Somerville, MA and Brooklyn, NY (Top40 Charts/ Echo Nest) - Eliot Van Buskirk, a 13-year veteran writer and editor formerly of CNET and Wired.com, announced today the launch of Evolver.fm, a consumer-facing publication covering music apps, which he believes to be the most significant new development in music and technology in over a decade. Evolver.fm - emerging from beta today - is music fans' definitive online resource for music applications on smartphones, web browsers, televisions, cars, and future platforms yet undreamt.
Evolver.fm is published by The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform powering the next generation of music applications. As the hub of innovative music application development, The Echo Nest is publishing Evolver.fm to provide a much-needed online publication to document the fast-growing music app market.
"As someone who has covered digital music since the nineties, I'm tremendously excited about the opportunity to track music apps and their effect on music culture from the perspective of music fans and technology enthusiasts," said Evolver.fm Editor in Chief Eliot Van Buskirk. "Quite plainly, apps represent the future of the music business. The first phase of the digital music revolution was heralded by the transformation of digital music into something invisible and nearly free to distribute, as I saw firsthand at CNET and later at Wired.com. This second phase is about the invisibility and easy distribution of the music player itself. You'd never own 20 to 40 hardware MP3 players, but you could easily install that many music apps on various platforms."
Emerging from initial beta release, Evolver.fm - targeting music listeners who use smartphones, computers, or television set-top boxes - debuted a unique black-background redesign this week that makes articles easy to read and share, and plans to roll out another big feature in the coming months. The site also launched a new Untapped Apps section, where users can vote on the music apps they want to see made. Voting is now open at Evolver.fm/UntappedApps.
"We're asking the crowd to decide which apps people want the most, from a list of 12 great ideas generated by The Echo Nest staffers," added Van Buskirk. "Once people have voted, we welcome their music app ideas for the next round of the Untapped Apps series, which I'm hoping will help shape the music apps of tomorrow."
Evolver.fm is currently live. See evolver.fm/about for more information about Van Buskirk and his intentions for Evolver.fm, the leading resource for music fans in the music app era.