Spotify, SoundHound combine forces in apps – but only in Europe (Appolicious)

A couple of big-name mobile apps are joining forces to make finding and listening to music a lot easier – at least in Europe.

SoundHound, which provides mobile apps that use a device’s microphone to “listen” to songs playing nearby, then uses an Internet connection to identify them, has teamed up with Spotify to provide new services through both companies. Spotify is the European on-demand music streaming service that recently crossed the ocean to the U.S. after much waiting. It allows users to find and play pretty much any song they want to – it has a catalogue of more than 15 million tracks – in either an ad-supported version or for a monthly fee.

Both services provide some pretty useful mobile apps, and both appear on both Google’s Android operating system and on Apple’s iOS platform. The combination of the two opens up the ability for mobile users to use SoundHound to discover information about songs, then immediately launch Spotify to play them. It adds even more cool features to SoundHound, which recently added lyric tracking to its bag of app tricks.

That’s not a bad deal, considering that SoundHound could formerly bring users to the tracks they either searched for using the service (you can type in searches by band, song and album) or identified by sound, but only made them available for purchase. The partnership with Spotify, instead, makes it possible to listen to the song immediately, with no purchase required.

According to SoundHound’s press release, Spotify integration will be available to both free and paid SoundHound users, although you will need to be a Spotify Premium user, which runs about $7.99 a month. That removes the ads from Spotify and gives you unlimited access to the service, which can also play the music you have on your computer as part of your playlists designed in Spotify.

The only trouble with the whole partnership as it stands is that it’s exclusive to Europe. You’ll need to be a premium subscriber to Spotify in Europe to take full advantage of the link-ups with SoundHound, and the press release doesn’t say anything about the features possibly bridging the Atlantic.

It seems kind of doubtful that the SoundHound/Spotify partnership won’t reach to the U.S., though. It’s possible the two companies will use Europe as a testing ground, where Spotify is incredibly popular, to see if users start to gravitate toward the new features before spreading them to new markets. But it does seem that SoundHound will gain a lot more usefulness with Spotify’s help, and Spotify will become even cooler with the addition of SoundHound song-searching.

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Get help snagging the music that fits your tastes with We Are Hunted (Appolicious)

APPOLICIOUS ADVISOR RATING:

5 of 5 bars PRICE: FreeTASTY: A great way to discover music that's on the verge of becoming popular.BUMMER: The name's a bit excessively hip without being self-explanatory, but in general, there's not really anything negative that can be said about this app.COOL: This app looks like a NYLON magazine spread. It automatically mutes during a phone call, great sound quality.

It can be difficult keeping up with what kids these days are listening to. We Are Hunted does its best to do the hard part for you. The music-discovery app knows who and what the hipsters are talking about, and then charts and streams the top songs online every day.

The app scours the various popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.), blogs, message boards and peer-to-peer sharing networks and forums, and “listens” to the buzz to find out what songs and bands people are getting excited about.

Then, you just load up your app, and start streaming music. It's ridiculously simple. Using the drop-down menu on the right side of the screen, select what kind of music you're into: rock, alternative, pop, electronic, punk, metal, hip-hop or remix.

Users can also create their own playlists at the app's mother site, and then search for it through the app. Or, you can check out what your friends are listening to. Just go to the "User Created Chart" option.

Thankfully, We Are Hunted plays the entire song, and you don't even have to sit through ads between tracks. Audio quality is crystal clear, and there don't seem to be any songs that play at especially high or low volumes. All songs that stream through the app sound like they could have been bought directly from iTunes.

As great as it sounds, the app's design is where it really shines. We Are Hunted looks a lot like a spread in a magazine. High-res photos pop off the screen, and the bright pink text adds just the right amount of color to the plain slate background.

The app puts four album covers on your screen at a time, in order of their popularity. Users can swipe through the app horizontally to see more songs. When you see something that catches your eye, just tap on an album cover to hear it. Controls are as easy as play, pause and skip ahead or back. Finding your way around We Are Hunted is as intuitive as it could possibly be.

