I love streaming music and I’m an avid user of Spotify for this purpose. I was pretty delighted when I saw that Taylor Swift’s new album “Red” was available for listening when I opened up the app. I listened to the whole album, and I gotta tell ya…it’s pretty damn good. But then something happened, it dissapeared. And then it came back. Then went away again.
Apparently, Taylor Swift doesn’t… → Read More
Samsung has signed a deal with Spotify to bring the streaming music service to Samsung’s Smart TV range, Blu-ray players and home theatre systems later this year. It appears to be the first TV manufacturer to do so. This is a significant distribution deal for Spotify and will help to tip it over into mainstream consumer application territory.
It’ll mean TV purchasers having instant on-demand… → Read More
On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg named a few products that he is impressed by. In particular, Spotify, Airbnb, Nike+ and Runkeeper caught the attention of Facebook co-founder and CEO.
The first company he named was Spotify. He was straight to the point by stating that “Spotify is killing it right now.” → Read More
When Kieron Donoghue launched ShareMyPlaylists back in 2009, I thought he was just a little crazy to be building a startup on the back of Spotify’s lack of social features and an ecosystem that didn’t really exist yet. Sure, the music streaming service had a somewhat unreliable API, but it hadn’t even launched in the US and wouldn’t do so for some time. There was no Spotify app store either and… → Read More
Yesterday, Josh wrote about how Spotify is planning to push out a browser-based version of its music streaming service. Earlier today AllThingsD further confirmed this and added a bit more color: the price is not likely to be reduced at the same time; and it will start rolling out in about a month. We’ve heard a similar report of an October timeframe from a source. And now, in addition to that we… → Read More
If you’re wondering why the Spotify desktop software has hardly been updated in a year, it’s because the company is preparing to launch a completely overhauled browser-based version of its streaming music service, multiple sources confirm. Along with moving to the web, the redesign will focus more on discovery, including following the listening habits and playlists of influencers in addition to… → Read More
London-based Top10 has had a busy first year, with a September 2011 launch for their original web service announced alongside a $3.5 million Series A round, and then a Spotify app released in January that has so far seen users share over a million song recommendations. Now, the startup is refocusing on its web roots, with a new update that changes the focus slightly, away from user curated top… → Read More
Without a doubt, Spotify is my service-of-choice for listening to music these days. It was a huge win when I was in Mexico, and its offline mode is an absolute life-saver.
For those of you that use the Android version, an update has hit the tubes, and here’s a look at what’s new. → Read More
And the Spotify announcements just keep coming. The folks behind the popular streaming music service called attention to a new deal with Deutsche Telekom earlier this morning, and now the company has revealed that it’s bringing physical gift cards to the United States.
The cards come in $10, $30, and $60 denominations, which translates to one, three, and six months of premium streaming music… → Read More
Add one more distribution partner to Spotify’s list as it seeks more scale for its music streaming service to make it more profitable: Deutsche Telekom, owners of T-Mobile, says that beginning in October, it will be making 18 million tracks from Spotify available to its 35.4 million customers in Germany, with the data usage associated with the streaming not counting against subscribers’ data… → Read More
Friend of TC Nik Cubrilovic posted this clever hack that allows you to listen to the free version of Spotify without having to listen to advertisements. He recommends that it only be used by people who, for reasons of geographic control, cannot pay for a pro account (which is totally worth the cash). → Read More
The neverending patent wars keep on raging, and Spotify is the latest to get targeted in the social media skirmishes. The music streaming company is getting sued by Nonend Inventions, a Dutch company, which claims Spotify is infringing on five of its U.S. patents covering streaming media, peer-to-peer search, and retrieval and playback techniques. Nonend says altogether it holds more than 40… → Read More
European music streaming service Deezer is expanding to Asia. It’s announced that it will roll out in Thailand this week, with Singapore and Malaysia to follow shortly. In addition, Indonesia and the Philippines are expected “within the coming weeks”.
Of note, its Thailand launch is in partnership with dTac, one of the region’s leading telecommunications operators. This sees Deezer replicate… → Read More
If Facebook could collect its 30% tax on what we pay monthly for Spotify, Hulu, or Netflix using the subscription payments system it’s rolling out today, it’d have nice new revenue stream to swim in. But that’s a deep cut for developers to give away just to smooth out friction in the one-time subscription set-up for material services.
So far, the only partners listed in the subscription payment… → Read More
Yesterday, Beats Electronics confirmed that it was buying the music streaming service MOG. Today, HTC, which invested $309 million in Beats last year, revealed to its shareholders just how much was paid: $14 million — a song compared to the $4 billion valuation swirling around its competitor Spotify.
The note, first spotted by the blog Unwired View, is embedded on HTC’s investor relations… → Read More
Here’s an interesting twist for Yahoo, the beleaguered Internet company, and Spotify, the upstart streaming music service that is taking the market by storm: today the two have announced a global deal, in which Yahoo will integrate and promote Spotify’s music service on the Yahoo Media network; and Spotify will get a Yahoo app on its platform. The move shows how Spotify is teaming up with a big… → Read More
Music streaming service Spotify is rolling out a new feature for U.S. users today, which looks like a direct swipe at Pandora: it’s introducing a free mobile radio service. The update is only available in the iOS versions of the app at present (iPhone and iPad), but gives free users access to unlimited music from Spotify’s catalog of 16 million songs. → Read More
Spotify’s move last year to open its platform to other apps has created more stickiness for its streamed music services. Now, one of the startups based around that idea has found some traction of its own: Oslo-based Soundrop, which creates “listening rooms” and social jukebox-style service for Spotify users (think Turntable.fm), has picked up its first round of investment, $3 million from … → Read More
Answering a question at AllThingsD, Sean Parker confirmed that “there was some indication” that Apple tried to keep Spotify out of the U.S. market.
“There was some indication that that was happening,” Parker said, “It’s a very small industry in a lot of ways, certainly smaller than it was 12 years ago,” He joked. → Read More
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… → 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… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
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