Written by Submit My Music on 14 July 2011
Spotify, a digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs, is now available in the US, but by invitation only for now.
From the Spotify website:
This is a great day for anyone who loves music in the US and, of course, a real milestone for us at Spotify. I’m proud of the fantastic team who have been working tirelessly to bring what we think is the best possible music service to our friends in the US.
During our invite-only beta phase, we’ll be offering three great services – from absolutely free to paid subscriptions. The services we’re launching today are:
- Spotify Free – the unsurpassed free music service. With an invite, enjoy on-demand, buffer-free access to over 15 million songs on your computer and great social features. Manage your own music files through Spotify, and sync with your cellphone or iPod. Features occasional advertising.
- Spotify Unlimited – all the special features of our free service, but with uninterrupted, ad-free access to Spotify on your computer. All for only $4.99 a month.
- Spotify Premium – the top-of-the-range Spotify experience. Premium gives you access to all the music, all the time. Listen online or offline, on your computer, your cellphone and a whole heap of other devices. Enjoy enhanced sound quality and access to exclusive content, competitions and special offers. Premium costs just $9.99 a month. (That’s the equivalent of a couple of fancy coffees.)
We’re launching in partnership with some of the biggest and most pioneering brands in the world, who all want to help us spread the good word of Spotify. Our exclusive launch partners are Coca-Cola and Sprite, Chevrolet, Motorola, Reebok and Sonos. These brands will be launching innovative campaigns in partnership with Spotify in the coming weeks and months.
We believe that music is the most social thing there is and that’s why we’ve built the best social features into Spotify for easy sharing and the ultimate in music discovery. Even if you aren’t a total music freak, chances are you have a friend who is and whose taste you admire. I’m looking forward to connecting with some of you guys in the US through Spotify and discovering some cool new tracks.
If you’re in the US and you haven’t already signed up for an invite, feel free to do so now – we’ll send one to you as soon as we can. Of course, if you just can’t wait, you can jump the queue by signing up directly for Spotify Premium or Unlimited starting at just $4.99 a month.
Tags: Spotify
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Written by Submit My Music on 14 April 2011
From the Spotify website:
Spotify’s aim from the very beginning was to make music on-demand available to all. To give you the power to listen to, discover, share and manage your music the way you want to – simpler, faster, better – while making sure the artists whose music we all love continue to see the benefits as we grow. Making Spotify available to millions across Europe has seen the service become incredibly popular. People are listening to more music and from a wider range of artists than ever before, and are giving up on piracy, which is exactly what we hoped would happen. So it’s vital that we continue offering an on-demand free service to you and millions more like you, but to make that possible we have to put some limits in place going forward. Here’s how the changes will work:
• New Spotify users will be able to enjoy our unrivalled free service as it is today for the first 6 months.
• As of May 1st, any user who signed up to the free service on or before November 1st 2010 will be able to play each track for free up to a total of 5 times. Users who signed up after the beginning of November will see these changes applied 6 months after the time they set up their Spotify account.
• Additionally, total listening time for free users will be limited to 10 hours per month after the first 6 months. That’s equivalent to around 200 tracks or 20 albums.
The changes we’re having to make will mainly affect heavier Spotify Free and Open users, as most of you use Spotify to discover music – on average over 50 new tracks per month, even after a year. Plus, the average user won’t reach the limit on plays for 7 out of 10 tracks, after a year of using Spotify.
For those of you using Spotify to find new tracks to enjoy and share with friends, these changes shouldn’t get in the way of you doing that. Rest assured that we’ll continue to bring you the biggest and most diverse music catalogue available. For anyone who thinks they might reach these limits, we hope you’ll consider checking out our Unlimited and Premium services, neither of which will be affected, plus we have a 7-day free trial for Spotify Premium that we’d love you to try. Throughout May, we’ll also have a pretty nice 30-day free trial for Spotify Premium – more details on that in the next few days. Above all, this means we can continue making Spotify available to all in the long-term. We’ll be bringing out some awesome new features as well as significant improvements over the coming months, which will make the Spotify experience even better.
