Posts Tagged ‘music’

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App Review: The Good Kind of Stereotypes

Monday, March 11th, 2013

stereotypes appOlder music applications such as Shazam, Spotify, and iTunes have seemingly set the stage for the newest golden child, Stereotypes. Stereotypes, normally frowned upon in society, now take on a more fun role in the world of music apps. Creating groups and sharing music videos at any time connects you with your friends, giving you that feeling of hanging out even if they are not around.

About the App

Formerly a social music website seeking to connect people through music taste and similarities, the Stereotypes app allows users to congregate in one place to discover, recommend and share music with people who share the same tastes.

Within the past month, Stereotypes has furthered their mission of bringing people together through music with the unveiling of their iPhone app. Users are able to create groups with their friends to share music. Why should you use it? Some reasons include a sense of belonging with endless interaction, discovery of new music, and unlimited groups with unlimited free music.

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Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, August 7th, 2012

Twitter now available in three new languages

Twitter’s approach to making the social network available in more languages is unique: it crowdsources the translation process out to the users through the Twitter Translation Center. Well, it looks like this approach is paying off. Only a few months after becoming available in right-t0-left languages, Twitter has announced it’s now also available in Greek, Czech, and Basque.

To change the language of your personal Twitter experience, just go to your account settings. To help with the translation process for any language, you simply sign-in to the Translation Center with your Twitter account.

Jason Mraz fan-sources ideas for new music video

Singer-songwriter Jason Mraz is making a music video for his song, “The Woman I Love,” and is looking to his followers for help in the creative process. For one week from July 30 to August 6, Mraz asked fans to tweet him at @Jason_Mraz with possible plotlines using the hashtag #MrazingTheVideo.

A director will create a storyboard based on the best ideas. The music video will premiere this fall on Twitter and those who’s ideas were chosen will be credited by their Twitter handles appearing at the end of the video.

The first tweets from Mars

NASA’s Curiosity Rover landed on Mars at 1:39 am EST on Monday morning, and the Internet is going crazy for it. In addition to a livestream of the landing via Ustream, the experience is also being documented on Twitter. The story is being told firsthand by NASA employees as well as the Rover’s own Twitter account, @MarsCuriosity.

As complex and hard to understand as the actual process of a Mars landing is, the Twitter account maintains a playful voice. The account announced the landing by tweeting, “I’m safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL“ Along with amazing color photographs, the account is continuing to tweet amusing exclamations such as “Look out below!”, “Now the adventure begins,” and captioning a photo “No @Instagram required.”

Twitter suspends, un-suspends, and apologizes to Guy Adams

On July 27, Guy Adams, a Los Angeles correspondent for The Independent, started tweeting criticisms of NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. One tweet contained the email address of the President of NBC Olympics, Gary Zenkel. In the tweet, Adam urged his followers to email Zenkel to express how they felt about NBC’s Olympics coverage. On July 30, he found his account suspended. In an email, Twitter stated that his account was suspended because he posted an “individual’s private information such as private email address, physical address, telephone number, or financial documents.” Adams maintained that because it was a corporate email, it should not have been considered private.

Most of the outrage over this incident was that Twitter claims not to monitor private accounts. However, Twitter has explained in a blog post that they did “proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter Rules and encouraged them to file a support ticket with our Trust and Safety team to report the violation.” The account was reinstated when NBC withdrew the request for account suspension.

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Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

This weeks’ Twitter Tuesday has a theme: entertainment! It wasn’t even intentional, but the past week saw three great uses of social media, specifically Twitter, involving music, movies, and television. We hope you enjoy it!

Pepsi’s “Live for Now” offers exclusives to followers

Pepsi’s latest campaign, “Live for Now,” has a huge social component, bringing exclusive content and deals to those following the @pepsi Twitter account and the #LiveforNow hashtag.

Throughout the week, Pepsi will tweet about new music and upcoming music festivals using the hashtag. Each week, the account will also tweet out codes for free music credits through Amazon’s MP3 store.

But Pepsi will also be offering unique content on their enhanced brand page. Pepsi will be creating a weekly video series called “Live for Now Music” which will be based off of the top trending artists and music from throughout the week. Twitter’s Advertising Blog states that it’s the first time a partner will be using real-time data to develop original programming.

