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Spotify iPhone and Android Applications are Now Live

Steven Finch — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:19:49 +0000

The Spotify iPhone and Android applications are now live. Here is a quick look again at both demo’s.

Voddler: Free Movies and TV Streaming Service

Steven Finch — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:36:55 +0000

Voddler is a new video startup that launch back in private beta back in July 2009. Currently it is rumoured that only 1,500 people have access to the site, so we wanted to run through the service for everyone else.

Voddler won’t be launched officially until sometime this fall, and then only in the Nordic countries for starters. The agenda is to go global, though.

Voddler aims to do for movies and TV series what Spotify is doing for music. Although in private beta Voddler already seems to be getting a lot of buzz in Scandinavia, so we hope to let everyone else know about it.

Voddler is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, Voddler will also be providing a Linux-based box with a pre-installed client that you can easily connect to your TV to get that home cinema feel.

Here below is a screenshot of the latest design of the landing page, designed to work best on widescreen televisions.

Movies are of course a lot more bandwidth-intensive than music. How well Voddler works for you will depend on your Internet connection. To get 1080p HD quality you should have an 8 Mbit/s connection, for 720p HD quality you should have a 5 Mbit/s connection, and for DVD quality you should have a 2.5 Mbit/s connection. Contrast this with Spotify which only has to deal with music streaming and therefore works just fine with a mere 256 kbit/s connection.

Spotify iPhone App Gets Accepted into iTunes Store, but did iTunes Make a Deal to Be a Music Download Provider?

Steven Finch — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:42:16 +0000

There has been a lot of talk this morning about Spotify getting their new iPhone application accepted into the iTunes store. I know we have talked a lot about Spotify recently including them entering into the Chinese market, USA market, and how to use Spotify if your based in the USA or any other country. However, today’s news is probably bigger than all of these.

The company’s iPhone application has been approved for the App Store ahead of competitors Rhapsody and Grooveshark. PaidContent UK reports that Apple has notified Spotify that its app will appear in the store shortly. In late July there was fear that the Swedish site’s iPhone service would be denied due to the fact that it was seen as a threat to iTunes.

Unlike many other iPhone music apps, Spotify’s iPhone service offers users the ability to select tracks and listen to them in an offline playlist. The ability to cache files is a huge asset to those who commute to work without a wireless connection.

With today’s announcement, Spotify’s audiences in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Spain, France and Finland will be more likely to pay for the company’s premium service.

This is a very interesting decision by Apple who recently blocked Google Voice from entering the app store because it basically provided free phone calls via the iPhone. I dont think Spotify is a future competitor to iTunes because they are offering completely different products. iTunes provides a platform to purchase digital products, while Spotify is strict music streaming service. However, im very surprised that Apple didnt make an agreement with Spotify and accept them into their iTunes store but only if iTunes because a default download provider for the music on the service (like 7digital currently).

Rhapsody To Release Their Music Streaming iPhone and iPod Touch Application

Steven Finch — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:01:01 +0000

We have previously report on the new Spotify iPhone application and also the Grooveshark iPhone application, but very soon Rhapsody are also bringing out their own music streaming iPhone application.

If approved by Apple, the Rhapsody app for the iPhone/iPod Touch will include these features:

The app is a free download from the iTunes App Store, but will require a Rhapsody-To-Go subscription ($14.99/month)
Users will have unlimited access to Rhapsody’s library of 8+ million songs from all four major record labels and indie labels
Perhaps in a bid to get approval, users can purchase MP3s directly from the app through iTunes rather than Rhapsody’s own download store

I Can’t Believe it’s not Spotify!

Dean Sherwin — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:52:52 +0000

Spotify is undoubtedly one of the fastest growing music and entertainment services on the internet today. And as with all good services they have decided that it’s time for more Apps. They recently announced that they would be releasing an App for android devices similar to those for the iPhones.

This would allow users to access their Spotify accounts easily from their android devices. However, they have a competitor.

“I can’t believe it’s not Spotify” has just launched and is taking on a lot of users as they wait for the official app to be released. It packs much of the same features as what we expect in the official version but lacks in one – offline playback. However, the developers say that this may come later if it continues to grow in popularity.