Tags: Spotify
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Written by Submit My Music on 27 September 2010
The rapid rise of digital music sales has stalled in the United States, the world’s biggest and most important market, with sales in the first half of 2010 flat compared with a year before.
According to research group Nielsen, digital sales were flat in the U.S. market after a 13 percent increase from 2008 to 2009 and 28 percent growth from 2007 to 2008.
Jean Littolff, managing director of Nielsen Music, told Reuters the flat U.S. sales could be due to weak consumer confidence, the appeal of new music releases and confusion over the many different ways people can buy music online.
The digital music market has mostly been led by a-la-carte sales on sites such as Apple’s iTunes, with the sale of individual tracks or albums, and Nielsen said subscription streaming services where consumers pay for access to music were still struggling to make an impact in the mass market.
According to the Nielsen research, digital music sales were up 7 percent in Britain, up 13 percent in Germany and up 19 percent in France.
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Written by Submit My Music on 08 September 2010
Amazon has moved from investor in AmieStreet to owner with an acquisition made public today. Amazon
will not embrace AmieStreet’s dynamic pricing anytime model soon, however, as the internet giant appears to be shutting the store down. The team will now shift focus to Songza, says Joshua Blotuch of AmieStreet.
“As of September 22, 2010, all AmieStreet.com pages will be forwarded to Amazon.com and you will no longer be able to use AmieStreet.com or any of its services,” read an email sent to users this morning.
According to Hypebot, the move can only be seen as a failure for dynamic pricing in music. Under AmieStreet’s model, download prices were determined by fan interest rewarding those that discover new music early. Now the Amie Street, Inc. team will concentrate its efforts on ramping up their social music streaming service, Songza.
The new Songza.com service gives users the ability to create their own internet radio stations from a library of over 8 million songs and to collaborate on group stations around shared interests.
Tags: AmieStreet, SongZa
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Written by Submit My Music on 30 August 2010
Amazon MP3 sent out info about their new product called Artist Central. Read the letter and check it out:
We thought you may be interested in learning about Artist Central, a free service where musicians, managers and record labels can promote music on Amazon.com.
Artist Central allows users to contribute compelling content to Amazon.com Artist Stores, search results, and product detail pages. This helps music fans on amazon.com discover artists and their work more easily, and leads to greater sales.
Users can upload photos, a bio, videos, and audio for promotional streaming, as well as utilize new features like a Twitter widget and customizable banners to create a robust, customized Artist Store on Amazon.com, ultimately helping customers discover artists and their work more easily. Check out the artist store for Band of Horses to see these features in action.
Artist Central is completely free to anyone selling their music on Amazon.com. Getting started is easy and only takes a few minutes. Just go to Artist Central and sign in with your Amazon account to claim your artist. (If there is currently no artist store for your artist, you can click “Create a new Artist Store”.) Claims are usually approved within 1-2 days.
Once your claim has been approved, you can upload artist photos, videos, tracks, banners, and bios and see them on the site almost immediately.
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Written by Submit My Music on 25 August 2010
Apple on Wednesday invited members of the media to its annual media-centric keynote, where it is expected to introduce new iPods and an updated Apple TV, set for Sept. 1 in San Francisco, Calif.
The event will be held next Wednesday and will start at 10 a.m. Pacific Time, 1 p.m. Eastern, and will be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Alluding to the music-themed nature of the event, the invitation includes an acoustic guitar with a sound hole in the shape of an Apple logo.
The announcement dispels an earlier report that the event would be held on Sept. 7.
In recent days, a firestorm of rumors and speculation have centered around a supposed new Apple TV, perhaps dubbed iTV, starting at $99. Both Bloomberg and The New York Times have cited anonymous sources as stating that Apple is currently negotiating with content providers to offer 99 cent TV episode rentals.
