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Posts Tagged ‘Popular Music’

Deezer Raises $9.5 Million More For Free Music Search And Streaming Service
Music search and discovery engine Deezer has raised €6.5 million ($9.6 million) in a second round of financing, bringing the total amount invested in the French upstart to approx. €12.2 million ($18 million). The additional capital was raised from from AGF Private Equity and CM-CIC Capital Privé, thus joining the historical shareholders who make up the DOTCORP Asset Management funds.

Deezer is one of the most popular music services in Europe. Formerly known as BlogMusik, it ran into lots of legal trouble when it launched its free music streaming service a couple of years ago. However, unlike many other ventures of the kind the startup turned itself around, reached essential agreements with copyright associations, and ultimately relaunched as a ‘legitimately’ free music search engine back in August 2007.

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Rock Band coming to the iPhone

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Odds and ends, Developer, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch, Music

It’s true — as leaked earlier this week and confirmed yesterday, EA is bringing Harmonix’s Rock Band to the iPhone, and it’s about what you’d expect: notes come down the screen set to popular music, you tap in certain places in time to the beat, and get a score based on how well you do. Truthfully, I’m a huge Rock Band (and Harmonix) fan in general, but this doesn’t excite me much — the big draw of Rock Band is actually playing with those instruments, and while yes they’re plastic and tiny, when you get four people in the same room together playing them, it actually feels like you’re jamming in a band.

Fortunately, the iPhone version will have both online and bluetooth multiplayer, so you will be able to jam with people, but the gameplay is simply reminiscent of Tap Tap Revenge, which you probably already know about and/or have. It looks like they’ve gotten most of their songs from the actual Rock Band game; twenty songs with the purchase (no price yet), and then there will be 99 cent packs of two songs each coming out soon. The app’s been submitted and it should be out in the store next week.

TUAWRock Band coming to the iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MOG Raises Another $5 Million As Traffic Nearly Doubles Since January

MOG, the very popular music portal and blog network, has closed a new $5 million funding round led by Menlo Ventures, with existing investors Simon Equity Partners and Scott Jones also participating. Menlo Ventures’ Sonja Hoel Perkins will join the company’s board as part of the deal. The company has raised a total of $12.5 million since it was founded in 2005.

MOG has been having a stellar year. In April the site launched a completely overhauled homepage, which now includes music news, reviews, a selection of top posts from its blogs, and a variety of other content. The MOG network now sees over 8 million unique visitors a month, with over 700 blogs that generate over 6,000 posts a week.

MOG’s existing products are obviously doing quite well, but I can’t help but wonder if the new round was in part helped by its unlaunched music streaming product, which we previewed back in January. At the time we called it Ultimate Streaming Music App that may never launch, because it only had two of the four major labels signed on. If MOG managed to get the remaining holdouts on board, the company would be a ripe target for investors. The company declined to comment on the matter, but we’ll be keeping an eye out for more on this.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Billboard Hopes Its API Will Be A Cornerstone For Music Mashups

Earlier today came news that Billboard, the well known music analytics company, was repositioning its homepage to serve as a consumer-friendly destination for music fans rather than the B2B hub it had been before. Alongside the release, the company has informed us that it’s planning to make its API more accesible to developers, with the hopes that it will spur a new wave of music-related applications built around the data. Developers can access the API at developer.billboard.com.

Billboard has been churning out charts featuring popular music since the 1940s, with its most well known chart, the Hot 100, making its debut in 1958. These vast volumes of data can be used in any number of ways, from tracking overall trends to charting the success of an individual artist over time (you can see an example use of the data in this piece on Michael Jackson in the New York Times). In short, the data is something of a goldmine for data-hungry music fans.

Billboard is hoping that the new API will serve to make the site one of the foundations that music mashups are built around, in much the same way the Google Maps API has become a cornerstone for countless mashups. That’s much easier said than done, of course, and I doubt that the data will be as broadly useful. Still, we can likely look forward to some very cool projects in the near future.

Billboard actually opened its API early this year, but up until now it has done a minimal amount of marketing around it (the company was still primarily concerned with its B2B offerings).

Today’s news was also a major win for Lala, the very cool music startup that may have finally found the right formula for actually making money. The service now powers Billboard’s site-wide music player, offering immediate playback of many of Billboard’s top songs.

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