This app is an excellent way to ensure that you don't get left behind in terms of who's popular in the music industry.

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Wrap your tunes in an old school package with VinylLove Pocket iPhone app (Appolicious)

APPOLICIOUS ADVISOR RATING:

3 of 5 bars PRICE: $0.99TASTY: The visual of picking your songs out of virtual record crates gets an A+ for nostalgia.BUMMER: At the end of the day it doesn’t recreate that great vinyl sound.COOL: You can actually “scratch” the record on the player.

There’s a reason that music fans still collect and talk about vinyl records. Few people lament the death of the 8-track or the cassette tape, but the specific sound quality of a record is hard to beat. It’s not surprising to see another app, in this case VinylLove Pocket, try to recreate some of that nostalgia and apply it to your existing iTunes collection. In many ways Vinyl Love Pocket’s efforts are successful, but not where it really counts – sound quality.

Visually, VinylLove Pocket is a treat from start to finish. Instead of slapping on an iTunes style album display onto a supposedly vintage app, VinylLove Pocket gives you the nostalgia show right from the get-go, offering up all of your albums in crates where you can flip through each album cover like so many collectors do today. It’s a really cool visual touch.

The same goes for actually putting the needle on the record when you are selecting a track from the album you picked out. There’s a very enjoyable monotony to the whole activity, and the fact that it actually takes more than a split second to play a song is almost a joy in the fast paced world we’re all living in.

But there are things are the digital age we take for granted, and VinylLove Pocket reminds you of them quickly. You can scratch the needle on these records to your hearts content, but you can’t skip forward or backward on a track at all. If you’ve picked a song you can either listen to it or go to another tune, but there’s no searching for a specific section of a song here.

And that sort of trouble is worth it when the sound quality is as pristine as you’d get from a real vinyl record. But that’s not the case here, of course. VinylLove Pocket can’t improve the sound of the audio that comes out of the tiny iPhone speakers.

There are certainly worse ways to spend a dollar, and visually ,VinylLove Pocket has a few neat tricks. I especially admire its adherence to a vintage look and feel. But all it’s really doing is putting a new cover on your same old iPod. I’ll stick to real records, myself.

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Bullseye doesn’t quite hit the mark as a brand new style of app (Appolicious)

APPOLICIOUS ADVISOR RATING:

3 of 5 bars PRICE: $1.99TASTY: Visually interesting app should keep attention spans at least a few times through the song.BUMMER: The interactive portions of this don’t elevate it to anything beyond a musical screensaver.COOL: Two versions of the song to choose from should delight fans of Polyphonic Spree.

Bullseye By Polyphonic Spree bills itself as an “interactive music video,” a statement that conjures a number of different ideas. I was hoping for some sort of game that was timed to end alongside the song. Instead, the interactivity amounts to a lot of window dressing and not much more. But it might still be a step in the right direction.

There isn’t much to the app itself. A small options menu lets you pick which version of the song you want to hear (acoustic or studio), and you’re off and running. The video mirrors the lyrics in the song, so there are some pretty impressive animated visuals of objects splitting apart and coming together, and a big tree with fireworks during the song’s closing moments. But the interactivity leaves a lot to be desired. Tapping certain objects makes them come to life — flowers bloom, plants grow, fireworks explode. But once you’ve seen this once, there isn’t anything to keep you coming back. This isn’t interactivity in the style of a choose-your-own-adventure book. It’s interactivity like rubbing a scratch ’n’ sniff sticker. It just isn’t interesting.

The idea of interactive music videos is a great one that could benefit the music industry tremendously, but this app falls short of that premise. It’s saved a bit, thanks to some unique visuals that feel right at home on the mobile platform. A video like this would look weird on the big screen, but on your iPhone it feels like an extension of a strange app game. That said, only drop the two bucks for Bullseye by Polyphonic Spree if you already love the song, because chances are you won’t be opening it often otherwise.

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Keep tabs on activities at the Hollywood Bowl for Android (Appolicious)

APPOLICIOUS ADVISOR RATING:

5 of 5 bars PRICE: FreeTASTY: Keep tabs on what's happening at the Hollywood Bowl all summer long.BUMMER: There's nothing negative to be said about this app.COOL: This is a beautifully designed application.