While I can’t see this app lasting as people tend to veer towards products with an official stamp on them, I can definitely see its use at the present. The developers deserve their time in the limelight because they plugged a gap in the market. But soon the official app will push them out with no really effort.

How To Use Spotify if your based in USA or Other Countries

Steven Finch — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:04:21 +0000

Spotify has of course been in the news a lot lately. However, the Spotify service is still only available to users in certain countries, such as UK, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Spain and France. Thus if your based in the USA the Spotify service is currently not available for you to use, until now.

A few people have been reporting that they have used the following steps to get a Spotify account when they are based in the USA.

1) go to http://www.daveproxy.co.uk/
2) enter the following URL: https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/
3) Create your account, for UK postcode – check http://www.postcodesearch.org.uk/

Let us know if this still works in your country!

Spotify and Tom Group Partner for Chinese Music Streaming Service

Steven Finch — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:23:04 +0000

Spotify has been in the press a lot lately with their move into the US market imminent, new funding, plus they have launched their iPhone application (but still yet to be accepted).

Today the news is that Spotify has partnered with with Tom Group a major Chinese media conglomerate to launch the company’s popular digital music streaming service in China. The tie-up will create a localized version of the software to introduce to provide music over computers and mobile phones, Tom said in a statement to Reuters. Spotify’s current services are only available over computers.

“Tom will work toward unveiling a localized version of Spotify in Greater China in the near future,” the statement said.

Microsoft’s Music Streaming – Where is it Bill?

Dean — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:09:01 +0000

Right next to downloading, music streaming is the next big thing in terms of entertainment on the net. It’s really starting to pick up with many people launching their own private radio stations. While the vast majority are in too small a niche to actually make money, the big companies will.

Spotify are the biggest at the moment. They are the ones to go to for video and music streaming. Recently however, Microsoft announced that it would launch its own music streaming service. This was originally intended for July but has become delayed.

Several other companies are now catching up quickly with streaming services already launched or in the works.

TechCrunch.com contacted Microsoft and this is what they had to say for themselves:

We don’t have much detail to disclose on this subject but what we can share is that, in the coming months, MSN is planning a new music service in Beta via its Music channel in the UK.

“At this stage we won’t be confirming the details behind this but more information will be available soon and will be communicated in due course.”

At any rate, Microsoft had better hop to it if they want to succeed in what it becoming a crowded market. If they let users get too comfortable with one source (as we have see happen in the past with iTunes) then they will not want to move onto any future service provided by Microsoft.

Spotify To Enter The USA Market Very Soon

Steven Finch — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 08:58:48 +0000

Spotify has received a lot of press in the last few days cause they are planning to move their European only service into the US market. The story was broken over at Forbes and I think this could be a very big move for the music industry as a whole. Spotify is a free ad supported music streaming service which allows users to listen to anything in their catalogue as often as they want. Spotify offers a free service which is advertising supports, a day of free advertising and then also a full unlimited service. Users can also build and store playlists; so that if you turn on shuffle, after awhile it feels like a Pandora station with only your favorites or the iTunes collection you wish you could afford.

Ive used Spotify since private launch and it is so addictive and one of the best services I have ever used. Their currently library has over 5 million tracks with thousands more uploaded on a daily basis. Spotify has attracted more than 2 million users in the UK and another 4 million across Europe. The company also wants to let you take you playlists with you anywhere you want. An Android app is in beta and an iPhone app is being tested.

Key issues when entering the US market is:

Can they afford the crippling royalty rates that all the majors will want in the US? These rates already killed Spiral Frog and other services.
Microsoft UK executive already leaked that they are readying a launch of a competitive product that will be tied in with the Zune. However, it is Microsoft and they always seem to get new products wrong recently.
The economy needs to turn around because Spotify is 95% ad-supported. “If you look at the market today, who knows where it’s going to be in the next two, three years?”. Spotify founder Daniel Ek told Forbes. “We are doubling our revenues month-on-month–that’s a very good sign.”

Spotify Seeking Funding and Revenues

Steven Finch — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:30:00 +0000

Previously we have written about Spotify’s upcoming Android application as well as their iPhone app, but currently Spotify is fast approaching its “payment due” day.

Spotify has been able to attract a huge amount of users but their free section is being used a little too much and they are now finding difficult to generate enough income to pay their major label partners by the date due.

