Despite fears that streaming access cannibalizes sales, classical music record label X5 tells me when it launched an app within Spotify and saw streams of one album increase 412% in a month, that album’s iTunes sales shot up 50%. The Swedish label’s “The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music” soon reached #1 on the iTunes Classical charts, and broke into the iTunes Top 200 album charts for the first time, hitting #152.
The stats back up claims by some record labels and Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek that there’s no evidence of Spotify or other streaming services negatively impacting music sales. More data like this could encourage artists and labels to promote their streaming music presences, and push acts like The Black Keys and Paul McCartney who’ve pulled their catalogues from Spotify to come back. → Read More
Music streaming provider Deezer is one of the bigger (and older — it’s been around since 2006) services of its kind, with some 20 million registered users in 48 territories, and 15 million tracks in its catalog — but it has failed to capture mindshare in quite the same way as rival Spotify; and some might argue that this will make it harder in the long run for Deezer to keep up and grow.
Today sees the launch of the company’s latest attempt to turn that situation around: “Open Deezer,” a new set of APIs for iOS, Android and Java-based web apps, which it hopes will help it bring on a new raft of developers to create music services around its platform.
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Today, Spotify is releasing its long-awaited iPad app — finally giving Apple tablet users, who also have a Spotify Premium (paid) subscription, a native route to accessing its 17-million song catalog.
It will be worth seeing whether pent-up demand for the app will translate into a rush of downloads and usage, in the same way that Spotify saw around its (also long-awaited) U.S. launch last year. On the back of that, the U.S. has become Spotify’s fastest-growing market, with the company projected to make $889 million in revenues this year on a global user base of 13 million people and counting. → Read More
Spotify has been busy as of late, launching brand apps, adding more social functionality through a partnership with Turntable.fm competitor Soundrop, overhauling its Android app, adding a Play button, and more.
And it seems that the company has hit a few more scaling milestones recently: According to AppData, there are more than 18 million monthly active users now on the Spotify platform. While Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wouldn’t confirm the AppData number, he did say that the company was at 17 million tracks and 700 million playlists across the platform. → Read More
Right now I’m sitting in a room covered in Spotify and Coca-Cola logos. That’s because Spotify and Coke have just announced a global partnership to help both brands expand their ubiquity.
The folks at Coke explained that music has always been a huge part of Coke’s marketing efforts, going all the way back to a series of ads featuring Ray Charles nearly 50 years ago. That said, the partnership will focus on four key pillars: global, technology, social, and a commitment to music. Spotify explained that Coca-Cola will be a huge factor in bringing Spotify to new markets and new corners of the world. → Read More
As Spotify continues its march to becoming a $1 billion-revenue company, the music streaming service is launching a battery of new products to increase the amount of time that people spend on the site: There is an iPad app that could launch as soon as tomorrow; and there is the ability to play Spotify tracks on third-party websites, launched last week. Another development in Spotify’s stickiness has been the rise of third-party, web and mobile apps, which have been planting themselves on its platform and growing in use.
One of the more popular has been Soundrop: a jukebox-style app that lets users create playlists or listen to “rooms” of music created by others, adding their selections to the mix — similar to Turntable.fm, except that it works in more countries (everywhere that Spotify does; currently 13 markets compared to Turntable’s U.S.-only limit).
It’s not only users who are finding Soundrop popular: Inge Andre Sandvik, the co-founder and CEO, says the company is weeks away now from closing its first round of funding from “leading VCs.” → Read More
Spotify’s storming of the U.S. market last year has seen the company rack up a total of 10 million active users of its music streaming services. It is projected to have revenues of $889 million this year, up 160 percent on 2011. But with that growth also comes increasing net losses, which in 2011 doubled to the tune of around $60 million.
Daniel Ek, CEO of the music streaming company, says in a candid interview with the Swedish financial paper Dagens Industri (translation here) that the question of when Spotify will show a profit is currently irrelevant. “Our focus is entirely on growth,” he told the publication. “That is priority one, two, three, four and five.” → Read More
Spotify wants to make it easier for anyone to legally soundtrack their websites, oh, and get links to its own download page plastered all over the Internet. So today it launches the embeddable Spotify Play Button for news sites that when clicked starts playing a designated song, album, or playlist in your Spotify desktop app. Rolling Stone, The Huffington Post, and the Guardian are amongst the marquee launch partners that will start featuring the button today, and Tumblr bloggers can instantly add Spotify music to their posts straight from the audio dashboard.
While Spotify tells me this is all about improving music discovery and the listening experience, the real benefit for it comes when someone without its desktop app clicks the button — they’re prompted to download Spotify (shown below). The company’s user acquisition costs are supposedly sky high, so free promotion through the Play Button could be key to making its business model hum. → Read More
Ever since I met the Songza guys at New York Tech Meetup, I’ve wanted to learn more about the app. It’s the first music service that I’ve been excited to use, mostly because it removes the work entirely. I’ve been curious about a few things, like how Songza plans to combat the big boys, namely Pandora, and how exactly these guys are making any money. Remember, Songza has no audio ads, no limits, and is free to download.
Co-founders Elias Roman and Eric Davich sat down with me to discuss this and more, saying that the only way to enter into a space as crowded as streaming music is to bring something totally different to the table. → Read More
Don’t stop the music. It seems obvious, but MOG is the first of the big on-demand music streaming services to get this right on a tablet. Today MOG officially releases its iPad app, and it includes MOG Radio which when enabled will continue to play songs after your currently queued tracks finish. No more hours of accidental silence. It’s also retina-ready to crisply display artwork, bios, editor’s picks, and reviews.