If you live in Los Angeles, you know that no other experience is like being at the Hollywood Bowl in the summertime. The venue's own app for Android allows you to keep up on everything related to the Hollywood Bowl.

The first thing you'll notice upon launch of the app is its very colorful, scrolling day-by-day calendar. Each date is marked so you can see who will be performing within the coming weeks. If you see something of interest, just click on any day to read a description and learn the time the event will begin. Then, you can either buy the ticket or add the concert to a favorites list in order to receive reminders and announcements.

The Hollywood Bowl application also explains how to get to the venue from wherever you are, and where all accommodations are once you arrive: bathrooms, concession stands, picnic areas and even your seats.

The app has it's own social networking element, too. One section of the app is reserved as a fan photo gallery to which users can browse pictures from other users and submit their own photos.

The app runs smoothly and loads quickly, so you won't have to wait very long to find the information you need.

Other than the fact that the app is well-made and informative, I'd have to say that the Hollywood Bowl app's greatest feature is its design. This app is a calendar and a directory, guides that usually come in boring black and white, but this menu glows rainbow. It's actually one of the more creative uses of color I've seen in an application.

Pretty colors aside, this app is also neatly labeled and organized, so most users won't have any trouble finding their way around.

With so many tours coming to the Bowl this summer, this is exactly the app you need to stay in the loop and get the most out of your experience.

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Apple reportedly pays $100 million to music companies (Appolicious)

Apple reportedly has cut a deal with the largest of the four major music companies, securing the rights to its songs for Apple’s coming iCloud music streaming service.

According to a story from CNet, making a deal with Universal Music was the last of the obstacles Apple (AAPL) needed to clear for iCloud, and it can now offer music on the service from all four of the companies. A separate story from The New York Post states that sources claim Apple will make somewhere between $100 and $150 million in advance payments to the music companies as part of the deal. That shakes out to $25 million to $50 million for each company as an incentive to get them on-board with iCloud before it is released.

Apple is set to announce the details of its iCloud service on Monday at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. So far, the company hasn’t released any details – including remaining mum on whether a music service is part of the iCloud deal – but it has become common knowledge that Apple managers have been negotiating with music companies and attempting to bring a music-streaming component to the company’s services. Two major Apple rivals, Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN), also just released streaming music services, and neither sought the approval of the music companies.

CNet’s sources had few details about the music company deals, but those anonymous sources did explain the revenue split for iCloud: 58 percent will go to the labels and another 12 percent to music publishers. Apple gets the remaining 30 percent – its standard rate, it seems. The New York Post writes that Apple is considering a $25-per-year subscription fee, with an initial free offering to customers who purchased their music through iTunes (not unlike Amazon’s current freebie model).

According to CNet’s sources, streaming won’t be available on Monday when iCloud is announced, but will drop “soon” (The New York Post puts the service’s start date in September). It also says that iCloud will include a “digital locker” service that will allow users to upload their music tracks to Apple’s cloud servers to be streamed from anywhere, but the locker will only be available for music purchased on iTunes, which sounds like a compromise worked out with the music companies. From what we’re hearing, with other tracks, iCloud will mirror them on its servers; the service will scan users’ music libraries and then allow them to stream Apple’s versions of files they’ve already purchased.

The New York Times is reporting that Apple has reached solid deals with Universal and with Sony (SNE), the two largest record companies, while negotiations with EMI and Warner/Chappell are still taking place. More licensing deals still have to be made, but it appears that the major hurdles for iCloud are being cleared just in time for Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ big announcement next week.

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Google to stream music with new cloud services (Appolicious)

Google made some big announcements at its I/O conference in San Francisco today -- most notably, that it’s now gunning for iTunes.

The tech giant rolled out its Music Beta service, an iTunes-like bit of software that works from the Internet-based cloud rather than your computer’s hard drive. Much like Amazon’s music-streaming service, Google Music allows users to upload their songs to the cloud and then stream them anywhere, on computers or Android-based smartphones and tablets.

