If, like us, you love the music they play on BBC Radio 6 Music but can’t bear the incessant, irrelevant blather generated by some of their ’personality’ DJs like Lauren “Tweet Me” Laverne, salvation is at hand.
It’s taken them an eternity to get the service up and running in the States, but the music streaming service Spotify is finally heading to the land of hamburgers and Mom’s apple pie.
We suspect that it may not be around for long, but Spotify has announced big changes that will put the popular music streaming service in direct competition with Apple’s iTunes.
The music streaming service Spotify is getting stingier, and restricting the amount of songs that can be listened to for free.
Spotify is pushing hard to get more subscribers to their music streaming service by offering a free seven day trial of the premium service.
Spotify have declared themselves “excited” as they announce what they’re describing as “a major evolution” in their innovative music streaming service.
From today, the company are rolling out Spotify version 0.4.3, which packs in their largest feature upgrade since launching in late 2008.
Based on the number of streams each track received in their six launch countries, music streaming site Spotify have released a listing of their most listened-to tracks of 2009.
if you’re a Spotify users, you can listen to the top Spotify tracks playlist featuring the top tracks of the year.
Click on for the listing:
Spotify has tooted on its PR horn and trumpeted the news that its mobile phone app is now available on the Symbian platform, letting zillions of users on Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung handsets gorge themselves on their music streaming service.
Like the iPhone and Android versions, the Symbian version serves up unlimited music streaming, so long as users are shelling out a tenner a month for the premium account and they’re on a fixed data plan offering WiFi or 2.5/3G Internet access.
After a bout of synergistic backslapping, Spotify and the mobile network 3 have announced a deal to bundle subscriptions to the music streaming service with the HTC Hero handset.
From November 2009, 3 will be offering the HTC Hero with a two year Spotify Premium account, giving customers unlimited access to the service on their phone, leaving them free to gorge on 3,333 tracks downloaded to the phone every month.
We’ve become increasingly annoyed by the growing amount of adverts on the free Spotify service, but we may have to give up on the service altogether, come the run up to the UK general election.
In an attempt to woo the ‘yoof’ market and get down with the kids, the Conservative party have announced that they’re going to be the first UK first political party to buy ads on Spotify.
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has thrown down his expensive leather gauntlet and announced his intention to do battle with the digital music industry, launching the new Sky Songs service next Monday (Oct 19).
The subscription service will enter a market dominated by Apple’s all-conquering iTunes and have to face competition from streaming music upstarts like such as Spotify and Last.fm, but with Murdoch’s pockets being diamond-mine deep, Sky Songs could well prove a serious contender.
Users of the mobile iPhone and Android Spotify apps have already been enjoying the ability to keep on grooving to Spotify playlists after their web connection has gone kaput, and the company are now offering the same facility to desktop users.
Subscribers will soon be able to right-click on playlists and select them as “available offline,” with a marker indicating the playlists that can be accessed offline.
From today, subscribers to the Spotify Premium service will be able to shell oot for their monthly fix of unlimited music using a Paypal account.
The Paypal option is only available in the UK, with Spotify saying that they’ll be supporting more countries in the near future.
The feature has long been requested by users (especially those without a credit card), and may well tempt some wavering users to sign up, although our wallets are staying in our pockets.
Is Spotify worth it?
Techradar is running an interesting piece about the mobile version of Spotify which was recently released for the iPhone and the Android platform (with more mobile versions on the way).
Noting that the majority of reviews for the iPhone version have been largely negative (5,985 of the current 9,164 reviews are a mere one star), they argue that punters just aren’t that keen on forking out £9.99 month, and the deal looks decidedly stingy when compared to what the BBC offers in return for the license fee.
And then there’s the BBC. If you look at the Beeb’s breakdown of where the licence fee goes, £2.01 per month gives you all the BBC’s radio output – that’s Radio 1, Radio 2, 40-odd regional stations, the specialist DAB-only channels, the Asian Network and the talk and sport channels – while a further £0.61 per month gives you online, which means podcasts, streaming and iPlayer.
£2.62 for the Beeb compared to £9.99 for Spotify? Suddenly Spotify doesn’t look quite so attractive.
Part of the problem is that in order to exist, Spotify has to pay the bills – and you can be confident that it’s paying rates that the BBC would laugh at. By all accounts the going royalty rate for streaming music is around 1p per stream, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you start getting lots of users.
One user listening to ten streams per day is 10p a day, or £3.00 per month – which means Spotify’s paying more than the BBC spends on its entire radio and online output.
We’re not entirely sure that it’s fair to compare Spotify with the BBC, but like a lot of others, we feel that the asking price of £9.99 per month is just a bit too steep.
Maybe it’s because we’re all a bunch of cheapskates, but if they made it a fiver we’d be in like a shot.
How much would you be prepared to pay for a service like Spotify?
Read the full story here
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