We’re excited to announce the launch of our new Library and Crate, which together will help you more easily discover and create playlists with music from independent artists. The Library will include over 6.5 million songs provided by INgrooves, CD Baby, Dim Mak, DashGo, featuring independent artists like Steve Aoki, James Vincent McMorrow, Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros and more.

Now, when you’re enjoying a playlist and you find a song that you love, go ahead and favorite it! If that song is available through the new Library, it will be added to your Crate so that later, when you’re making the perfect playlist, you can easily find it. On the mix creation page, you’ll also now be able to search both the Library and Crate by artist name or song title to find an old favorite track that is right for your new playlist.

This is just the beginning! We expect this to be a big year and want to thank you for all your support!

Ever wondered what the best music is for driving? How about working out? We decided to find out. Looking at this past year, we combed our listeners’ feedback across our 360 million hours of streaming to uncover their favorite artists and songs for certain activities and moods.

Looking across tens of thousands of playlists for popular tags like driving, feeling good, working out, studying and in love, we found the top 10 songs that our listeners shared and enjoyed the most for each respective tag in 2014.

And voila! Today we’re launching 8tracks Charts, a collection of playlists that chart the top 100 songs for some of our listeners’ favorite moments.

Today we’re excited to bring a little bit of holiday magic into your lives. Specifically the type of magic that allows you to beam 8tracks playlists from your laptop to your TV. You might call it witchcraft, but actually it’s 8tracks Chromecast compatibility – now on web. 

That’s right, everyone – as of today if you have a Chromecast setup you can play 8tracks playlists on your TV while controlling them from your browser. So if you’re in the kitchen making a crazy awesome holiday meal, but still want to be in charge of the music (which you should be, you’re cooking for everyone in this hypothetical situation), then you can still have complete control. It’s your domain. 

To try it out, download the Chromecast extension if you haven’t already, then launch the Chromecast player on your TV from any 8tracks playlist page.

It’s December, everyone, which means the time has come to reflect on an amazing year in music. We thought about just sharing some of the tracks we loved from 2014, but we think we have something way better: a whole collection of playlists assembled by the record labels, artists, and blogs responsible for sharing and creating some of this year’s best music.

Collecting picks from our friends at Warp, UltraMusic, Domino, Polyvinyl, Drowned in Sound, and many more, our Best of 2014 is (we think) the definitive collection and the last word on the year’s most exciting music, chosen by the folks who make it happen.

Today we’re beyond excited to unveil the latest advancement in playlist technology: 8tracks 3.0 on Android, available as of today on Google Play. Coming on the heels of a complete redesign of our iPhone, iPad, and Xbox apps earlier this year, the new release features a similar improvement of the design and navigation we brought to those apps. This means we officially have a complete roster of new apps in time for the new school year, which experts predict will improve student test scores by as much as 1000%.

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