Currently Spotify seem to be trying to increase incomes in three key areas:

A premium service is getting much more attention from Spotify as it adds additional features beyond just “ad free” to attaract paid users.
Spotify is rolling out by far its largest advertising format to date. It will feature wall to wall billboard ads on its music player that appear after just 5 minutes of inactivity as part of a major 3 Mobile ad campaign. (However, if I’m inactive on Spotify I tend not have the application open on my screen its just in a tab at the bottom, thus the ads showing will obviously have no affect whatsoever.
To buy more time, the startup is on the hunt for another $40-$50 million in venture capital funding. (paidContent)

I personally use Spotify and find it pointless to upgrade to their premium service because I receive unlimited listening time, tracks, search and playlists. I know they are finding it tough to gain additional revenues and maybe moving their product into iPhone and Android markets is a better bet to increase revenues fast enough.

Spotify iPhone Application in Action

Steven Finch — Sat, 30 May 2009 20:06:36 +0000

A few days ago we wrote a quick article about the release of the video for the new Spotify Android App. Today we thought we would post about the other Spotify app that hasnt been talked about so much and that is the iPhone Spotify application.

Below is a quick video of the application in action. Enjoy!

Spotify Android Application in Action

Steven Finch — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:04:52 +0000

Spotify is a music startup that has had a huge amount of press of late. Today Techcrunch and a few other sites have been talking about the Spotify application for Android and providing some screenshots of the service. However, we have now found a video that actually shows the application in action. So take a look and let us know what you think.

Muziic – Playlists from YouTube’s Catalogue

dashiel — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:52:42 +0000

There’s a whole host of music streaming solutions out there now; Last.FM, Spotify, SeeqPod, SongBird. All of them trying to carve out a little niche in the rapidly changing online music market. Any new player in the market has really got to stand out in terms of content and user experience if it hopes to get any kind of traction.

So how does Muzzic differ from it’s competitors, and how does it hope to gain users’ loyalty? They’ve got the content issue fairly well covered; their program crawls YouTube’s catalogue, logging all the songs by title and artist. The search seems pretty comprehensive – even odd little things like Kutiman’s Thru You series, and Swede Mason’s hilarious oddities are recognised.

There’s also a little sidebar to browse user’s upload channels by genre – this is pretty limited though, and there’s no way of knowing what you’re going to find in one particular person’s upload list. They work fairly well as mini radio stations or preset playlists though. You can build your own playlists, a single track at a time, or pick tracks to play from your search results. Muziic’s player also brings down the video for whatever you might be watching and plays it in a tiny little window next to the progress bar.

So is it any good? It’s better than last.fm for the fact that you can pick your own specific tracks, rather than have to listen to something like what you had in mind, but essentially it’s like a miniature version of a YouTube quicklist, nothing massively innovative, and more limited than SongBird in that it only draws down from YouTube – a massive catalogue, granted, but not compared to pulling down tracks from the whole web, especially now YouTube has vowed to take down all the content from PRS artists. Not having any audio ads is nice, but the playlist management is so much more comprehensive and cool on Spotify that I’d bear Roberta whining on at me, as well as their more limited catalogue for the privilige of playing through my search results and not having to add tracks to a list one at a time. There’s no music discovery functionality, and worst of all, the tracks occasionally just stop playing for no reason.

All in all a nice try, and probably worth experimenting with before you go back to Spotify.

Don’t Get Sued… Use Tunerec

Keshav Khera — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:53:30 +0000

With the RIAA already suing teenagers for downloading pirated music, it’s time you move to the safer side and try another alternative. And yes, that ‘other’ alternative can be free and legal.

Tunerec is a web based service, that ‘records’ songs off internet radio streams and then tags them all for your convenience. Since it has to ‘record’ the streams first, it takes some time to save them in your database. But the patience is eventually rewarded. It has an iTunes like interface, where you can search for artists, songs and albums; Make playlists and also share them with friends.

Although I don’t understand why it has to ‘record’ songs for each user, and not just once for all its users, it probably doesn’t take much time as the number of songs i had last week jumped a whopping 100K this week, taking the total, as of now, to 1 Million.