That will keep hard drives free while allowing users to set up playlists on any device and have it stream to the cloud, and they still get the option of specifying certain artists, albums, tracks or playlists that will be downloaded to their devices for offline play.

First Amazon, and now Google -- both huge companies are taking shots at Apple’s mobile and music supremacy, with not a lot going on over at the Apple camp. Dollars to donuts, that’s about to change.

We’ve been hearing that Apple is working on a cloud-based music service of its own, building a big server farm to accommodate the storage space and other considerations, but that it was hung up on licensing considerations. With Google clearing that hurdle, I’d wager that Apple can’t be far behind, especially because the company’s media business has been a huge part of its success during the last decade. The popularity of the iPod and the ease of use of iTunes led to the iPhone and then the iPad -- and Apple isn’t looking to hand off that torch to anybody, least of all Google, anytime soon.

So it seems like a fair bet to assume Apple will be announcing, in some capacity, its own streaming digital locker service for music (and other media, perhaps) when its Worldwide Developers Conference rolls around in early June. Apple’s preview graphic on its website says the event will preview the “future of iOS and Mac OS X,” and that will likely concern a lot of how media works with Apple’s powerhouse devices, seeing as a new iPhone and iOS rollout isn’t expected until September.

Google’s new services are a pretty good indicator of the things Apple will be setting as its baseline with its cloud service. Streaming to iOS devices is a given, and the combination online-offline setups seems like a solid choice as well. But Apple will definitely be coming to the party looking for ways to one-up the competition, because that’s really what it is best at doing. And all this competition suggests some very cool services and features coming to the mobile market.

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Google Music finally ready to take on iTunes (Appolicious)

It finally happened -- Google officially announced its music service, Google Music, at its Google I/O conference in San Francisco today.

The Google Music Beta is cloud-based and is currently in an invite-only stage, and will be “free for a limited time,” according to Google’s announcement. The service runs on all Android devices and is basically a lot like iTunes, but based on the Internet, or like Amazon’s Cloud Player service.

From what we’ve learned so far, Google Music will allow users to upload their music to an online “digital locker” directory, where they can stream it to just about any device they own, including PCs and Android-running tablets and phones. Like Amazon’s services and those like it, it’ll mean users can stream music without taking up hard drive space on their devices, should they choose.

But Google Music isn’t cloud-exclusive, meaning it’ll operate offline as well. It works by allowing users to pick and choose what songs, artists or albums they’ll want available in offline mode, which basically tells the cloud to download those songs to your device so they’re physically stored on-hand. Music will also support user-created playlists, which will keep chosen songs ready for offline mode, and will sync with the cloud so they’re persistent across all your devices.

Music also features an iTunes-like feature called Instant Mix, which sounds a little like Apple’s Genius feature. Clicking on a song and telling Google to build an Instant Mix around it will make a playlist of similar tracks to match the listener’s mood, without a lot of management. It sounds a lot like the way Pandora works with its Internet radio stations, grouping like songs together and bringing them to the listener without a lot of input. One wonders how robust Instant Mix is likely to be -- for example, if it will support mixes built using multiple songs or artists, the way Pandora does.

The big questions now surround how Google will price and roll out the service for users. Amazon’s cloud service is technically free right now, to a point -- it dishes out 5GB of space to users without charging them anything, and users who purchase songs through Amazon get a gratis bump up to 20GB for the first year. Similar services, like mSpot, run on a model that’s a lot like that, charging subscription fees per month or year the way Amazon will after the Cloud Player has cooled off a little.

It sounds like Google’s setup will be similar, although being as big as it is, it’s in a great position to really undercut the competition. And while Amazon was able to get out ahead of Google on music in the cloud, Google is still beating Apple to the punch, which is a pretty big deal considering the steady forward progress Google has been making in the smartphone and tablet markets. Any advantage Google can make its own is good for the company, considering that it’s still playing catch-up with Apple in many respects. With Google Music, at least until Apple rolls out its own cloud service, Google gets to be on the offensive.

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