• Music Search Startup SoundHound Partners With Spotify For Instant Streaming

    Robin Wauters

    Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

    Thursday, August 25th, 2011
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    Music search and discovery company SoundHound has inked a deal with digital music service provider Spotify to enable SoundHound users in Europe to instantly access the latter’s catalogue (of over 15 million tracks). From the sound of it, the partnership doesn’t enable users outside of Europe to cross that particular bridge just yet.

    Starting today, SoundHound users on iOS and Android devices who also subscribe to Spotify Premium will be given the option to ‘Play Now in Spotify’ after identifying a song through the music discovery and recognition service. That goes for users of both the free and the paid SoundHound apps.

    SoundHound users in Europe who don’t subscribe to Spotify Premium will be redirected to a page inviting them to become Spotify users before proceeding to listen to the track.

    A direct Shazam (Encore) competitor, SoundHound’s ‘Sound2Sound’ technology searches sound against sound, thus bypassing traditional sound-to-text conversion techniques.

    Headquartered in San Jose, California, SoundHound is backed by Global Catalyst Partners, TransLink Capital, Walden Venture Capital, and other Silicon Valley investors.