subscription music

Six 'subscription music' stories May 2014 - March 2015

Jay-Z’s new Tidal music service respects the artist, but rips off Spotify’s UI

Jordan Kahn Mar 31 2015 - 5:56 am PT

Tidal-vs-Spotify-UI

In case you hadn’t heard, Jay-Z is this week launching (relaunching) the Tidal music service he recently acquired along with a lot of help from industry friends. The company is hoping its model is innovative and helps artists earn more, but its UI for the web app appears to be a shameless copy of Spotify, as you can see in the comparison screenshot: Tidal above, Spotify below.
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Jimmy Iovine tried to lure key Tidal artists away to Apple, but no hard feelings, says Jay Z

Ben Lovejoy Mar 31 2015 - 4:04 am PT

14 Comments

Jay Z Performs At O2 Arena In London

Jay Z suggested in an interview with Billboard that Jimmy Iovine had tried to lure away top-selling artists from his newly-relaunched streaming music service, Tidal, but that he wasn’t angry about it. Iovine had reputedly offered more up-front cash to Tidal artists who agreed to do a deal with Apple.

I think that’s just his competitive nature, and I don’t know if he’s looking at the bigger picture: That it’s not about me and it’s not about him; it’s about the future of the music business.

The rap and hip-hop star said that he had initially hoped to work in cooperation with Iovine, having “talked to every single service,” but had apparently been rebuffed …
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Opinion: Could Apple’s integrated streaming music service decimate the competition?

Ben Lovejoy Feb 9 2015 - 7:39 am PT

40 Comments

Image: Forbes

When Apple enters a new business, you know it’s not going to do so in a half-hearted, small way. When it launches its Apple-branded Beats Music service later this year, it’s a no-brainer to predict that it’s going to be a big deal for the music industry. With Apple’s deep integration of Beats into its existing iOS/iTunes ecosystem exclusively revealed by Mark Gurman added into the mix, I wonder whether the unique selling points being notched up by Apple could be enough to leave existing big-name players like Spotify, Google Play and Rdio dead in the water?

That’s rather a grand idea, of course. As of last month, Spotify reached 15 million paid subscribers–up 50% in the last six months alone. Beats Music had only a little over 100,000 subscribers at the time Apple bought the company, and is rumored to have only 2-3 times as many now. But an Apple-ified Beats Music service has four things going for it …
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Spotify updating iOS app with neat touch preview and new swipe gestures

Ben Lovejoy Jan 22 2015 - 4:30 am PT

15 Comments

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BriF9qxInAk]

Spotify has announced an update to its iOS app to add some very handy new features. You’ll be able to preview any song just by touching the track and holding your finger down. Tapping it then plays the full track.

The app is also getting two new swipe gestures designed to make it even easier to queue music and save tracks to My Music …
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Spotify now reports 15 million paid subscribers

Zac Hall Jan 12 2015 - 6:56 am PT

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Spotify 15 million premium users

Streaming music subscription service Spotify shared its latest user numbers today, announcing that it now has 15 million paid subscribers to its premium service and 60 million active users. Spotify’s paid user count of 15 million accounts is up from the 10 million paid subscribers it previously reported just over six months ago.

Since then, Apple has officially closed on its $3 billion deal to acquire Beats Electronics and Beats Music, which gave it access to its own on-demand music streaming subscription service. Before Apple’s Beats acquisition last year, the Spotify competitor was believed to have just over 110,000 paid subscribers of its own.
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Beats Music 2.0 update delivers iPad version for subscription music service

Zac Hall May 1 2014 - 11:25 am PT

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Screen Shot 2014-05-01 at 1.50.30 PM

Well, there it is. Beats Music updated to version 2.0 today bringing native support for the streaming music subscription service for iPad users. Beats Music teased the iPad version just yesterday in a teaser image shared over Twitter. Beats Music also recently added support for in-app subscription purchasing making it easier for users to use the full version of the service. The update also includes the ability to find other Beats Music users you may already know through Twitter.
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