Spotify leads the world’s on-demand subscriptions with six million paying subscribers, but it’s facing stiff competition from a company that isn’t even available in the biggest music market on the planet: Deezer, which tells us it now has over four million paying subscribers to its “premium plus” subscription. Though you cannot access it from the…
As reported by the Wall Street Journal today (and echoed via Techmeme), Spotify plans to launch a “top 50″ chart that will give fans and the music industry insight into which songs are most popular on its freemium music subscription. Update: Spotify tells us Spotify must be running in the background to play the charts….
Last week, CNET reported on an extension for Google’s Chrome web browser that let people scrape songs off of Spotify’s web player, for free, and save the music as MP3 files. This was obviously fairly problematic and possibly illegal, as far as browser extensions go, so Google hastily deleted the app from its Chrome app…
Mother’s Day is fast approaching, and, typically, we can’t resist putting together another playlist to celebrate it. Let’s literally hear it for the moms. We wouldn’t be here without you. We’ve stocked this playlist with a few tunes to get the ball rolling, but the neat thing about these collaborative Spotify playlists is that you…
My old friends at We Are Hunted, the brains behind the much-heralded Twitter #music app – and their new friends at Twitter — have figured out what to do with the We Are Hunted Spotify app, now that the firm’s technology is being used exclusively to parse Twitter data and turn it into playable charts. To deal…
Soundrop, a Spotify app that shares a big investor with Spotify, says it alone has the ability to scale listening rooms up so that thousands of people can listen to the same song together at the same time, using a secret sauce called Erlang — a hyper-efficient coding language developed by Ericsson for use on…
First we collected music objects, then we hoarded MP3s to the point that many of our computers’ music collections became so huge and labyrinthine as to become almost useless. Now that most active music fans play music from the cloud as much or more than we access our local libraries (remember iTunes?), we music fans…
Comedian Louis CK made a great point that’s worth revisiting (transcript), even if you’ve seen it before: that “everything is amazing and nobody is happy.” The disruptive funnyman was referring to the way we complain about the world we live in, even as we enjoy unprecedented abilities and conveniences thanks to the preposterous degree of technological advancement over…
Soundrop, which builds group listening rooms that can exist all over the internet at the same time, offers plenty of rooms where you can hear someone’s idea of good music. Now, it’s harvesting charts of the most-starred music from all of its rooms in Spotify, and filtering them into genre charts designed to offer the…
Apparently, it is possible to cobble together some APIs over the weekend to make an iOS app that takes a picture of an object, then plays a song about that object. That is precisely what Martino Bonfiglioli and Christian Zanin (both of musiXMatch) did at Music Hack Day Paris this past weekend. Their creation, Camera…
As noted in our hands-on review of Twitter’s new app for iOS and the web, Twitter #music, that app looks at Twitter alone to find music for you to listen to and musicians for you to follow. However, Twitter’s acquisition of We Are Hunted — and with it, Stephen Philips, Richard Slatter, and Michael Doherty…
Grandpa’s CD player was an awful piece of technology by many estimations. Purists hated the idea of slicing precious analog sound waves into bits, on philosophical if not auditory grounds. Owners of cassettes and vinyl were justifiably bummed to have to buy everything all over again. And on the label side, that CDs didn’t include the copyright…
Spotify recently rolled out some of the new features it teased in New York last December with a new way to “follow” people — not in the religious or stalker senses, but in the Twitter sense of seeing what they’re up to. Spotify being a music service, that means seeing what the famous people you like and…
Back in my day, making mixtapes required patience and creativity. Spending hours recording songs from CDs or tapes onto a blank cassette meant taking time to sequence songs, making sure each song flowed into the next. Then music transformed from atoms into bits, and mixtapes into playlists, which only take seconds or minutes to make,…
Venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson, whose firm invests in Turntable.fm, SoundCloud, Twitter, and other companies, weighed in on an issue we’ve written about several times: true music portability. By that, I mean the ability of music fans to take their music from one service to another, instead of being locked into Spotify, Pandora, or any…