Lastly, Pepsi will be holding pop-up concerts throughout the summer with Twitter at the center of the action. The concerts will feature artists with large Twitter followings, will be first announced on Twitter, and streamed live on their brand page.

MTV introduces new Movie Awards category with Twitter-only voting

Last Sunday night the MTV Movie Awards aired, an award ceremony based on voting. Usually, voting for all the categories is conducted on MTV’s website. But this year, one category winner was decided completely based on tweets.

While going from category to category on the page for the awards, the Best Hero category had a landing page different from the rest.

Each nominee (Harry Potter from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2, Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, Captain America from Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor from Thor, and Jenko from 21 Jump Street) was given their own voting hashtag.

The landing page also had the “MTV Tweet Tracker” keeping track of how many votes each nominee had. That way, voters could see if they needed to send out a few more tweets for their favorite hero. The winner of the golden popcorn trophy was Harry Potter.

Miss USA goes social

The MTV Movie Awards weren’t the only competition to get social on Sunday night. The Miss USA pageant doesn’t have a huge online component, but fans can vote for their favorite contestant and the winner automatically gets a spot in the semifinals. But even without voting via Twitter they have incorporated the social network in a large way.

Leading up to the competition, fans could submit questions for the interview portion of the competition via the hashtag #AskMissUSA. The producers will select one of the questions to  be one of the five questions asked to the five semifinalists during the interview portion of the competition. NBC will also show real-time tweets on the screen during the swimsuit and evening gown portions of the show.

That wraps up this week’s Twitter Tuesday! Did you tweet about the MTV Movie Awards or Miss USA? Are you following @pepsi for great music this summer? Let us know!

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Madonna’s Social Launch of MDNA

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

Madonna has never had much of a presence on social media, but she is a woman known for reinventing herself time and time again. For her 12th studio album, MDNA which came out on March 26, she has sworn off traditional methods of promotion such as posing for magazine covers and performing on morning shows. This has allowed her to spend less time traveling all over the country and more time rehearsing for her upcoming tour. Instead of interacting with middle men to promote her album, she is going directly to the fans.

Facebook engagement

Madonna only conducted one in-person interview, sitting down with Jimmy Fallon on March 24. But even that had a social aspect. The interview was broadcasted via livestream on her Facebook page, and you needed to “Like” the page in order to watch the live interview. The interview took place in a makeshift studio at Facebook’s New York office. The audio was a little hard to hear at times, but you could still hear Fallon’s hilarious comments while they listened to parts of the album. Fallon and Madonna exchanged banter about her classic ‘Borderline’ and Madonna went on to sing a few lines. Madonna even taught Fallon some dance moves, which the Facebook employees in the audience thoroughly enjoyed! Fallon also asked Madonna questions that fans were submitting in real time.

In preparation for the livestream, her manager, Guy Oseary worked with Facebook to fill out her timeline with old music videos, live performances, and photo shoots. Sneak previews of tracks from MDNA were released and shared on Facebook leading up to the album’s release, and fans can even answer polls asking which songs from her previous albums she should perform on her upcoming tour.

Madonna’s big Twitter debut

Up until a few weeks ago, Madonna had no presence on Twitter. But she began tweeting from @MadonnaMDNAday the day before MDNA’s release on March 26. Then on the day of the release she hosted a live Twitter chat using the #askmadonna hashtag. She tweeted with Ryan Seacrest, Ellen Degeneres, and thousands of fans who had been submitting questions for a few days leading up to the chat, as well as in real-time.

Fans asked questions about her vocal warm-ups, her favorite foods, and her opinions of other celebrities such as Justin Bieber. Madonna really liked the suggestion of one participant to film her next tour in 3D, giving fans yet another thing to look forward to in the pop diva’s career.

While it was originally said that Madonna was only joining Twitter for one day, she appears to still be tweeting. She is still answering fan questions as well as engaging with celebrities such as Lionel Richie and Jessie J. She has even had a Twitter conversation with Britney Spears about reenacting their on-stage liplock on her upcoming tour, and personally inviting Katy Perry and President Obama to her concerts.

