David Holmes of PandoDaily wrote a great feature on Overhead.fm’s product and origin story.
Holmes writes that Overhead.fm is a compelling music solution for businesses, especially as an alternative to Muzak:
For the thousands of businesses already using an old-school service, Overhead.fm is a pretty attractive alternative.
Check out the full article.
Though our headquarters are currently in the Mecca of tech and startups, the San Francisco Bay Area, we have our roots firmly planted in two wonderful cities. Los Angeles and Providence are home to The Troubadour and Lupo’s, where our founders spent many evenings at shows “researching music”.
Overhead.fm was founded in Providence, Rhode Island’s bourgeoning technology scene. Providence is the state capital, the second largest city in New England, and home to leading research universities. Though the city keeps a relatively low profile, it is home to a diverse industry portfolio from tech startups to Fortune 500 companies like CVS Caremark.
Overhead moved its headquarters to Los Angeles in late 2012 to be at the epicenter of the entertainment industry. It is the hotbed of undiscovered young talent playing in trendy speakeasies and the world’s biggest stars selling out The Greek, The Hollywood Bowl, and Nokia Theatre “L.A. Live”.
Thrillist came out with a list of America’s 7 Best Rock Clubs and two of our favorites from our old homes made the list (along with the Great American Music Hall in our new home, which deserves a blog post as well). This got us talking about which venue offered us more enjoyment while we were in each city. The Troubadour is an American icon and likely the most influential rock venue in the world. As a small sample of it’s impact, The Troubadour is where The Byrds got their start, The Eagle’s Don Henley and Glenn Frey first met, and Cheech and Chong’s comedy was discovered. As a result, the tiny venue attracts some of the biggest names in music at affordable prices. For example, OK Go will perform for a capacity crowd of around 400 for 20 bucks this July. But perhaps the venue’s greatest strength are the shows with relatively unknown performers. The likelihood that you are experiencing the early days of next big thing is high because this is where the next big star is created and found. At The Troubadour you can enjoy a few drinks at the friendly front bar, before an intimate performance with immensely talented performers on some of music’s most hallowed ground.
Read more...Happy New Year from all of us at Overhead.fm, and thank you for making 2013 our best year yet! We’re really excited about how far Overhead.fm has come and where we’re going in the new year. This has all only been made possible because of our awesome customers, especially those that took a chance on us when Overhead.fm was just getting started. It’s been great growing with you in 2013, we’re looking forward to another great year in 2014!
Many businesses choose Overhead.fm as their background music provider because we allow them to use their own computer, tablet or phone, but isn’t an option for all of our customers. Restaurant chains, property management companies, and other businesses with more complex needs often prefer to have Overhead.fm run on dedicated hardware.
To address the needs of this type of customers, Overhead.fm offers the ability to purchase a dedicated business music player. Today, that player is getting a major upgrade.
Upon receipt of the new device, the most obvious improvement is the significantly larger touch screen. Upgrading from the old 4.3” device to the new 7” device more than doubles the area of the screen. This is roughly the equivalent to the difference between an iPhone 5 and an iPad mini.
Perhaps more importantly, the device’s touch input has also been vastly improved. The new player features a capacitive multi-touch digitizer like those used on premium phones and tablets.
What hasn’t changed is the price: the new player is still only $74.95 with free standard shipping. As always, the player comes with the Overhead.fm app pre-installed and works with your existing wifi network.
Updated 3/15/2014: Image updated to show updated interface
The Overhead.fm player has seen a lot of new features in the last year, and the player design has accomodated these additions admirably. Still, we’ve worried that some of the simplicity and elegance of the orignal Overhead.fm design has been lost in the pursuit of adding new features.
To make sure that Overhead.fm remains simple to use, we embarked on a project to complete redesign our webapp. Today, we’re giving subscribers a sneak peek into what we’ve been working on. To see the new version, simply opt in using the new banner at the top the player - you can always switch back.
The new interface radically simplifies things: it provides easy access to the most important content, your mix stations and curated playlists. It also makes updating your account or billing information seamleess.
The new webapp is designed to adapt to screensizes ranging from smartphones up to large-screen displays. This versatility is important, as we know that businesses use Overhead.fm on a wide range of devices.
Read more...About Overhead.fm
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