However, Apple reportedly does not intend to make the new Apple TV the centerpiece of its announcement, as sources said Chief Executive Steve Jobs doesn’t expect the device to be an instant mainstream hit. Instead, Apple is allegedly looking to improve its product, which it has long referred to as a “hobby,” by transitioning it to the iOS operating system and giving it access to the App Store for content and games.
Apple is also expected to reveal a new iPod touch with a forward facing camera that will allow FaceTime video chat, as is currently available on the iPhone 4. There have been numerous leaked parts alleged to be from Apple’s forthcoming portable media player that show a space in the device’s front panel for a camera.
While the iPod touch lacks a phone number to allow people to connect for a FaceTime call, beta releases of iOS 4.1 show that the media player will identify users by their e-mail address. Jobs said earlier this summer that his company will ship tens of millions of devices compatible with FaceTime this year alone. Currently, only the iPhone 4 is capable of making FaceTime video chat calls over Wi-Fi.
(Source: Appleinsider.com)
Tags: Apple
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Written by Submit My Music on 24 August 2010
The Spotify blog announced a new release of the Spotify client today. Spotify gives users access to millions of songs.
“Playlists have always been central to the Spotify service and with the recent introduction of Spotify social we’ve seen millions of playlists be shared between friends and family. With millions of great playlists being created and shared we’ve looked to make it even easier for Spotify users to manage them with today’s introduction of playlist folders in this Spotify update.”
Alongside playlist folders – which up till now has been one of the most requested features - Spotify also introduces a number of other new features in this latest update, including:
Official Spotify Twitter updates will appear for all users in the Feed to keep them up-to-date on all the latest Spotify and music news
- A new look and feel for the Search view. Artist and album images are shown to make the search view more visually arresting
- Newly-added picture of playlist subscribers to the header of each playlist, so users can see at a glance who’s subscribed.
- Support for Windows 7 Snap, Jump list and Taskbar features
- Added “Send to Windows Live” option
The new version will be rolled out to users today.
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Written by Submit My Music on 20 August 2010
Former executives from Disney and EA have joined forces to form QVIVO, a company that aims to release a free social media centre app that allow users to play and stream movies and music while interacting with their Facebook friends.
Former Disney man Jon Niermann and Liam McCallum, who were both serving as executives for EA’s Asian branch, are hoping that the QVIVO app will attract social networking addicts who want to buy, organize and stream their video and audio content.
The app is free for PC and Mac, but extenders for other devices such as phones will be paid for. It is described as ‘a free social media app for your PC and Mac. It organises your media into beautiful libraries, plays anything you can think of and even shares your fun with friends’.
(Source: Techradar.com)
Tags: QVIVO
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Written by Submit My Music on 19 August 2010
SoundCloud, an online audio platform catering to music professionals enabling them to collaborate, promote & distribute their music, today made the following announcement:
SoundCloud is opening up a bit more to allow you to find and share more sounds to use and reuse. With new search and discovery features for Creative Commons tracks, your creations can go much further. More options give you more freedom over your audio content on the web. It helps expose your work and find people to collaborate with that you perhaps wouldn’t normally find.
With Creative Commons licenses, creators have the freedom to choose how their work can be used, shared and re-used. There are six different licenses that provide users with different levels. Not only can you search for tracks released under CC licenses on SoundCloud, but the SoundCloud player also got a face-lift. It now displays the type of CC license in the top right corner of the player.
Read SoundCloud’s full announcement here.
Tags: Creative Commons
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Written by Submit My Music on 12 August 2010
Hypebot.com reports:
Press speculation abounds about forthcoming Apple or Google music subscriptions services. If and when they materialize they’ll join a crowded field of alternatives big and small. Competitors range from ten year veterans Rhapsody and Napster, euro-darling Spotify to newcomers like MOG and Rdio. In spite of the enormous investment the global user base is estimated at under 2 million current subscribers globally.
Read the full article here.
Tags: Music Subscription Services
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