The New York Times is reporting that Rdio is partnering with Cumulus Media—a company that owns, like, real radio station—to provide a free version of its audio streaming service.
Remember when Twitter bought We Are Hunted, whose creators then built Twitter’s #music app, which was initially super popular in part due to its cool design and the fact that everybody uses Twitter, but then it ran into a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem?
Twitter #Music launched with Spotify streaming as a core feature. It’s only fair that Spotify #Music get an app of its own, then, and one has just launched today. The new client very closely mimics its web counterpart, letting members find and play trending music on Twitter from big-name artists, fast-rising newcomers and everyone in given genres. As you’d imagine, the difference rests in how you play music — it’s much faster to start a track or add it to a playlist, and you don’t need to be a Spotify Premium subscriber to tune in. If you’re interested in learning what the world is listening to, you’ll find the free #Music app at the source link.
Filed under: Internet, Software
Source: Spotify
While EE celebrates reaching 1 million 4G subscribers, Vodafone is stepping up its game to get you to become part of its LTE family. Originally limited to London at launch, Vodafone says it plans to roll out its 4G network in Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield on September 28th. On top of that, the operator will also throw in an extra 4GB of data if you join before the end of October. Vodafone already offers customers unlimited data for the first three months of their tariff, along with your choice of Spotify Premium or a Premiership football bundle (free for six months), so this will help to soften the blow when that comes to an end. Right now, Vodafone’s 4G footprint is still relatively small but it plans to push its LTE network live in Bradford, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle by the end of the year.
VODAFONE BOOSTS ULTRAFAST 4G PLANS WITH ‘4GBONUS’ SPECIAL PROMOTION
· All Vodafone Red 4G-ready and Vodafone Red Business 4G-ready customers signing up before the end of October will get an extra 4GB of data per month for the length of their contract
· Existing ultrafast 4G customers will also get the ‘4GBonus’ added to their plan at no extra cost
· Vodafone ultrafast 4G coming to Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield on September 28 as rollout to 98% of UK population continues
Vodafone UK is today giving customers even more reasons to enjoy fantastic sports or music entertainment on ultrafast 4G by boosting the amount of data available with all Vodafone Red 4G-ready plans by 4GB per month for the length of their contract. Vodafone Red 4G-ready brings 4G to life as never before, with sports action including over 150 hours of Premier League football from Sky Sports Mobile TV, or more than 20 million songs from Spotify Premium for music lovers.
Anyone signing up to a SIM only plan or a 12 or 24 month plan, with a new 4G-ready handset included, will get three months unlimited UK data, then double the amount of data available on standard Vodafone Red plans plus an extra 4GB per month for the length of their contract. On top of unlimited calls and texts it’s Vodafone’s best ever value deal. The ‘4GBonus’ offer runs from today until the end of October for new and upgrading customers. Customers who signed up for Vodafone Red 4G-ready plans after they went on sale on August 12 will also receive the additional 4GB of data at no extra cost.
Following the launch of Vodafone ultrafast 4G in London last month, Vodafone also announces today that it will launch 4G services in Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield on September 28. By the end of the year, Vodafone Ultrafast 4G, with speeds typically six times faster than 3G, will also be switched on in Bradford, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle.* Vodafone is targeting indoor 4G coverage across 98% of the UK population by 2015.
Mark Howe, Head of Post Pay Consumer, Vodafone UK, said “With our Vodafone Red 4G-ready plans 4G finally has a purpose and now with the ‘4GBonus’ Vodafone ultrafast 4G is even more compelling. There are a number of hotly anticipated new devices coming out in the Autumn and with the ‘4GBonus’ there are even more reasons for customers to choose Ultrafast 4G from Vodafone.”
Vodafone Red 4G-ready starts at £26 per month for a 12 month SIM-only plan, which now comes with 6GB of data, and £34 per month for a 24 month plan with a handset included, which now comes with 6GB of data. Vodafone Red 4G-ready customers also have a choice of great entertainment from either Sky Sports Mobile TV or Spotify Premium.
Customers choosing Sky Sports Mobile TV will have access to more live football than ever before, including exclusive live coverage of more than 100 matches from the Barclays Premier League, the Sky Bet Football League, UEFA Champions League, the SPFL and La Liga. Vodafone customers choosing Sky Sports Mobile TV can also look forward to the Ashes tour of Australia this winter, Majors golf coverage including the US PGA Championship and Heineken Cup rugby.
Vodafone Red 4G-ready customers choosing Spotify Premium will have more than 20 million songs at their fingertips. Spotify is the largest music streaming service of its kind, offering instant, on-demand access to the world’s music, on the go. Vodafone Red 4G-ready users can discover new music, enjoy playlists curated by their friends, follow their favourite artists and celebrities, or just relax and listen to Spotify radio. Spotify Premium lets music lovers enjoy music however they want – on a smartphone, tablet or through a home entertainment system. Music fans can even listen to their favourite tracks on aeroplanes, thanks to the ‘offline sync’ feature.
