A blog is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. In the 2000s, blogs were often the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014, now known as the Llama Group. Since version 2 it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community.
The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community or as a social networking service in which everyday authors can publish their opinions and views.
Magnatune is an American independent record label based in Berkeley, California, founded in spring 2003. It only sold music for download through its website but added a print-CD-on-demand service in late 2004 and in October 2007 began selling complete albums and individual tracks through Amazon.com. In May 2008, Magnatune launched all-you-can-eat membership plans. From March 2010 Magnatune dropped the CD printing service and moved exclusively to all-you-can-eat membership plans. Magnatune was the first record label to license music online and as of May 2015 had sold over 7,000 licenses in its twelve years of existence.
AllOfMP3, MP3Sparks and MemphisMembers are brands of online music store that were operated by Mediaservices, Inc., a company founded in 2000 in Moscow, Russia. The stores formerly sold music encoded in standard, non-protected audio formats at a significantly lower cost than other online music stores. In 2008, the original AllOfMp3 site was replaced by a blog.
eMusic is an online music and audiobook store that operates by subscription. In exchange for a monthly subscription eMusic users can download a fixed number of MP3 tracks per month. eMusic was established in 1998, is headquartered in New York City with an office in London, and is owned by TriPlay.
50 Foot Wave is an American alternative rock band, formed in 2003. The band is fronted by Kristin Hersh, who writes the group's songs with collaborative efforts from the other group members in composing and arranging the music. The group's name is a reference to both an illustration and the term for the 50-foot sound wave of the lowest F tone audible to the human ear. The band sometimes abbreviates its name as L'~, using the Roman numeral for 50.
Lagoona was a dance and techno band, consisting of the two music producers Andreas Viklund and Björn Karlsson. The band was based in a small town called Porjus in northern Sweden. Lagoona was one of the first groups to call themselves "online artists" and they released their first free MP3 single on the Internet in October 1997, long before the format became widely popular.
Fluxblog is an MP3 blog created and updated by Matthew Perpetua, music editor of BuzzFeed and contributing writer to Pitchfork, Slate, Vulture, Rolling Stone and MTV.
Music for Robots is a defunct MP3 blog written and curated by a collective of friends who originally met at Bates College, who founded the website in April 2004. The blog made history in 2004 when it hosted a song by the band The Secret Machines provided to them by Warner Bros. Records, signaling the first time a major label had deliberately encouraged a blog to post an mp3 by one of its artists. The site gained greater notoriety later that year when MTV aired a news feature about the site and one of their discoveries, a band of teenagers from Brooklyn called Hysterics. In 2005, the "robots" branched out, dipping their toes in concert promotion and releasing a compilation CD titled Music For Robots, Vol. 1, which included music from Hysterics, Avenue D, Death from Above 1979, The Mae Shi, and Daedelus. Music was known for their diverse, comprehensive musical tastes and willingness to cooperate with the record industry, and only post music with permission of the artist and/or label.
An unsigned artist, unsigned band or independent artist is a musician or musical group not under a contract with a record label. The terms are used in the music industry as a marketing technique. Bands that release their own material on self-published CDs can also be considered unsigned bands. Often unsigned bands primarily exist to perform at concerts.
Podcasts, previously known as "audioblogs", have roots dating back to the 1980s. With the advent of broadband Internet access and portable digital audio playback devices such as the iPod, podcasting began to catch hold in late 2004. Today there are more than 115,000 English-language podcasts available on the Internet, and dozens of websites available for distribution at little or no cost to the producer or listener.
Amie Street was an indie online music store and social network service created in 2006 by Brown University seniors Elliott Breece, Elias Roman, and Joshua Boltuch, in Providence, Rhode Island. The site was notable for its demand-based pricing. The company was later moved to Long Island City in Queens, New York. In late 2010, the site was sold to Amazon who redirected customers to their own website.
SpiralFrog was a very early music streaming service based in New York City that launched in the United States and Canada on September 17, 2007. SpiralFrog offered free and legal music downloads, all supported by advertising, and was the largest site of its kind in North America. On March 19, 2009, SpiralFrog terminated operations due to loan recalls. While SpiralFrog was not successful in the end, it nonetheless helped shaped the digital music industry shift from the purchase to streaming models, and its ultimate revenue recovery
The online service imeem was a social media website where users interacted with each other by streaming, uploading and sharing music and music videos. It operated from 2003 until 2009 when it was shut down after being acquired by MySpace.
PassAlong Networks, also known as Tennessee Pacific Group, LLC, was a developer of digital media innovations and services located in Franklin, Tennessee. The company had a digital music library of three million licensed songs, two million of which were raw MP3 music files, and provided a series of products and services in the digital media marketplace.
Hype Machine is a music blog aggregator created by Anthony Volodkin.
Amazon Music is a music streaming platform and digital music store operated by Amazon. As of January 2020, the service had 55 million subscribers.
Ruby Isle is a band created when Mark Mallman joined with his high school friend Dan Geller and drummer Aaron LeMay. They released an EP, Into the Black in 2007 and released their first full-length album Night Shot in 2008.
