Tag: music

To the beat of the crowd: Looking back at 20 years of digital music disruption

To the beat of the crowd: Looking back at 20 years of digital music disruption

Nov 12, 2015 |

In 1999, with little more than a clever piece of code, Shawn Fanning turned the music industry on its head. Napster, a P2P file sharing service, enabled music listeners to download MP3s and share them with others, for free. The genie was out the bottle and the music industry would never sound the same again. The disruption of the music industry in the last 20 years, however, is not just a story about musicians and record companies, but rather a compelling tale about coders, entrepreneurship, legal battles, and listener entitlement. Here are some of the key developments of the last two decades that shaped the music industry into what it is today, leading it into the 21st century, and beyond: 1995: File extension “.mp3” After the advent of the CD in the late 1970s, the next major stride in digital music technology came with the emergence of the MP3. An organization that went by the name of Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) set out to define standards in audio recording in the late 1980s. MPEG compressed music digitally by eliminating...

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Serendip: Improving the radio experience (and Pandora burnout)

Serendip: Improving the radio experience (and Pandora burnout)

Oct 22, 2012 |

It is clear that social media has become the greatest way to share interests, business ideas, and news that the world has ever seen. Hundreds of apps and websites have leaned on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace for publicity and advertisement. However, there has yet to be an app that encompasses music and social media into one; and that’s exactly what Serendip does. Created in 2011 by Sagee Ben-Zedeff, Serendip enables users to listen to a radio-like experience that one could enjoy, and share his or her playlists through Facebook and Twitter. The user could then view his friend’s playlist, and so on. The profile looks shockingly similar to a Twitter account, but Serendip focuses on music only. With over 1 billion people on Facebook and almost 200 million Twitter users, Serendip hopes to spread like wildfire. Serendip has received $1 million in seed funding in its first round. [bra_team_member member_name=”Elan Yudkowsky” member_position=”Intern at OurCrowd” member_img_src=”https://blog.ourcrowd.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/elan.jpg” member_social_list=”LinkedIn, http://www.linkedin.com/pub/elan-yudkowsky/5a/689/649″ member_columns=”2″]Elan Yudkowsky is an intern at OurCrowd. He will be attending the University of Maryland in the...

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