As if crooning Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” wasn’t cool enough, President Barack Obama took to Facebook today to put up a Spotify playlist of some of his favorite jams (or, more likely, he made a list and an aide posted it). He’s calling it Obama Campaign 2012 Playlist.
Brace yourselves – according to The Christian Science Monitor, those madmen in Stockholm have created a music application which “may wipe out music piracy, make Apple’s iTunes largely irrelevant, and even supplant ABBA as Sweden’s most significant pop culture export. It’s called Spotify.” Now read quickly, as I’m having to type this on the fly as several poison blow-darts fired by Steve Jobs are embedding themselves in the wall next to my head.
This is a bit of news that shouldn’t come as a surprise to most of you, according to a recent study by the University of Reading, 75% of students would rather pay to download their music, than pay to stream music from a site or purchase it in a store. I could have told you that! Not only that, but the students want to download from the cheapest website, meaning they don’t want to pay the extra money for iTunes and their digital rights management fees.
A new site, TunesPro.com, was recently launched and is competing with other music downloading services. The target base for the site is the younger generation who know where to download free music, but are swayed by the possibility of corrupted files and viruses. TunesPro has one advantage in it’s favor, for many songs, it only charges a mere 19 cents per song with a steep discount with the purchase of an entire album. The record companies do pick the prices, so there is a higher price for songs that come from, presumably, the larger record companies, but the site has agreements with many record companies in an attempt to keep prices as low as possible. Continue Reading
Microsoft will launch a music streaming service this month, in an attempt to get some of Spotify’s market share. Spotify allows users to stream music for free with intermittant advertising, and the option purchase downloads. Peter Bale, executive producer of MSN, told The Telegraph:
“Music is an important area for Microsoft. We are looking at launching a music streaming service imminently. It will be a similar principle to Spotify but we are still examining how the business model will work.”
Hoping to get more folks to upgrade to its premium service, music-streaming portal Spotify has injected the value of its sound with CD-level quality.
Subscribers can pay £9.99 ($16.40) per month for the premium package. The sound upgrade from 160kbps to 320kbps starts this week.
Spotify users can continue to stream music for free at 160kbps, but have to listen to about a minute of advertisements every ½ hour. According to itproportal.com, 320kbps is the highest streaming quality currently available from any online service.
Premium users should go ahead and check the “enable high bitrate” box in the preferences section to enable the 320kbps tracks for streaming.
Spotify has added 11,280 albums and singles to their catalogue, to a total of 127,578 new songs available, after signing a deal with indie digital distributor Zebralution. For a full listing of the additions check out these Google Docs: sorted by artist and by label. According to the Spotify blog:
Today’s update is most likely the biggest update we’ve had since we launched last year.
New releases include The Spinning Top by Graham Coxon, She’s In Control from Chromeo, and material from Bill Evans, Café Sputnik and Kutiman. I especially appreciated the addition of the classic Allotria Jazz Band and the Balkan/ska Amsterdam Klezmer Band.
Hey BeatCravers! Are you having trouble finding free legal music available on the Internet? To help you get the music you want, quickly and without having to jump through legal hoops, we’ve compiled our top five favorite online destinations for your free music needs.
Popular sites like Myspace, Last.fm and Pandora are lagging behind when it comes to innovation in navigating the thousands of bands available online. Our top five sites promise new ways of finding and sharing music, so check out the list below, and tell us what you think:
The latest New York-based online radio company, Goom Radio, has secured $16 million from various venture capital firms, and is planning to “reinvent radio for the Internet generation”. However, it isn’t readily apparent how they are actually going about that mission.
The press release affirms that they have a “promising business model”, but doesn’t go into details on exactly what that model is, other than it’s ad-based. With free music available through many other similar services like Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify and the recent Free Music Archive, Goom Radio is going to have a difficult time rising above the competition.
PRS for Music, a collecting society for UK songwriters, composers and music publishers, confirmed yesterday that it agreed “commercial terms” with music streaming service Spotify. PRS for Music wants to force YouTube/Google into a deal to pay for the use of UK music, and supposedly the agreement with Spotify shows that such arrangements are possible with streaming services.
Guy Chambers, who wrote the Robbie Williams hit Angels, said: “Google is manipulating the PRS for Music dispute in a deeply cynical way; to confuse the public into believing that the industry is outdated and behaving in a protectionist manner.”
