Kiran Upadhyay

Editor’s note: Philip Inghelbrecht is a co-founder of Shazam, investor in 8tracks, and a paying Spotify subscriber. Of all industry roller coasters, the music industry must be the wildest. The last 30 years reshaped the business in a way we never could have imagined. Music as a product changed dramatically (e.g. from LPs to MP3s) and the ups and downs in worldwide sales would make the most hardened theme park visitor queasy. Nonetheless, we have yet to experience the biggest switchback on this rollercoaster ride. The clues for what’s around the next turn lie in a sister industry — movies. Let’s start by taking a look at the music industry. According to the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) revenue peaked at $38bn worldwide in 1999, collapsed down to $16 billion (2011), edged up somewhat the year after, only to fall back down again to $15 billion last year (2013). The transition from analogue to digital played an important role in all of this: it m...

Cloud storage service Box — which some say is great for photo storage — has stepped into the online collaborative note-taking game with the launch of  Box Notes , a new free service that lets you create documents, share them with friends and work on them in real time. Box Notes is currently in beta and you can sign up to ask for an invitation. A few users we know have already got access to the service a few hours after registering their email. Essentially, Box Notes is a blank online text field for you to start writing. The rich text formatting tools aren’t shown by default, but highlighting any word will have those appear for you to add a link or leave a comment. The commenting system is part of the focus on collaboration, encouraging users to add profile pics so your coworkers can see you through the new ‘note heads’ — similar to chat heads — which are little circles with your picture. When in collaboration mode, these note heads always show up outside the lef...

Spare a thought if you will for the hipsters amongst us, and the travails they face on a daily basis. It’s hard finding the right Urban Outfitters flannel and skinny-jeans combo to go with your finely-groomed, ironic upper lip hair. It’s hard when you rush to your nearby organic-cooperative craft ale bar only to find that their seemingly endless supply of copies of Vice Magazine have run out. Perhaps most crucially, it’s hard finding bands to talk about that your equally hip friends have never heard of. MusicFellas  aims to solve the latter problem. Recently formed in India by four enterprising music fans, it aims to offer a service that bridges functionality found in iTunes and Spotify, and make it easy to discover quality Indie music, as well as showcasing undiscovered artists. It also hopes to revolutionize the way we consume and pay for music. An ambitious project if there ever was one. But does it deliver, or does it hit a bum note? A Beautiful Streaming...

I think the need for music and rhythm is one of the most basic human needs; and as we evolve, so evolve our ways of hunting and gathering this precious commodity. In this post, I've gathered 10 great places to expand your musical horizons: free, legal ways to discover music online, which work  everywhere  (not only in the US or in Europe)! Not all of the sites below actually let you  listen  to music - they are not all players; but they can all help you find the next big thing, or just a tune to groove to. Let's get started! Uvumi Uvumi  is one of my favorite players in this space. You probably won't find much music you already know there; it's a community for budding artists, which lets them put their music online, be discovered and get direct feedback from their listeners. I've covered Uvumi in detail, but if I had to sum it up in brief, I'd have to say that what impressed me most about the site is how well-managed it is. Marshall (the guy behind the ...

While jazz is not a dying art form, it’s not always a part of mainstream music radio stations. But the legacy of jazz giants like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Dave Brubeck are still thriving and finding new generations of audiences. And contemporary artists like Herbie Hancock, Al Jarreau, Terrance Blanchard, Tutu Puoane, Carmen Lundy carry on the tradition, insuring that jazz lives on forever. If the names of these artists are not familiar to you, then you can read more about them from a slew of well designed and content-filled websites featuring album lists, reviews, sample MP3s, concert and club performance videos that I’ll be listing. Best Jazz Lists “Best” lists are always subjective but if you want to get an idea of the jazz greats, the lists I found on the net are not all that varied in their selections. The aptly named 100 Greatest Jazz Albums site offers a great “100 Best” catalog, including recording dates and reviews for each album. It...