music - page 16

After more than a decade at BBC Radio 1, well-known DJ personality Zane Lowe has taken a job with Apple in Cupertino, California.

Although the five-time Radio Academy Award winner hasn’t said what he’ll be doing at Apple, he will reportedly work on iTunes Radio.

When Prince presented the Grammy for best album this week, he made an impassioned case for a musical format that many seem ready to write off as dead.

“Albums, remember those?” he said. “Albums still matter. Albums, like books and black lives, still matter.”

That’s how you present an award, folks.

Albums are collections of musical pieces that work together to create an auditory gestalt larger than the individual songs themselves. With the massive growth in streaming audio these days, many people might be missing out on this incredible old-school experience.

Here’s the cure: a list of amazing albums you should listen to in their entirety, even if you don’t do vinyl. iTunes might have helped kill CDs, but it’s still a great place to buy albums rather than shortchanging yourself with a bunch of singles. There are dozens of other albums you should explore, depending on your musical tastes, but this list should remind us all how awesome albums are as a concept. You can thank us later.

I stood in the doorway, still teary-eyed from goodbyes with my parents. There, before me, sat the first lesson of my freshman year in college.

Peter Otto had a blond mohawk and twirled a shiny butterfly knife. He had already adorned his side of the room with posters of his favorite bands: The Meatmen, Dead Kennedys and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

“I guess I’m your roommate,” I said and he pointed to the lower bunk. I was chubby, an Eagle Scout and a mama’s boy. But I had one cool card I could play — a boombox that played compact discs, a relatively new music format.

But with only two CDs — a synth-pop album by Kenny Loggins and the debut record from Bruce Hornsby & the Range — there would be no cool, not then anyway. Otto wound up being the best roommate I ever had during two college tours. Some of his music made it into my CD collection, which accelerated in the fall of 1985, but I doubt he ever took to Loggins.

Nearly 30 years later, I keep reading stories that eulogize the CD, report plummeting album sales and lay out how the music industry is now taking its product directly to customers through social media, streaming services or direct downloads from a group’s website.

You may may never be able to listen to Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes live in the Star Wars cantina for yourself, but here’s the next best thing: a turntable modeled after Han Solo’s famous parsec-shattering ship, the Millennium Falcon.

Hollywood has long been the sparkling gem of entertainment in the U.S., but when it comes to making money, Apple is schooling the entertainment industry on how to bring in the cash with the App Store.

In 2014, iOS app developers earned more than Hollywood did from U.S. box office revenues, reports top Apple analyst Horace Dediu. According to Asymco’s number crunching, apps are now a bigger digital content business than music, TV programs, movie purchases and rentals combined.

Apple paid out approximately $25 billion total to developers, which means that not only is the App industry healthier than Hollywood, but also on an individual level, some developers are out earning Hollywood stars. The median income for developers is also likely higher than the median income for actors. If you’re looking to strike it rich, forget becoming the next Brad Pitt. Be the next Dong Nguyen.

Check out the chart below:

If there’s one thing we humans like to do, it’s make music. Seriously, we’ve been doing it since prehistoric times, so it’s no big surprise that we’d find many ways to bring music to our latest tool: the iPhone and iPad.

While there are a ton of different ways to play or make music on your iOS device of choice, here are nine rather weird ones, plus some fantastic videos to hear and see just how its done.

Update: Uber and Spotify have confirmed a partnership that will let Spotify Premium subscribers become backseat DJs in Uber cars in 10 cities. The service starts Friday in London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Nashville, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney and Toronto.

“The integration couldn’t be easier,” the companies said in a press release. “Simply connect your Spotify account via the Uber app, request a ride, and when you get matched up with a Spotify-enabled Uber, select music that suits your mood. Your tunes will be playing when your Uber arrives, and you can change it up at any time.”

This week: Huge news in the fight for an open Internet; YouTube’s music service confuses us; Apple Pay is, like, the payment method of the future, man; big Black Friday deals on Apple’s newest gadgets; the go-to apps we keep on our home screens, and sooooo much more.

Hem and haw your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the chuckles begin.

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Show notes ahead!

Not all of us have the chance to head to Europe, what with the cost of airfare these days.

Luckily, we’ve got the Internet, and amazing videos like this one from filmmaker Andrew Walker at 599 Productions. He filmed the various time-lapse images while exploring Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic last September using a Canon 5D Mark III and several Canon and Ziess lenses.

Check it out, and be sure to strap on a pair of high-end cans or route the audio through your huge Bluetooth speaker to hear the epic soundtrack.

Sometimes all a penguin needs is love, says the new Christmas ad from British department store John Lewis.

There’s a young boy with a real penguin. The penguin, named Monty, loves playing with the boy: swimming, sledding, building with Legos. but there’s one thing the boy cannot provide for poor Monty, and that’s a life mate.

Watch the full ad below and be sure to stick around for a delightful Calvin & Hobbesian moment at the end.

As vinyl enjoys a resurgence in interest and availability, it’s no small wonder that the publisher of Grand Theft Auto V is creating a special boxed set of tunes on physical media.

The six-disc vinyl and three-disc CD box sets will include 59 tracks from the game, including the original score, songs from the in-game radio stations (including real recording artists like A$AP Rocky and Tyler), and even some new content from DJs in the game, including Big Boy, DJ Pooh, Nathan and Stephen from WAVVES, Kenny Loggins, Twin Shadow and Cara Delevingne. The soundtrack is already available digitally through iTunes, but the new collection will come out on CD and vinyl in a 5,000 copy collector’s edition run. You’ll be able to grab a copy starting Decemebr 9, though no price point has been revealed.

Two years ago, Nick den Engelsman started a band with a couple of friends. As they worked on recording songs, life got in the way, what with getting jobs, getting married, having babies, and the like.

