Music

Twitter is now helping guide users of its music service to the types of music they want to hear.

Thursday, Twitter Music, the 2-month-old Web and mobile streaming service powered by Twitter activity, was updated with a discovery feature called charts, which offers people a genre-based approach to music listening.

With charts, Twitter Music users can now select from Twitter-generated playlists based on music genre and find special types of charts, such as "Popular" for new music trending on Twitter or "Superstars" for new tracks from hit artists. Following the Twitter Music formula, tracks are featured … Read more

Once you put a number on something, that's it, isn't it?

Your height, your shoe size, your IQ, they all define you.

Some companies like to put a number on ads. Why wallow in thinking about the emotional impact of an ad, when you can just give it a number -- pass or fail?

I was moved to utter stasis, therefore, when Bloomberg offered me the pulsating news that Apple's latest ad -- the one introducing the line "Designed by Apple in California" was a mere 489.

A 489 is about the level of, oh, … Read more

Pandora struck back against critics Wednesday, calling accusations that the streaming radio service is trying to shortchange musicians "a lie."

In a blog post Wednesday, Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren accused the Recording Industry Association of America, the organization charged with defending the interests of musicians, of orchestrating and funding a "misinformation campaign" involving well-known artists. The RIAA believes artists should be paid more than they currently receive for their songs being played on the streaming service and has accused Pandora of trying to persuade musicians to accept a substantial reduction in royalties.

While saying he bore … Read more

Wouldn't it be great if you could have your very own disco everywhere you go? Forget the shoulder-borne boombox -- student Yuhan Zhang from Sweden's Umea Institute of Design has brought mobile music into the 21st century.

Called the Marshall Dicycle, the concept is designed around amp maker Marshall, although the look of the thing seems to skew more toward "Tron" than Marshall's rather traditional style. … Read more

It's pretty well established that torrent files can be used for downloading pirated music, movies, games, and more. But, the company BitTorrent wants it to be known that it has nothing to do with such piracy.

The company's vice president of marketing Matt Mason penned a blog post on Tuesday saying that while BitTorrent built the open-source, peer-to-peer technology used for content sharing, it does not endorse piracy in any shape or form.

"We don't host infringing content. We don't point to it. It's literally impossible to 'illegally download something on BitTorrent,'" Mason … Read more

The wrangling between those who'd like to be paid for creating music and those who would like to pay them a shoelace and a Mars bar may never end.

In the latest edition of "Oh, No You Don't," Roger Waters, David Gilmour, and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd have buried the hatchet, then together picked it up and embedded it into Pandora's (Voice) Box.

They are royally miffed at what they see is Pandora's attempt to hoodwink artists into supporting a reduction on their royalties of 85 percent.

So in a USA Today editorial aimed squarely at Pandora, … Read more

Some people just don't want to spend a lot of money on headphones, and I don't blame them.

But can you get a decent pair of headphones on a very tight budget?

Sure. And you can even find some models that deliver fairly impressive sound for less than $10.

Click on any image to see our picks.

Earlier I put together a list of headphones that cost less than $50. While that list included some models that you could pick up for less than $25, the ones I've rounded up here all come in under $25 -- and even a few under $10. However, most of the models in this price range are limited to in-ear and on-ear models, not the larger over-the-ear or wireless Bluetooth headphones.… Read more

They are red-eyed and dead-eyed.

They are brain-dead and stiff-lipped.

Their pale faces stare at you, ready to infect you, so that they can affect you. Who are these people? These are the iZombies.

Yes, no sooner had Samsung become somewhat bored with smacking at Apple's pinata of faith then Nokia decided that it, too, must show iPhone users as a group gone awry.

In a new ad to press home the advantage of the flashy, nonflashy camera on the 925 phone, Nokia paints iPhone users as zombies: all flash and no panache.

Here we have the lone Nokia … Read more

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is known for being near the front of the line when a new Apple product is released, but it turns out that Woz himself was on the birthday wish list of... wait for it... hip-hop icon Kanye West.

Woz revealed to CNN's Piers Morgan this week that Kanye's girlfriend, babymama and fellow pop culture titan Kim Kardashian asked him to come up for a visit with West about their common interest in technology as a birthday present to the controversial rapper.… Read more