Archive for: spotify
- November 30, 2011 12:52 pm
Spotify’s special event just wrapped up, and with it come details on the company’s future amongst a heap of recent Spotify articles good and bad. The once little known service inside the U.S. has quickly become a music juggernaut. During today’s event, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek stated that Spotify has secured licensing deals with all the major labels and adds over 20,000 tracks to Spotify’s library each and every day. According to Ek, the full library would take over 100 years to listen to from start to finish, and all this reaches 10 million listeners. But enough fluff. Here’s what Spotify announced today…
- November 14, 2011 7:52 am
Everyone’s Most peoples’ favorite streaming service, Spotify, is getting bigger! Starting as early as this week residents of Austria, Belgium, and Switzerland will be able to enjoy all the streaming goodness that some parts of the world have been enjoying for over 2 years now.
The claim comes via Paid Content. Unfortunately, Spotify won’t confirm any such timeline, instead saying that they are “working hard to launch the service in Austria, Switzerland and Belgium as soon as possible”.
Regardless if it’s “this week” or next month, having Spotify expand into new territories further proves that streaming music is here to stay despite early reservations by many different parties.
We’ve jumped back and forth between some of the bigger services such as Spotify as well as Rdio and Mog. They all have the own strengths and weakness, not to mention completely different approach to UIs. With that said, what music streaming service do you use, and why?
- September 29, 2011 8:46 am
It appears Spotify is finally caving to pressure from a growing wave of disgruntled users over the company’s new auto-share-to-Facebook feature. CEO Daniel Ek just tweeted that an update is rolling out that will enable a new “private listening mode” found directly within the Spotify > File menu.
Currently there is an option to turn of the aforementioned feature, though it’s buried in the preferences menu and is labeled with “Get personal recommendations by sending music you play to your Facebook timeline.”
For those of you who were none too pleased with the auto-share feature, is the new private listening mode enough to win you back?
- September 27, 2011 9:56 am
While European markets have been enjoying the service for a couple years now, your typical music label greed has drawn things out much longer than needed. But alas, we’re finally rockin’ out with Spotify, and once again, they’re at the top of tech news around not only the U.S. but the world — though not for a good reason. It seems people are up in arms about the new mandatory Facebook account requirement to sign up for a new Spotify account. If you’re only worry is sharing everything you listen to, there’s a fix.
Also, Spotify is apparently signing up over 250,000 new users per day since activating the aforementioned Facebook account requirement.
More Spotify news after the break…
- September 17, 2011 10:49 pm
Facebook’s rumored music service is allegedly going to be uncovered and detailed at the company’s upcoming F8 conference in just a few short days (September 22nd). And while the actual details of Facebook’s event are still a mystery, a Netherlands developer by the name of Yvo Schaap has uncovered a slew of HTML code on a number of popular streaming and online music discovery sites including Mog, Spotify, Rdio, Soundcloud, and more.
The code in question:
More after the break…
- September 7, 2011 1:33 pm
Fan/user of Spotify? We’ve been a rather frequent user of Spotify ever since the service launched earlier this summer. During that time, however, we’ve had to learn how to split our time between both Spotify and Last.fm for the sole fact that Spotify doesn’t feature a randomized radio feature like Last.fm. Add to that the lack of any web based portal for Spotify users and you can see where the novelty of the European based app wears off. But along comes Andy Smith to save the day with Echofi…
For some time rumors have swirled around Facebook either making their own music service or partnering up with someone else. Come September 22nd at the social networking giant’s F8 conference, the truth may finally be set free. But unlike past rumors, the actual announcement may prove quite surprising…
It’s pretty sad when a new, innovative company’s first month in the U.S. is welcomed with large patent infringement lawsuit — Welcome, Spotify!
The company patent troll, PacketVideo, purchased the patent in question a few years ago — 5,636,276 which itself is incredibly general and vague. Hell, even back in 1995 when the patent was originally filed many people considered the content of the patent pretty ridiculous. Nevermind the fact PacketVideo themselves just purchased the patent — not actually using/producing anything with it. Add up all the parts and you’ve got the classic makings of another useless patent troll. PacketVideo is simply looking for an easy, quick buck. Sadly common sense and actual innovation are not properties of modern copyright.
So what’s Spotify think of all of this?
The popular european-based streaming service, Spotify, has been available in the U.S. for a little over a week now. What do they have to show for themselves?
According to Billboard whom cites three separate labels/publisher executives, Spotify has now crossed 70,000+ paying subscribers. To put that in comparison’s sake, Rhapsody has over 800,000 subscribers — though they’ve been in business since as far back as 2001. (I’m waiting to hear back from Spotify on any official numbers.)
While I have talked about Spotify many times on Gadgetsteria over the last couple of years, I must admit that I cancelled my subscription after 5 days. Why? Despite a 15,000,000+ song library of, I found a lot of the more obscure/indie/european music that I listen to was either sorely lacking or nonexistent — an odd trait considering the European roots. Nonetheless, I still think Spotify is a great service that everyone should at least try.
Any U.S. based Spotify newbies care to share their experiences thus far?
