTunes — but listening to songs in their entirety requires listening to the randomized stream. If a distasteful song comes up in the stream users can tap to move on to the next tune.

Bing, of course, offers up ads promoting its search engine every four or five tunes, though ads can be disappeared with a tap.

Another downside is that, unlike listening to songs from an iTunes library on the iPod app, Top 100s won’t permit other apps to run on a user’s device while it’s playing, at least not until iPhone OS 4.0 comes out and Melodeo upgrades the app to take advantage of the new OS’s multitasking functionality.

But hey, what do you expect for free?

Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Advertising, Music, News, Software, iPhone Apps | Comment on this article

If you enjoyed this article:
Subscribe via RSS or email, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter

About the author

Lonnie Lazar

Lonnie Lazar is a writer-musician-web designer-attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie's photos on Flickr.

Email the author | Read more posts by Lonnie Lazar.

Related posts from Cult of Mac

2 comments

    The original app is available in the UK but not the free Bing version……

    mrplow, on April 20th, 2010 at 6:53 am

    I hate to pick nits but King Crimson’s 1969 classic, “In The Court of The Crimson King,” is a lousy blues-rock-ish cover (a really bad one, at that). A microsoft kinda abomination that’s to be expected, I suppose.

    BMWTwisty, on April 20th, 2010 at 7:15 am

Add your comment

Name(Required)

Mail (required, but not published)

Website

Comment