Spotify

Spotify‘s paid subscribers hit 155M at the end of the last quarter of last year, up 24% year-on-year. This compares to the last-declared figure of 60M from Apple Music.

Total monthly active Spotify users, which include people on the free ad-funded tier, reached 345M, a year-on-year increase of 27% …

In 2018, Spotify filed for a patent that would utilize recordings of users’ speech and background noise to determine specific patterns. From that information, Spotify could then recommend certain music, podcasts, and even advertisements to users.

Spotify audiobooks have so far seemed a forgotten offering, with just a handful of titles added last year, but there is now an indication that the company is gearing up for a more serious push into this market.

The audio streaming company has just added nine titles, all classics with new narrations …

Spotify Wrapped has become a really popular way to look back at all your most listened to artists, albums, songs, and more. Even though your Wrapped 2021 won’t become available until the end of the year (usually early December), Spotify is out today with tips on how to use features and tricks now to get the most out of it so the results are the best reflection of what you really listened to throughout the year. And the first two tips are how to hide songs from Spotify Wrapped.

After finally adding support for standalone Apple Watch streaming in November, Spotify is now beta testing a major update to its CarPlay application. The latest version fo Spotify for iOS distributed to TestFlight beta users this week brings a new queue system as well as interface changes.

The Spotify Wrapped 2020 year-in-review roundup is now live for users around the world. It allows you to easily see your most listened to songs, artists, and albums in the Spotify app for iOS and Android. Here’s how it works.

Back in September, we saw Spotify finally start testing streaming support for its Apple Watch app, something we’ve seen arrive with other third-party services like Pandora months ago. Now it looks like the feature may finally be rolling out more widely.

Spotify has pulled further ahead of Apple Music in terms of paid subscribers, announcing that it now has 144M against the last-declared number from Apple at 60M. Apple last shared its subscribers way back in June of last year, but the lack of update since then suggests that growth since then has been relatively slow.

Digging into the details, however, reveals a mix of good and bad news for Spotify …

An enquiry has been opened in the UK into whether streaming music services like Spotify and Apple Music pay artists a fair royalty.

Apple Music pays more than both Spotify and YouTube on a per-stream basis, but artists say that the amount they receive from all streaming services is just a small percentage of a tiny sum …

Spotify has rolled out an update to its iOS app today with support for home screen widgets. This comes after Spotify beta tested iOS 14 home screen widgets with a handful of beta users last week. Read on for instructions on how to find the new Spotify widgets.

Since iOS 14 was released in September with the all-new home screen widgets that have proved hugely popular, Spotify hasn’t officially released an update to support the new feature. However, now iOS 14 widgets have been spotted in the Spotify beta.

A number of big developers who object to Apple’s App Store policies have jointly formed the Coalition for App Fairness, a non-profit intended to coordinate efforts to do battle with Apple. Founding members include Epic Games, Spotify and Tile, each of which is involved in high-profile disputes with the iPhone maker.

It will add to the antitrust pressure faced by Apple as the coalition accuses the Cupertino company of ‘taxing consumers’ and ‘crushing innovation’ …

After almost two years since the debut of the Spotify Apple Watch app, the service is finally testing streaming support with what looks like a random selection of users.

Spotify has been one of the major tech companies to accuse Apple of having too much power and using monopolistic business practices. Now after Apple’s September event which included the official announcement of its Apple One services bundle, Spotify has hit again with a statement of condemnation.

The podcast industry is at a crossroads in 2020. Since 2004, we’ve enjoyed an open ecosystem with podcasting driven by RSS feeds. Once Apple released the iTunes podcast directory in iTunes 4.9, but it’s still been based on the open RSS standard. When listeners subscribe to a show, it is directly pulled from the RSS feed and, therefore, a direct download from the podcast’s server. As Spotify has made its mark on the industry with exclusive shows, it’s worth discussing the differences between free shows, the open podcast market, and paid podcasts.