Listening to MDNA

The new promotion methods aren’t just limited to live chats on social media sites. Up until April 1, members of the design-focus daily deals site Fab.com had the opportunity to buy a deluxe version of MDNA for just $7.99, almost half of what it costs from other outlets. Fab.com even dedicated its homepage to MDNA.

Spotify users can enter for a chance to win premium tickets to her sold-out U.S. tour. Users that listen to MDNA three time’s during the first three weeks that it’s out will be entered into the contest, and they can boost their chances of winning by also signing up for a “Madonna Superfans” newsletter.

 

Do you think Madonna’s latest reinvention of her image will be effective?

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Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

Couple’s wedding saved by generosity on Twitter

Six weeks before their wedding, Lauren Lane and Daniel Welch found out that the events company organizing it was folding, and the couple would be losing £4,500 (over $7,000). Naturally, Lane turned to Twitter for help, tweeting “Help needed with aspects of our wedding after venue goes bust with 6 weeks 2 go & with our £4.5k”.

The responses started coming in and her tweet was retweeted by many, including celebrities Davina McCall and Dannii Minogue. Lane’s bridesmaids also began tweeting local wedding services companies asking for any help. People from the Twitterverse helped however they could.

The Guardian explained: “Twitter users with something to offer leapt in to help. Some contributed jewelry and clothes, one came up with a three-tiered chocolate cake. A magician, make-up artist, a photographer and a wedding planner all offered free or cut-price services or goods.”

The couple was married on February 25 and Lane described it as their “dream wedding”. They estimated that they received £10,000 (around $16,000) worth of goods and services, and only had to contribute £5,000 of their own funds.

Wiz Khalifa and Amber Rose announce engagement

Last Thursday, rapper Wiz Khalifa proposed to his girlfriend, musician Amber Rose and tweeted her answer. At 1:49 p.m, he tweeted an Instagram picture along with three words: She Said Yes.

The picture was of the engagement ring on Amber’s hand. Around ten minutes later, Amber Rose tweeted the same Instagram picture with the message, “He has made me the Happiest Woman in the World!!!!”

As fans of both artists responded to the tweets and congratulated them, “Wiz and Amber” made the list of top trending topics.

Lady Gaga reaches 20 million followers

When Lady Gaga became the first Twitter user to reach 15 million followers in November, it was estimated that she would be the first to reach 20 million followers in March or April 2012. That estimate proved to be pretty accurate, as Gaga reached the milestone on March 3.

Her closest competition is Justin Bieber with 18 million followers, but statistics from TwitterCounter.com shows that Gaga’s daily follower growth rate is consistently higher than Bieber’s.

Gaga has referred to herself as the “Queen of Twitter” ever since her follower counts surpassed Britney Spears’ in August, making her the most followed person on Twitter.

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Weekly Wrap – Twitter Tuesday

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

The Grammys set social TV records

According to CBS, Sunday’s Grammy Awards saw the second largest audience in the show’s history. But viewers weren’t just watching the show, they were discussing it on social media also. According to a Mashable article, the Grammys got 13 million social mentions, becoming the top entertainment event in social TV. For comparison, the  runner-up (the 2011 VMA’s) got only 3.1 million social comments. Some of the most social moments were Chris Brown’s performance, when Adele performed as well as when she won Album of the Year, Jennifer Hudson’s tribute to Whitney Houston, and Paul McCartney closing the show.

Twitter partners with satellite providers

Twitter recently announced two new partnerships, with Iridium and Thuraya, the world’s largest satellite providers, to provide even greater access to Twitter SMS. This service will come in handy at times when phone lines and the Internet are inaccessible, such as war zones and during natural disasters. Twitter is making moves to insure that the service can be accessed in as many parts of the world as possible. But since not all carriers support Twitter SMS, they also have set up “long codes”, which people can use to send tweets.

Is Oprah desperate for ratings?

While many people were tuning into The Grammy Awards on Sunday night, Oprah was tweeting to make sure viewers didn’t forget about her network, OWN.

