Spotify

According to a new report from the Financial Times, Spotify is in “advanced talks” to acquire SoundCloud, the popular user-focused streaming music service. Details of the acquisition talks are unclear at this point, the report comes the same day as Apple Music was ranked #1 for customer satisfaction by J.D. Power in its first streaming music study.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Spotify may still comfortably be the market leader in streaming music, with 30M paid subscribers against only half that for second-placed Apple Music, but it’s had a full decade to reach that number – against just over a year for Apple’s service. Playlists are a key battleground in the competition between the two, and Spotify’s latest weapon is Release Radar.

Release Radar, launching today, is a personalized For You-style playlist updated weekly. Unlike Discover Weekly, a playlist focused on discovering new music, Release Radar focuses primarily on the artists you already know and love …

Expand
Expanding
Close

If Apple versus FBI was the big story to start the year, then it looks like Apple versus Spotify will be the hot battle of the summer. Yesterday a letter surfaced in which Spotify accused Apple of being anticompetitive with its App Store policies and holding back a Spotify update in order to benefit Apple Music. This letter is likely what prompted Senator Elizabeth Warren’s negative remarks about Apple earlier this week.

Now Apple is pushing back and without mincing words. Apple’s top lawyer Bruce Sewell has issued a three-page response to Spotify (via Buzzfeed) in which he accuses Spotify of “resorting to rumors and half-truths about our service.”

Expand
Expanding
Close

Spotify has become very vocal in recent weeks about Apple’s business practices for its App Store. Apple recently revamped its subscription policy for iOS developers, offering a 85/15 split if developers keep customers for more than a year, but Spotify is still not happy with proceedings.

In a letter to Washington seen by Recode, the company now says Apple is being anti-competitive by rejecting its latest update to the Spotify app in order to encourage sales of its own $9.99 Apple Music subscriptions. Spotify is making a lot of noise to suggest Apple is using illicit business practices to elevate the success of Apple Music, by crippling Spotify and other third-party services.

Expand
Expanding
Close

MacBook OLED screen keyboard concept

Spotify has reached a streaming music milestone with its user base officially reaching 100 million users, 25 million more than last reported. But the numbers are very different when you only look at paying customers…

Expand
Expanding
Close

Following news of incoming changes to Apple’s App Store that will benefit developers with a new subscription revenue split and paid search result ads, Spotify today outlined to The Verge why the improvements don’t address their issues with Apple’s policies.

Specifically, a Spotify representative noted the company’s inability to offer special deals to customers and lack of access to data into “why customers churn — or who even qualifies as a long-term subscriber.”

Expand
Expanding
Close

Spotify is clearly feeling the competition from Apple Music, and is now matching the Cupertino company’s family deal of $14.99 per month for up to six family members. This literally halves the cost of Spotify’s previous family membership, as well as extending it from five to six people …

Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple Music competitor Spotify today announced that it is greatly expanding its video offerings this year. As noted by Bloomberg, Spotify will launch 12 original video series with actors like Tim Robbins and Def Jam Records co-founder Russell Simmons. The series are said to each feature episodes ranging from a few minutes long to 15 minutes and will be available to free and paid users.

Expand
Expanding
Close

SoundShare has released a major update to their iOS app today that looks to bridge the divide between multiple music streaming services. By combining multiple music streaming services (Spotify, Deezer, and Apple Music), SoundShare creates a social network that takes out any hassles in sharing and discovering music. Even users who may not be using any premium streaming services can take advantage of the app. Thanks to iOS 9.3’s Apple Music API, apps like SoundShare can exist to create a better overall music discovery experience.

Expand
Expanding
Close

SongShift is a just-released app that lets Spotify users import playlists directly into Apple Music. In the past, there have been some roundabout ways to accomplish that task, but SongShift is one of the first apps that takes advantage of a new iOS 9.3 provision that makes it possible for third-party apps to access Apple Music.

Expand
Expanding
Close

As much as I think the Apple Music user interface is still a total jumbled mess, I do think there are also a few features that Apple should add as it simultaneously cleans up what’s already there. A big one for me is the potential for private, collaborative playlists and streaming radio stations.

What Apple Music currently has, as far as users sharing music goes, is the ability to share a playlist, station, album or song from within the app via email, third-party apps or copying the link to share elsewhere. But once sent to someone, the person only receives a link to open the shared selection in Apple Music. It works, but it’s not exactly taking full advantage of the potential for user collaboration and a truly interactive experience that ties together the various social aspects of the service.

The new sharing features could be twofold. First, the ability to have collaborative playlists that one or more other people could contribute to. That’s a feature that some competitive services, notably Spotify, already have, but I’d like to see Apple take it a step further with the ability to create not just collaborative playlists, but private, custom radio stations that stream in real-time…

Expand
Expanding
Close

DJs will be well familiar with the name Serato. It’s one of the — if not the — leading software products around for DJs that make the hop from vinyl to digital sets (and that’s most of them these days). But the company hasn’t had a huge presence on iOS devices outside of that world — save for its Remote companion app for users of a Serato desktop setup. That’s where Serato’s new Pyro app comes in, but it’s not exactly the scaled back version of the company’s desktop offering you might have been hoping for.

Instead, rather than act as a suite for mostly professional DJs and their mixing and controller hardware like on the desktop, Pyro is aimed at all users and meant to act like the DJ for you, using Serato’s technology to automatically mix songs from one to the next by changing the tempo and doing a real mix like a professional DJ would:

Expand
Expanding
Close

Following the most recent Apple Music launch for users in Turkey last week, the subscription music streaming service and accompanying Beats 1 radio station have now officially launched in Taiwan.

Expand
Expanding
Close

According to a report this morning from The Wall Street Journal, Spotify is getting ready to finally launch its video content offerings. The rollout is set to start with the Android app getting video by the end of this week, but the iOS app is following suit by the end of next…
Expand
Expanding
Close

For me, coffee at Starbucks is secondary to the great music you discover courtesy of your twenty-something barista’s Spotify DJ skills. The good news is you can now easily save those Spotify playlists for listening later through an update to the Starbucks iPhone app today.
Expand
Expanding
Close

According to the Financial Times, Apple has passed 10 million paying subscribers for Apple Music. Apple Music launched in June 2015 with a three month free trial. Since the launch, Apple announced it has 6.5 million paying subscribers in October. In November, Apple launched Apple Music on Android which no doubt attracted a significant chunk of additional new users.

Crossing ten million is a significant symbolic milestone, as it now means Apple Music is half as large as Spotify’s paid userbase.

Expand
Expanding
Close

When Apple Music launched back in June, it was noted that the music subscription service didn’t offer up the entire iTunes catalog with a few big name artists missing including The Beatles. That could be about to change, according to a new report out of Billboard, which cites sources that claim The Beatles music will be available for streaming for the first time next week. While the report believes The Beatles music will start streaming on Christmas Eve, what isn’t clear is which streaming service will have access first …

Expand
Expanding
Close

A well-known music industry analyst is estimating that Apple Music will hit 8M paid subscribers by the end of the year, and will reach 20M by the end of 2016, reports Music Business Worldwide. The prediction was made by Mark Mulligan, co-founder of digital content specialists Midia Consulting, who previously held senior research positions with Forrester and Jupiter.

In raw numbers terms, that would put it just behind market leader Spotify by the end of next year, but that may not quite present the true picture …

Expand
Expanding
Close