Business users who want to enjoy ultrafast 4G and the ability to share their data allowance at no extra cost with Vodafone Red Business 4G-ready, will also receive an extra 4GB of data for the length of their contract. Vodafone Red Business starts from just £21.67 (ex-VAT), for a 12 month SIM-only plan, which now comes with 6GB of data. Customers who signed up for Vodafone Red Business 4G-ready plans after they went on sale on August 12 will also receive the additional 4GB of data at no extra cost.
Filed under: Wireless
Spotify is being sued by the electronic and dance music brand Ministry of Sound—because the streaming music company refuses to delete playlists which mirror its compilation albums.
Spotify Connect to bring seamless playing and integration with audio systems
Posted in: Today's ChiliEven with today’s smart devices and almost always-on Internet connection, a seamless audio experience across a variety of devices is still pretty much a holy grail. But that will not be the case for long. Spotify today unveiled its Spotify Connect project, an endeavor to bring audio streaming to the next level and integrate it […]
Spotify, the popular online music service, has decided to join forces with home-audio manufacturers when it comes to churning out Wi-Fi speakers that are capable of hooking up to Spotify servers, allowing paying subscribers to send their favorite tunes over to said Wi-Fi speakers, while leaving the handset or smartphone free to perform other tasks. According to Spotify founder Daniel Ek, he hopes that this move would be a precursor of what the future offers – a serve-all musical soundtrack where your audio accompaniment streams from speakers, in addition to other future compatible items such as lightbulbs and clothes, now how about that?
In a nutshell, you are able to listen to Spotify on your smartphone while commuting home, and the moment you enter your home, just “send” the music over to your stereo system and continue working on that email on your smartphone without any interruption. Do you think that this kind of interaction will be able to change the way that we listen to our music at home or at the office? Heck, who knows, someone might even come up with a fax machine (who still uses these?) that can connect to another Wi-Fi device, allowing your Spotify tunes to play back over the fax machine whenever it is not sending or receiving any faxes.
Spotify Connect Feature Hooks Up To Wi-Fi Speakers original content from Ubergizmo.
Spotify is getting into the hardware game. The company is teaming up with a slew of great audio companies to bake Spotify right into Wi-Fi connected speakers. And it’s not just speakers—the new system makes juggling your tunes between your phone, tablet, and computer a piece of cake, too. Here’s the facile music experience you’ve been waiting for at a price you can actually afford.
Spotify’s new Connect feature seems as good an excuse as any to throw a party
Posted in: Today's ChiliThis is a sort of hardware / software announcement for Spotify, a hardware partnership with a number of big names in audio like Philips, Pioneer, Bang & Olufsen, Denon, Marantz and Yamaha that allows you to keep the party going on those Spotify playlists. Start playing one on your handset, click play on a compatible speaker system, and it will keep streaming on the speaker without interruption — even when you take a call or leave the vicinity of your WiFi network. The audio system will actually start streaming music directly from the cloud. That means you can, say, turn on an iPad in another room and let your party guests skip songs — though, granted, that might not be the greatest idea, depending on who you invite.
Specific devices have yet to be named, though compatible systems will be branded with a Spotify Connect logo, so you’ll know what you’re getting yourself into. Those should be arriving in a late-October / early-November timeframe. Spotify will be holding up its end of the bargain by rolling out a software update for iOS ahead of those launches. Android and other operating systems will be receiving it at a later date.
Spotify Makes Its Biggest Hardware Play Yet With Spotify Connect, Syncing Music At Home And Beyond
Posted in: Today's ChiliSpotify is today adding a new feature to its iOS app that represents the streaming company’s most ambitious move yet to position itself as the go-to music app on connected devices — and in the process entice more people to pay the $9.99 per month required to use the app. It’s launching Spotify Connect, a new button in the app that will let users seamlessly shift Spotify music playing between their handsets and different Wi-Fi-connected devices in the home, starting with audio devices from 10 manufacturers.
Spotify Connect also has a social twist: if you have other Spotify users on your Wi-Fi network, they, too, can take control of the decks through the feature. (But just make sure you only let friends connect to your Wi-Fi whose musical taste won’t clash with yours because Spotify, maybe betraying its benign Scandinavian roots, is relying on a kind of civility code for how this gets used. Adding in any kind of blocking or controlling feature would just “make things needlessly complicated,” Pascal de Mul, Spotify’s global head of hardware partnerships, told me in an interview.)
Ultimately, the aim is for Spotify — now live in 28 countries and with a catalog of 20 million tracks — to become as widespread as possible, and therefore the most convenient music app for consumers to use. “Remember when every music device came with a tape deck or CD player or radio? We would like that ubiquity for Spotify, to be that way on every device,” said de Mul. (He used the word “ubiquitous” a lot.)
