On April 28, Last.fm will shut down its subscription radio stream. That means the company won’t be streaming content through its own servers, just third party stuff, mostly from YouTube and Spotify. “We understand that many of you will not like this decision,” a Last.fm forum post announced on Wednesday. A flood of Last.fm users agreed. […]
“The Student Discount is here,” Spotify announced today. “Spotify Premium is now 50% off for students.” This is for college students, I presume (I sneaked a peek at the discount form; it definitely asks users for their “college”). So qualified college attendees get ad free Spotify for $4.99 instead of $9.99. The discount comes as Pandora […]
Starting this weekend, Austin, Texas will be teeming with techies and music fans, as the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) event kicks off on Friday, March 7. The Interactive and Film portions hit first, with the music festival running March 11-16. Numerous panel discussion will explore the topic of radio in some way, shape or […]
The endlessly creative Spotify applications keep coming. The latest: Forgotify, which randomly streams long forgotten tracks, or, in my case, songs I don’t think I ever knew from the getgo. Here’s what I got in 20 minutes or so of listening: Mani Demon Chants, by Men of the Wilkili Village from the album “The Living, Dead […]
You don’t hear a great deal about Last.fm these days, in large part because it has been eclipsed by a myriad of new streaming music services. But on Wednesday the company announced that it had forged a deal with Spotify to bring the latter’s whole catalogue to Last.fm users. “Whether it be your own profile […]
We had Rhapsody, Pandora, Rdio, Slacker, Songza and Spotify. Then last year Google Play All Access and iTunes Radio joined the scene. Today producers and headphones impresarios Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine are bringing us Beats Music. Like Spotify and similar platforms, Beats offers up on-demand music for unlimited listening. In part the service hopes […]
I teach history courses at a big university in California. Classes started three weeks ago. One of mine takes place in one of the largest lecture halls on campus. I walked into the room, which holds almost 200 people, and there on the corner of a front desk sat two CDs, one by Tom Waits, […]
Shortly after we posted my review of Soundrop, Spotify’s chat room application, Soundrop marketing Vice President Thomas Ford wrote to us. “I think you published just a few weeks too soon,” he observed. “We’re planning to launch the new Spotify app tomorrow [December 17]. I hope it helps solve some of the interaction issues by […]
Who doesn’t like free? That’s what Spotify is counting on with the announcement today that its mobile smartphone and tablet apps will let users stream their favorite artists and playlists for free. The catch with smartphones is that you can’t select particular songs. Instead, Spotify is channeling the iPod Shuffle, letting you randomly “shuffle play” […]
Twitter has 49 million users every month in the US. Facebook has 198 million. There are about 6 million US Spotify users. What about terrestrial broadcast radio, that old-school, supposedly dying analog medium? Radio has 241.8 million listeners per week, not just per month. Take that, Silicon Valley. Those numbers are according to Nielsen’s December […]
