[News] Spotify To Add Apps: Including Last.fm, Rolling Stone, Lyrics, Other Third-Party Apps

In their quest for music world domination, music streaming service Spotify just announced that they will be integrating apps into the popular player soon. The service will kick off the apps launch with content partners such as Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Last.fm, TuneWiki, and Songkick, with more on the way.

The apps will be customizable and will show up in the left bar of the player along with your playlists, local libraries, etc.This is a smart move for Spotify. Why waste time trying to integrate these kinds of features on your own when there are plenty of companies already killing it in these respective fields? Want suggestions from news sources you already know and trust? There's an app for that. Want to be able to read (or sing) along with the lyrics to a song? There's an app for that. Want to know when an artist is rolling through your town? Well, you guessed it. There's an app for that, too. These new features should be rolling out sometime this week and will be available to both free and premium accounts.

It will be interesting to see how services like Rdio, MOG, Pandora, etc. respond to this new feature. Either way it will be better for us music junkies in the long run to have these services fighting over us by upping their features and enlarging their music libraries.

[SKOA Presents] We're Drizzling A Little Awesome Sauce On Our Reviews!

So first of all, we kind of had record numbers for this humble little site. THANK YOU ALL FOR STOPPING BY AND LOVING ON JACK WHITE AS MUCH AS WE DO! We never realized that a couple little streams could be such a game changer. We hope you continue to stop by and leave comments so we can all geek out together about music we all love.

Due to the sudden surge of eyeballs on our part of the interwebz (HI NEW PEOPLE!!!), we figured we should start getting a little fancier than we've been in the past. BUT in true SKOA form we're trying to not take ourselves too seriously since we are music fans and not snobby critics (at best we try to make sure we don't come off like that anyways).

Having said that, I present to you the Official Some Kind Of Awesome Rating System:

That's right. Freaking Awesome Sauce. No 7.4s here (yes Pitchfork, we are looking at you) out of 10. Just a simple 5 "bottle" rating system. This will essentially be our gauge of how much we're into something, be it a show or a single/album.

Now let it be known: we do not intend to review things we're not in love with. That's a waste of time, especially when there is so much awesome in the world. The albums you see here will always start at three bottles at the very least. Unless something REALLY leaves a bad taste in our mouth, we hope to never unveil the one or two bottles.

We have a lot in the works to continue to share with out everything that we think is super awesome and would love your feedback every step of the way because as much as this is a creative outlet for us, we really just want to geek out with other people.

Pitchfork Music Festival Dates Announced, First Round Of Bands Revealed + Tickets On Sale Friday

 

The 2010 Pitchfork Music Festival celebrates its fifth anniversary this year at Chicago’s Union Park, on Friday, July 16 - Sunday, July 18. This three-day event will once again showcase a variety of cutting-edge, global performers on three stages in one of the most comfortable and positive festival environments in the country, all brought to fans at a fraction of the price of any other nationally renowned music festival.

 

Tickets for the 2010 Pitchfork Music Festival will be on sale Friday, February 5th, with single-day tickets for $40 and three-day passes for $90. The first round of bands will be announced on Friday, February 5th as well. Two-day passes will not be available for purchase. This year, Friday’s performances will begin earlier to present fans with a longer first day of music. Tickets can be purchased at www.pitchforkmusicfestival.com.