Spotify is about to release their own version of Gift cards that will be in store in time for Christmas.
Gift cards will come in £10, £30 and £50 options. You can redeem the cards for Spotify subscriptions or download tracks.
To redeem a card just head over to our ‘Redeem your code‘ page and enter the PIN number on the back of the card. Starting today Morrisons will be the first store to start selling our gift cards. Spotify will be dding many more retail shops in the near future, stay tuned.
Spotify, can you please add Gapless playback to your music player! This is one key feature that has been missing from Spotify from the very beginning and I really want to see it added very soon.
Is music an important part of your life? Do you love listening to music while working or discovering new music bands and artists?
YouTube has a huge database of music clips of all imaginable genres and types. It’s a great source of inspiration – we just need more tools to enjoy it.
The following two tools will add a lot of fun to your YouTube music-listening experience: they will let you endlessly listen to your favorite music genres.
Zebralizer
Zebralizer is YouTube-powered online tool that will play your music as long as you want it to. It won’t work on Internet Explorer, nor will it work on FireFox if you are on Mac. Google Chrome has been the best option to use the tool so far.
The site has a fun search option that will suggest to you results while you are typing:
Once the results are loaded, music will start playing immediately.
While listening, you can browse through the search results to add any clip to the play list. There’s also a “radio” button that will instantly create a play list from the similar music clips to the one currently running.
You can even load the lyrics next to the current song and start singing:
The built-in player controls let you play the music louder, jump to the next track, watch the video in the full-screen mode and shuffle your current play list.
Jukesy
Jukesy is a fun, yet not widely-known web-based app that allows you to enjoy an endless sit-back-and-listen YouTube experience.
To select the genre, you can browse through the vast selection of popular tags (anything from “art rock” to “hip hop” can be found there) or use the search option.
Once the genre is chosen, you can enjoy an endless video and music stream: Just keep the tab open and keep working or browsing the web – the music of your preferred genre will play until you stop it.
The built-in player controls let you easily adjust the volume, toggle the full-screen view or repeat your favorite song.
That’s a great music discovery tool: With its vast search capabilities, you are most likely to come across a new song or band that will become your favorite one. Besides, the tool offers plenty of information about genres and bands (powered by Last.fm).
You can continue searching for music, while the current clip keeps playing. You can add a new clip to the play list or queue video clips right from the search results (without interrupting your current music stream).
If you create an account, you can save your play lists as well.
Are there any other tools for the similar lean-back music experience? Please share them in the comments!
Jennifer Moline writes for the PsPrint Blog. PsPrint is an online commercial printing company.
It is a very big day for Pandora as they are launching the new version of their site.
Some of our new features include:
Simplified Station Creation – Enhanced auto-complete choices and personalized suggestions make creating new stations and discovering new music or comedy more intuitive and personal.
Discovery of Music with Friends – Enhanced listener profiles and a new music feed offer a centralized place to find, like and comment on what friends and like-minded listeners are discovering and enjoying on Pandora. The music feed will roll out slowly over the course of the coming days. In addition to the prominent new “share” button, stations now have their own URLs, making it super easy for listeners to share favorite stations via Twitter, Facebook, or email.
Improved Control – Prominent and ubiquitous access to familiar player control buttons including Play, Pause, Thumbs-Up and Thumbs-Down icons helps listeners to easily personalize their music and comedy stations. A new shuffle feature also allows listeners to shuffle any collection of stations to add variety to their listening experience.
Enhanced Artist Information – An option to learn more about the music, find lyrics, read artists’ biographies and expand the album art size.
Unlimited listening – We’ve removed the 40 hours listening cap – you can now listen as much as you want for free.
Kazaa has actually just got their new iPhone music streaming app into the App Store.
With Kazaa you can use your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to listen to unlimited, on-demand music everywhere. Play any of our millions of songs as much as you like, make your own playlists, listen to artist stations and discover new music that you love. Sync songs, albums and playlists to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch and listen even when you’re offline. Search and find any song, album or artist, and start listening immediately.
Access millions and millions of songs
All the music you love – and new music to be discovered – at your fingertips
Sync and play music even when you are offline
Build and save playlists
New music added every week
The app is US only at the moment and free to download. You will need to pay a subscription charge of $9.99 a month.
Spotify is on a roll at the moment. In only a few weeks they have signed up over 1.4 million US users, with 175,000 paying for the premium service.
This is amazing news for the music industry, because MOG, Rdio and other music streaming services have been having trouble gaining traction.
Spotify is all about conversion rates! The major labels want to see highest possible conversions to the premium service from the free option. In Europe Spotify has a conversion rate of 15% and so far in the US they are seeing 12.5%. Very promising signs for Spotify.
It seems as though Slacker is really trying to compete in the music streaming sector. Slacker has just opened up an on-demand service that fits in nicely with their radio service. However, they will be facing tough competition in this sector with Spotify, MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody and others in the market.
Slacker becomes the first music service to deliver three complementary tiers: free ad supported interactive streams, subscription based ad-free radio with extra features, and on-demand music with Slacker Premium Radio.
Official.fm has just managed to grab themselves $8 million in funding to build the worlds most advanced do-it-yourself platform for music creators and content owners. The aim is to use the funds to help gain more traction and spread the music across to other download stores and services globally. The site also offers widgets, tools and analytics.
Long term: “We’ll launch premium accounts in the coming months, giving you access to new ways for you to live off of the music you create & control.”
There is a huge amount of competition in this space and it already seems as though Official.fm is going to have a lot of problems with copyrighted content. Already on the site I can download a huge amount of illegal content, so only going to be a matter of time before the labels sue them.
Disclosure: Im founder of RouteNote a digital music distributor based in the UK.
It seems as though Spotify is going through some tough times in terms of advertising revenues. Spotify is about to make some big changes to their free music service in Europe and it would first appear this is because of poor advertising returns at present.
Spotify will be limiting their free service to 10 hours of listening per month, down from 20 hours. What’s more, they’ll only be able to play individual tracks five times ever, before they are made greyed out and unplayable.
Upgrading to the Spotify Premium service will obviously remove both of these limitations and provide better quality streaming.
“We’ve got to balance a number of priorities,” says chief content officer Ken Parks. “Chief amongst those priorities is to keep the free service, which is what makes Spotify unique, and what you’re seeing here is a balance of these priorities. We’ve shown that the model is doing extremely well, but as things stand we need to tweak the service to ensure everyone has access to legal music in the long term.”
It seems that these changes are down to rightsholder demands, but I know first hand that this is because of the major labels not liking the free service! Independent record labels and aggregators seem to be onboard with Spotify’s free service, as long as it brings people off illegal services and allows rightholders to generate at least a little royalties.