Compared to Rdio’s iPad app and Spotify for iPhone (no iPad app available), MOG has the best experience for simply playing music, it streams in higher fidelity on Wi-Fi, and provides the most accurate recommendations. Here’s a full breakdown of how the three compare on music playback, discovery, price, and sound quality. → Read More
There’s a fundamental problem with startups that depend on premium licensed content: If you succeed, the content owners will jack up their licensing fees. This is why Business Insider’s rumor that Spotify is raising a big round of funding makes sense.
In the seven months since Spotify launched in the U.S. it’s made huge strides, signing up over 3 million paying subscribers, and hitting 17.4 million monthly and 5.3 million daily users. Even though the record labels own a stake of the company, Spotify’s success make it a lucrative target for extortion.
Unfortunately, this is why investing in Spotify may not be wise and why firms like Andreessen-Horowitz may have passed. → Read More
Deezer came out well before Spotify appeared on the horizon – 2007 in fact – to disrupt the streaming music space, but it faces a problem. Spotify has sucked up a lot of air despite having less registered users, 15 million to Deezer’s 20 million. The again Deezer has 1.5 million paying subscribers when Spotify is over 3 million right now. What do they do next?
Deezer is fighting back, doubling down outside of the U.S. aiming to launch in 200 territories this year (most recently the U.K.), although not in the U.S., where Spotify just launched. Still, the Paris-based company today iterates on its product with the launch of an off-line mode which will run inside the browser. It is currently available on Chrome, and will be on other browsers very soon. Yes folks, that means you won’t need a desktop app, unlike Spotify. The announcement was made today at the London Web Summit by CEO Axel Dauchez. → Read More
The landgrab for music streaming customers is on, and Rdio — the U.S.-based startup from Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis — is joining that race in earnest.
The company today announced that it is now live in Spain and Portugal, just one month after it launched in its first European service, in Germany. The total number of countries where Rdio now works is up to eight, including the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Germany, Australia and New Zealand — and hints that there will be more to come. → Read More
On November 30 2011, Spotify made a bold move: it became an application platform, allowing third-party apps to live within the walls of Spotify’s official application so that they could take advantage of the service’s full-song streaming and tight Facebook integration. The revamped Spotify went live last month, and there are 13 third-party apps now available as part of the App Finder.
One app is especially straightforward, and it’s also surprisingly fun. It’s called Top10, and you can find it right here. → Read More
The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
If you’re a BlackBerry user and you’ve been waiting for a music service that’s just a bit more compelling than BBM Music, then you may be in luck — emphasis on the “may.” Spotify for BlackBerry was officially released today, but you’ll only be able to use it under some specific circumstances.
The newly released app will only work for users with the following BlackBerrys: the Bold 9780, Bold 9700, Curve 9300, Bold 9000, and the Curve 8520. → Read More
It’s telling that Apple chose an app that debuted more than 14 months ago, Instagram, as its “iPhone App of the Year” for 2011. This should not imply that there was a shortage of quality and groundbreaking apps released this year. Far from it.
From social magazines to music discovery apps to console-quality games that players can hold in the palms of their hands, there are hundreds of new titles in the iTunes App Store that will inform, organize, and entertain virtually anyone who owns an iOS device. As more choices become available to different kinds of consumers, however, it’s difficult to identify the undisputed champions of the app world.
We picked 20 of the best iOS applications that came out or received significant updates in 2011. The list is a healthy mix of free and paid titles that can run on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. (We will follow up with a separate top 20 list just for games, which are not included in this list). → Read More
For a long time now, Spotify has had its own Radio experience, but, to be honest, it hasn’t been very good. Then, last week, the Swedish-turned-America music service announced that it was redesigning its radio experience from the ground up, offering unlimited stations and unlimited “skips”. And it’s no mistake that, during his presentation of the new Spotify Radio, CEO Daniel Ek happened to compare his app to Pandora.
Since its IPO, Pandora has been on a kick, but Spotify is doing everything it can to continue nipping at its heels and has added 7 million new users since integrating with Facebook at f8. Enter: The Echo Nest, a music intelligence startup whose technology powers many music apps from media companies and independent developers → Read More
Hot music startup Spotify is holding a special event in New York City this morning, where it’s going to unveil what it’s calling a “New Direction” for the service. Spotify hasn’t given any details on what to expect, but it obviously considers it to be a very big deal — enough so that it’s invited dozens of reporters to attend.
Several reports indicate that Spotify will be launching a new platform for third party developers, who will be able to integrate Spotify’s large catalog of music into new applications.
As seems to be Spotify’s style, the event has unusually high production values: waiters are handing out espressos and bite-sized breakfast foods that I’ve never heard of (but are quite delicious). The company has a custom backdrop for the stage featuring music-themed illustrations. And there are over a dozen flat-panel televisions lining the walls, which I suspect will be used to showcase third-party apps later on in the event. → Read More
Something about the juxtaposition of things reminds me of the politics of disruption, the emotional spring of the social generation. By themselves, interesting, intellectual perhaps, but not of the parallel land of hope and acceptance.
I read an interview with Noel Gallagher, the supposedly sane one of the Oasis brothers. Something about Oasis being in the Top 10 of bands. He ducked the statement briefly, attributing it to alcohol and passing it off as Top 20 straight. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