The group decided it would be really nice to have an app that let them record parts of their songs individually, and then combine all the tracks into one song. They couldn’t find one.

Most multi-track recording apps like GarageBand will let you share files across services like Dropbox, but a simple “record and share” app wasn’t available.

This is how Composr was born. Here’s how it works.

There’s always that moment when your drummer can’t show up for rehearsal. She’s got some other commitment. He’s got another gig. Her boyfriend needs her to take him to the hospital.

It happens. When it does, you can do what I’ve always done – pound your foot against the floor and try to muddle on through – or you can use a drum machine. The problem with standard drum machines is that they’re made to be used by hands or, in some cases, drum sticks. I’m not a drummer (no sticks) and I need my hands to play my guitar. What I really need is a drum machine I can play from the floor, guitar-pedal style.

That’s what caught my eye about the BeatBuddy – this is a guitar-pedal-style device that lets you use your foot to play back drum beats in a variety of styles, fills and different parts included. This is my new best friend when the drummer can’t make it to practice, and it may become my new stage pal if I take my act solo.

It’s hard enough to sing and play guitar at the same time, let alone manage a floor full of guitar effects pedals. Add to that trying to create vocal effects like most listeners expect and you’ve got a solo musician’s worst nightmare.

The folks at TC-Helicon have come up with a couple of pretty nifty floor-style pedal boxes that have you covered though: You can dial in a fantastic guitar sound for either acoustic or electric guitar, fill a room with amazing vocal effects and backing harmonies, and even loop musical phrases to create a song with multiple parts on the fly. Dubbed Play Acoustic and Play Electric, these simple stomp boxes contain some serious technology in an easy-to-use platform.

Here’s how it plays out.

New figures released by app analytics firm App Annie show that mobile users are more likely than ever to pay for music services by way of in-app purchases.

Looking at figures from August, streaming music offerings from Spotify, Pandora and Beats Music were among the top earning apps in terms of revenue.

Following on from its recent Songs of Innocence album giveaway, U2 is apparently working with Apple on a secret new project, according to a TIME article.

While the story doesn’t give too many specifics, it does note that the project relates to “a new digital music format [the band hopes] will prove so irresistibly exciting to music fans that it will tempt them again into buying music –whole albums as well as individual tracks.”

Although this sounds the kind of counterintuitive move that utterly goes against Apple’s most recent promotional music stunt (where it paid U2 and its record label a reported $100 million to put out its album for free), U2 notes that it’s thinking about more than just itself:

We’ve had a couple of days to let the massive announcements of Apple’s September 9 keynote sink in, but if you want to relive the event you might want to check out this new video from Jonathan Mann.

Who is Jonathan Mann, you may ask? The brilliant YouTube musician who created the celebrated Mario Opera close to a decade ago is the answer. An unabashed Apple fan, Mann was previously responsible for composing the iPhone Antenna song which Steve Jobs publicly danced to, and earlier this year composed a great WWDC ear worm which is still rattling around my brain months later.

Following Apple’s Tuesday keynote Mann is back in Apple territory with a new musical tour-de-force entitled “Apple Watch: The Musical,” which somehow manages to compress Apple’s entire Tuesday event into just 3 minutes and 13 seconds.

As Bono came in chanting and The Edge power-chorded his guitar for the radio-friendly chorus of “The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone)” today, we hoped for a revitalized big-arena rock band performance from the biggest Irish rock band of all time.

What we got was the boys miming a well-rehearsed, highly-produced single that sounds like anything but The Ramones. Bono sings, “I was young/Not dumb/Just wishing to be blinded/By you/Brand new/We were pilgrims on our way” and, frankly, we wish they were young again. We wanted to be blinded by rockstars, but we really only got an ad for Apple.

At first listen, Songs of Innocence is a musically safe choice, a collection of songs that will sound just fine in the background as you wait in line for your first latte of the day at Starbucks. This isn’t the same band that had us thrilling to “In the Name of Love,” or “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” let alone snake-dancing to the mysterious syncopations of “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” or the gospel-tinged “One.”

The new album is being pitched by the band as intensely personal, but it comes off as more craftsmanship than artistry. It’s not all bad, and chances are U2 super-fans would have bought it even if it weren’t free, but the music lovers in us were a little disappointed.

UK-based rock band Radiohead just updated their Polyfauna app, originally released at the end of this past January, with all new audio and visual content.

The What’s New section of the iTunes description says, simply, “Entirely new.”

If you’re a fan of the ambient tech-inspired music of Radiohead’s seminal Kid A album, you’re going to love these new tracks. Here’s a video (below) to whet your appetite.

Sony is hoping to boost digital record sales with a new iPhone app that offers a discounted album every 24 hours. Prices are slashed by as much as 70 percent in the Album of the Day app, and all purchases are made through iTunes.

Equalizers haven’t been a fashionable tech feature since Boomboxes went out of style in the 90’s, but Spotify just released a major update to its iOS app and I can’t stop playing with its fun new equalizer.

Spotify’s 1.1 update includes a number of other new features like a redesigned Artist page on iPad and new Discover feature, but the simple equalizer is perhaps the most useful new addition, allowing users to customize presets with six sliders.

Apple’s recently acquired music streaming service, Beats Music, just received its biggest update since getting scooped up by Apple at the end of May, adding new features that let you fine tune your musical tastes on the service and view songs that were just served up in The Sentence.

Beats just launched a legal assault against Chinese copy cats earlier this month, but it looks like the company just got hit with a legal bomb for copying another headphone maker itself.

Bose Corporation has filed a lawsuit against Beats for allegedly infringing on the company’s noise-canceling patents, according to CNBC’s Josh Lipton.