But not all platforms are created equal. Spotify Connect is coming out on iOS for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices today, and de Mul tells me that the company is working on updates for its Android and desktop apps that will also add the new Spotify Connect feature. But for now there are “no plans” to update its Windows Phone or BlackBerry apps.
How it works
I had a look around Spotify Connect, and it works like this: if you’re listening to some music on your phone, and you come home and want to continue listening but through a bigger sound system, you select the little speaker icon to the right of the music navigation bar. Up pops a screen with a list of devices that are connected to the network. You select the device and the music instantly transfers to playing on that device. Your handset, using the Spotify app, becomes the controller of that music. When the desktop app with Spotify Connect comes out, you can include that in the list and use it to control the music, too. For someone that had to call Sonos support more than once to get her system to work properly (to be fair… we had a tricky analog integration) this is dead simple to use.
For now, the initial list of device makers are Argon, Bang & Olufsen, Denon, Hama, Marantz, Philips, Pioneer, Revo, Teufel and Yamaha, with more brands getting added before the end of the year — basically hardware makers that have built in chips made by companies that have cut deals with Spotify to embed its technology. That list of chipmakers, meanwhile, right now only has two names on it, SMSC (now part of Microchip) and Frontier Silicon, but just as Spotify is talking with more hardware makers, De Mul says he expects that chipmaker list to grow, too. For now, those who are Spotify Connect compatible will include a compatibility badge on their packaging.
So what happens to existing hardware deals?
Spotify Connect is not the company’s first foray into home entertainment systems, but it represents a new chapter in how Spotify wants to be in better control of the experience in the future.
Before today, if you wanted to stream Spotify music in your home, you had a couple of options. One was to buy specific connected hardware that would have made a bespoke integration with Spotify, and you would connect to control those devices using Airplay or Bluetooth. But de Mul notes that this was not ideal.
“Yes, we have made partnerships with a lot of hardware makers, but in taking stock of that, we’ve realized that it’s a time-consuming process that was only getting us into high-end devices, those where device makers felt justified in making the extra investment.”
And besides, he told me, Spotify wants to target users buying devices at all price points, not just the most expensive ones. The other issue, he said, was that updates to these bespoke integrations were not easy. “All that stuff lagged in the innovation cycle,” he said. “Every time we did something new it would take a while for it to come up in new devices.” What this means is that while these existing integrations can continue to be used with Spotify, they won’t work with the Connect service, and they won’t be updated with any other new features, either.
The other important aspect of Spotify’s hardware strategy up to now has been tied up in its relationship with hardware makers that specifically make app-based systems. The biggest of these, and Spotify’s first-ever hardware partner, was Sonos. While Sonos has been a very important partner for Spotify, and de Mul described it as “very awesome,” he also noted that there is “no plan to extend Connect to Sonos and no plan to continue to develop with Sonos” longer term. Part of this goes back to Spotify’s intention to centralise and better control the experience on its service: with Sonos you control the music experience using the Sonos app, and of course Sonos only works with… Sonos, “and we want ubiquity.” Update: Spotify says the quote is taken out of context, in that it cannot share future plans, not that it doesn’t have any at all. “We will continue to support and improve the Spotify experience on Sonos,” a spokesperson noted, once again not confirming any timescale or specifics.
So, some pretty clear signs of Spotify centralizing and consolidatng in the home audio space today, but what is perhaps more interesting is how Spotify Connect will longer term link up with its wider connected device strategy.
The company has been making some inroads with connected cars — for example a deal cut with Ford earlier this year to integrate and stream Spotify music on Ford’s SYNC in-car system. And Spotify has been appearing on connected TVs from the likes of LG and Sony.
Challenges
Car and connected device integrations also fall under the remit of de Mul (who himself worked for Philips before joining Spotify three years ago), and the landscape that he sees ultimately has all of them working in complete synchronicity. There remain some big challenges, however.
The first is whether consumers are interested enough in something like Spotify Connect to pay for the premium app to get it if they don’t have Premium service already. So far, there are no plans to take services like Spotify Connect out from behind the paywall. But that’s not to say it won’t ever happen. “We’re always evaluating putting more services into the free tier,” de Mul noted. “There is always a balancing between what we do for free and what for premium. In the U.S. we already have radio for free on mobile, so we’re trying to have those discussions. You will see more features moving to free.”
The second is whether consumers will be willing to make the investment in devices that will work with Spotify Connect. If Spotify and its investors have the patience, it may also just take time for users to make the leap to buy compatible stereo equipment, since, so far, things like speakers and amplifiers haven’t proven to have the same kind of purchase cycle as a computer or laptop.
The third is whether Spotify will extend this service beyond Wi-Fi and into cellular networks, so that even when Wi-Fi is not present the service could still work — such as in a car. “We are talking to everyone, including carriers,” de Mul said. “Everyone is playing every card.”