You know we’re firmly in December when you begin seeing the plethora of people sharing their year-end Spotify Wrapped. This compilation of listening stats has been awesome to see but has always made me, an Apple Music subscriber, a bit sad that I haven’t had anything similar. Apple has finally fixed this egregious error by completely revamping its year-end Replay feature. And it’s awesome. Hartley Charlton at MacRumors has more. The overhauled experience puts the new highlight reel feature at the forefront of the Replay webpage, which users are encouraged to interact with before delving into more detailed information and…
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What’s Your Vecna Song?
Stranger Things is all the hype once more. Season 4 has dropped, bringing the next chapter to completion. Two episodes clocking in at 4-hours is certainly a lot of Hawkins kids to watch. However, one thing that makes a great season even better is the incorporation of music this time around. The Duffer Brothers have not shied away from bringing iconic 80’s music into the Stranger Things universe. It’s always been prominent. But, Season 4 took it to a new level. Without giving anything away, music is a means of survival. To help celebrate this deep interweaving of music into…
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Listening Together
If you’re an Apple Music subscriber, like I am, it’s painfully apparent that Apple lacks some core social features. Their “Replay” feature pales in comparison to Spotify’s “Wrapped” year-end review. In addition, there is no way to collaborate on a playlist with friends. A new app, Caset, looks to change that. Billed as a “mixtapes for the new era”, Caset is an app that lets you create playlists with friends. Anyone you share the playlist with can add tracks too. Even better is you can give a tapback-style reaction to tracks, allowing a simple feedback mechanism to exist. Mixtapes represent…
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Cornering the Cast
Last week’s brouhaha of Neil Young vs Spotify / Joe Rogan went as predicted. Spotify didn’t budge and Young made good on his threat. Joni Mitchell joined the fray and removed her music from Spotify too. But lost in all of this are two critical decisions that have undermined critical cores to podcasting. The first is exclusivity. Podcasts were never envisioned or built to be exclusive. Sure, some outlets offer podcasts as members-only perks or private ways to access shows. However, podcasting’s lifeblood is RSS. That is an open standard and without it, podcasting would not exist. Spotify decided to…
Spotify once again makes me wish Apple would get more into the core features of what makes listening to music so great: shared experiences. Today they announced Spotify Blend, a “blended playlist” feature where two people can combine their tastes into one auto-generated playlist. This is very cool stuff. Apple Music does nothing like this. You can’t share a playlist others can contribute to, let alone combine two people’s music preferences into a singular list. Apple can’t even be bothered to compete with Spotify Wrapped. This feature that makes me jealous every December. Here’s what the Blend feature will do:…