One tweet in particular caught the attention of many, including the audience measurement company Nielsen. “Every 1 who can please turn to OWN especially if you have a Nielsen box,” she tweeted to over 9 million followers around 9 p.m. The backlash was immediate, with people questioning whether her account was hacked or if she was really “that desperate”. Nielsen tries hard to ensure that viewers in their samples are not pressured to change their viewing habits and are “looking into the incident”. Oprah apologized and, at Nielsen’s request, removed the tweet but is still responding to followers calling her out about it.

Twitter jerseys finally spread to North America

Sports teams around the world have begun promoting their Twitter presences on the field by replacing the names on players’ jerseys with their Twitter handles. But this weekend, the Philadelphia Wings (@PhillyWings) became the first reported sports team in North America to do so. The indoor lacrosse team debuted the jerseys in their game against the Buffalo Bandits on Sunday, which they won. The jerseys were auctioned off after the game, raising over $13,000 for the American Cancer Society. Team spokesman Zack Loyd told The Star that when the players were told about the idea preseason, more than half of them were already active on Twitter. He also said “We were just looking for a way to gain more regional and national exposure.” Well, mission accomplished!

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Lollapalooza Apps Help Connect Music Lovers

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

Summer is the season of outdoor music festivals and concerts, but some huge festivals like Lollapalooza can be overwhelming if you are unfamiliar with the festival.  This year, there is a great Lollapalooza app that will really help in that inevitable occurrence when you and your friends split up, someone is lost, someone is hungry, and someone wants to see a set starting in 5 minutes.

With the free Lollapalooza app for the iPhone and Android, you can create a personalized schedule or sync with your customized schedule from Lolla.com.  You can also share via Facebook, Twitter, and group chat.  There is also an interactive map of Grant Park, where the festival is held.  Between the interactive map and sharing options, you can share you exact location with friends by just dropping a pin.

To get excited for the festival or to pass time in between sets, the app also includes streaming stations with playlists of past and present Lolla artists.  There is a station to listen to artists from this year’s Lolla as well as an anniversary station to celebrate Lollapalooza’s 20th year.

Last but not least, the app is obviously a great guide for the whole weekend, with a Lolla Store, FAQ answer guide, quick links to the Lollapalooza website, Facebook, and Twitter pages, and a stream of tweets about Lolla.

With more people having smart phones and great new apps arriving every day, there are a lot of great apps for festivals.  Earlier in the summer, Lollapalooza shared its API to host HackLolla, a hackathon for developers to create web and phone apps themed around the festival.  The winning apps were Veokami for Lollapalooza, which helps relive the concert by gathering YouTube videos uploaded by fans, and Who’s Now Who’s Next, which tells you what bands are performing currently and which ones are up next.

Anyone going to Lolla this year?  Will you be using the app to organize and plan your experience?

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Online Reactions to Death of Amy Winehouse

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

Saturday morning, British singer Amy Winehouse was found dead in her flat in Camden.  As with any celebrity death, there were certain common occurrences on the Internet: insensitive tweets, sensitive tweets, death video scams, and companies trying to make money off of the unfortunate event.

People love to mock celebrities, even dead ones.  Winehouse was always very public about her lifestyle and struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, and sang about it in her music.  Unfortunately, this provided plenty of ammunition for Twitter users.  One of the biggest hits from her 2006 album “Back to Black” was the song “Rehab”, which included the lyrics “They tried to make me go to rehab, I said ‘no, no, no.’”  Even though no drugs were found in her home and the cause of death is still undetermined, many people still joked about it.

However, there were still plenty of people on social media remembering Winehouse for her talent rather than her hardships.  Celebrities such as producer Mark Ronson, Diddy, and Pete Wentz tweeted about their grief.  Matchbox 20’s Rob Thomas responded to people tweeting sarcasm and jokes, saying “So many people saying that because it’s not a surprise that Amy Winehouse passed, it’s not sad.  I hope you have more compassion for friends.”  Winehouse was trending on Twitter for the majority of the weekend as fans also expressed their sadness.

Winehouse’s death also made its way over to Facebook, where there were also ‘death video’ scams.  Similar to when Osama bin Laden died, there are links to videos supposedly showing footage of the last hours of the singer’s life being spread by scammers.