It may not have all the songs you want, and likely demands patience even for those it has, the audio quality is commendable with very less buffering interuptions. As for the ‘legal’ thing you may be wondering about, the site mentions that it is completely legal and RWW also notes that Tunerec “ has worked out an agreement with the Swedish songwriters association STIM and the musicians (or at least the labels) get paid for every every song played on the service. ”

You can also invite your friends to the service and share your playlists with them.

Tunerec is currently in currently in closed beta but i was able to get into the service right away after i signed up. People living in Europe have a better option than Tunerec and that is Spotify. But sadly, Spotify is only available in Europe and will take some time untill it opens up to the U.S and rest of the world. Untill then, you have Tunerec. If you don’t like it, go buy your own CDs

(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.

The World’s Top 10 Free Music Streaming Services

Steven Finch — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:25:50 +0000

Im spending a lot of time in the office recently and I’m one of those people who cant work without music playing really loud in the background. I’m sure its not just me who thinks better when music is playing loud, so I thought I would put together a quick list of the top 10 free music streaming service that are currently available. Some of these services can only be used in specific countries, but I’m sure this will change in 2009.

Pandora – Pandora is now just a USA based service. However, Pandora is a great service for those in the USA and im surprised if most people in the USA don’t already use it. Pandora is basically a music radio service which lets you listen to customised radio stations.

Last.fm – I have never really understood Last.fm myself, but they have a great service in which will let you stream music from certain artists. Some have full tracks for free to stream, but others have videos or some nothing at all.

Seeqpod – Seeqpod is basically Google for music. Seepqod is a search engine that allows users to find whatever music they want to listen too. Seeqpod can only find music that can easily be downloaded on the net, so it can be limited with some artists, plus sometimes the tracks might be corrupted and not completely work. However, it is great for making playlists.

Spotify – Spotify is a new music service that has launched out of Sweden. I have been using Spotify for several months now, even though it is in private beta testing. Though the music is streamed, it is played instantly and is partly supported by the famous P2P technology. Currently the service is only available in Finland, France, Norway, Spain, Sweden and UK. Spotify has to be the best music streaming service I have used in 2008.

Myspace Music – Myspace is of course the worlds largest social network and Myspace Music is just an add-on of this social network. With Myspace Music users can search for pretty much any artist in the world and stream the music they have on their profiles. Remember it is limited to only the music the artist wants you to hear.

Rhapsody – Rhapsody has a nice “listen FREE” search option at the top of its homepage, an excellent way to entice people to sign up for its premium service. Once you find the artist you are looking for then you can play any of the songs in their catalogue for free. However, then I realised streaming is only for the USA.

Imeem – Imeem is a mixture between music streaming service and social network. On Imeem to stream music all you need to do is to search for the artist you want to listen to and then the majority of the time they will already have an Imeem account.

Deezer - Deezer is a mixture between Seeqpod and Imeem. Deezer has some social networking aspects but mainly it is just a great music streaming service that is very easy to find the music you are looking for. All music on there is legal and free and artists actually get royalties from your streams.

Skreemr - Skreemr is very similar to Seepqod and it is just basically a search engine for music online. Skreemr is a free service that picks up free music from across the internet and allows you to play it easily. However, unlike Seeqpod they don’t allow users to make playlists.

Lala – Lala is one of the new music streaming services on the block. Lala provides free streaming to only USA users. There is a limit on how many times you can listen to a track for free, but you also have the option of purchasing that stream for $0.10 so then you have can unlimited plays. Additionally, if you want to take the tracks off the site then there is an option of $0.79 for the download.

Spotify: Ad Supported Music Streaming Player

Steven Finch — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:00:07 +0000

Spotify, founded by the former Tradedoubler team, is understood to have raised €15.3m from Northzone Venture Partners at a monster €71.6m pre-money valuation. The service is still in private beta.

The Stockholm-based Spotify can essentially be summed up, in the words of one blogger, as a kind of hybrid of Skype, last.fm, the iTunes Store and Bittorrent. A lightweight iTunes-like application streams songs via encrypted P2P technology. The service is ad-financed, hence the comparison with Last.fm.

Spotify has the same look and feel as iTunes, but it basically just a huge library in which allows users to stream albums and tracks as much as they want. Im not sure how they are going to include the advertising part of the business, because it is currently missing from the design. However, they have a great design and this could be a tool that is going to be used a lot in the future, but only as long as they get the monetization part of the business correct.