Yet another hot button is how companies are remembering her.  While fans are downloading Winehouse songs to remember her by, they still unhappy with companies such as Microsoft, iTunes, and Amazon for trying to get them to do the same thing.  After Microsoft posted a tweet saying, “Remember Amy Winehouse by downloading the ground-breaking ‘Back to Black’”, with a link to download the album on Zune. There was so much backlash on Twitter that Microsoft tweeted an apology.

Have you noticed any online activity that seems to occur whenever a celebrity dies that can be added to the list?

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Spotify Finally Crosses the Pond

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

“Imagine the iTunes store, except all the music is free.”  That is the pitch for the Spotify music service.  And now, it’s finally available in the United States to those lucky enough to find an invitation.

Spotify is a music streaming service started in 2008 in Sweden and has become quite popular in Europe.  After months of speculation and rumors, it finally launched in America on July 14.  Spotify is now in an invite-only beta with some exclusive launch partners such as Coca-Cola to help spread the word.  They even published a celebratory playlist for users to listen to once they’ve signed up.

The pitch comparing Spotify to the iTunes store isn’t literal, of course, but it is pretty similar and very impressive.  There is a free version with a 20-hour listening limit and occasional ads, as well as two paid options.  Spotify has 15 million songs available to listen to on demand.  You can use the search bar to find any song in the library or browse the top songs and albums and drag and drop it directly into a playlist.  You can even integrate your local library so that music files saved on your computer can be played in Spotify.

But the most unique part of the service is Spotify Social, Spotify’s way to share music with others.  On their website, they say “As soon as you discover new music, you want to share it with people.”  This is not only because of how popular social media is today; music has been an important shared experience for centuries.  With Spotify Social, you can share songs and playlists with your social networks.  Besides publishing and subscribing to playlists, you can also collaborate on playlists and send songs or playlists directly to specific friends’ Spotify inboxes.  There are also websites devoted to sharing playlists, such as Spotifylists.com.

Even though Spotify is still in beta, there have been many ways to snag an invite.  Klout, a site that rates your social media influence, reported that they gave away 15,000-20,000 invites through their Klout Perks program, which rewards top influencers with special deals.  Chevrolet gave away Premium account trials on their Facebook page and Coca-Cola was also giving out invites.

Have you been able to snag an invite?  How did you do it and what do you think?

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Virgin Mobile FreeFest Presale Tickets Fly

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

Virgin Mobile FreeFest concert tickets went live this morning at 10:00am to those who were lucky enough to get their hands on the early release passwords FREEMESOME, FREEAGAIN, and CRAZY4FREE. The unique thing about getting tickets to the live benefit show is that people needed to “like” the Virgin Mobile Live fanpage on Facebook and “purchase” tickets through the link provided on the wall.

Music-lovers took to the social media page, continually refreshing, until the link “CLICK ME TO GET YOUR FREEFEST TICKETS” was displayed on the Virgin Mobile Live wall. They scrambled to get through the gates of the over-loaded servers, type their given passwords, and fill out personal information all before time ran out and the tickets were released again for another lucky fan.

The allotted number of free presale tickets was gone in 10 minutes flat. The number of Facebook users who like the page is now up to more than 142,000 and the post containing the link to obtain the tickets has over 1,000 comments alone, many of which are from disgruntled fans that didn’t get the opportunity to nab tickets for themselves.

For those angry Facebookers, Virgin Mobile assures that “everyone will have the chance to get free tickets tomorrow at 10AM (ET). Be there or be square!”

The lineup this year includes acts like Cee Lo Green, The Black Keys, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, TV on the Radio, James Murphy, and many more. It all kicks off on September 10 at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, MD.

The purpose behind the benefit rock music festival is to bring awareness to the nation’s homeless youth. Virgin Mobile wants to celebrate the fans by putting on the free concert, and they’re hopes are that “with the money you’re saving on festival tickets, you can donate $10 to help the homeless youth in America here.”

So, if you were lucky enough to get your tickets today, throw some cash to a good cause; and if you weren’t, be patient and try again tomorrow!

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