Spotify, looking to build out the social features of its on-demand music streaming service, launched a new Follow button for artists, labels, concert organizers, and anybody else with music to promote. The button can be added to any external website or blog to raise awareness of a specific spotify profile. On click, signed-in Spotify users who are already logged in will automatically follow the artist; if they’re not logged in, they’ll log in and thereafter follow the artist. In following, Spotify users will get an update whenever new tracks or albums are added to the artist’s profile. It’s a very visible play to increase Spotify’s presence across the web, and the button will likely sit next to all the requisite Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ buttons on artists’ pages.
Tag: spotify
Spotify Now Available In Taiwan, Turkey, Greece, & Argentina
Spotify today announced that Greece, Turkey, Taiwan, and Argentina are all getting access to the music streaming service. According to the company, they’re now in 32 total “markets” worldwide with over 24 million active users over the course of 7 years of existence. The last major expansion, in April, was when it arrived to Mexico, Malaysia, and many others. The most notable country left out of Spotify’s realm thus far is Canada; regardless, Spotify – if it wasn’t already – is a certifiably global service.
Spotify Connect Cements Spotify In The Home
In its ongoing play to become the dominant player in the music distribution arena, Spotify has forged deals with 10 audio equipment manufacturers to develop a system, launching today, called Spotify Connect. Connect allows users to seamlessly switch between playing music on their handsets and Wi-Fi connected home audio devices. As an added bonus, any Spotify user on your Wi-Fi network can control the music, so getting friends involved is simple. Music providers getting into the hardware game is nothing new, recalling products from Zune to AirPlay, but this system could be the push needed to bring true ubiquity to Spotify, and could certainly be the backbone of a car based system which has been a major goal of Spotify for some time.
Music Sales Down As Streaming Up 24%
Amidst artist criticisms of streaming services, Nielsen released numbers that demonstrate just how streamed music is on the rise. In the first six months of 2013, streaming music was up by 24% to nearly 51 billion streams, while overall sales of albums and tracks were down by 4.6% over a year ago. The top track of the six months, unsurprisingly, was the Harlem Shake, which was streamed 438 million times, with the next closest contender, Thrift Shop, at 187 million streams. So no matter how the streaming issue resolves itself, it remains clear that streaming music is a medium that listeners are clamoring for.
Google To Launch Streaming Service
Google has announced a streaming music service called Google Play Music All Access built on top of their Play store. Let’s just say it contains all the features of Spotify–mobile and desktop access, a recommendation engine and social integration–with one major exception. Unlike most of Google products, Google Music will be $9.99 per month. iTunes is expected to launch their streaming service this year so expect the space to get cluttered pretty quickly.
Twitter #Music App Launches
After a week’s worth of teasing, the Twitter music app finally launched. A service for both discovery and streaming, it’s now available at music.twitter.com, as well as in the iOS app store; of yet there is no Android app. #Music is based around a recommendation engine that pulls data from across Twitter and your followers to offer recommendations from the catalogs of iTunes, Spotify, and Rdio. Of primary importance is the Trending chart, which allows you to view – and listen to via iTunes Preview, Spotify, or Rdio – the top trending songs on Twitter. As well, there are Emerging, Suggested, and Now Playing tabs; Emerging takes data from all of Twitter to identify up-and-coming new artists, while Suggested recommends music based on who you follow, and Now Playing takes stock of the music being played at that instant by the people you follow. Listening to the songs is straight forward as well, just log in with any of the previously mentioned services and you should be able to listen to full songs in the app. You can, however, click the iTunes button and be taken to the iTunes Store to purchase the song. How well this catches remains to be seen, but what is definite at the moment is that you’ll soon get to know how good your followers’ taste in music really is.
Spotify Launches Follow Tab
Spotify officially announced the release of its “Follow” tab, which replaces the “People” tab to display basic public profile details and recommendations. The release is timed with a nifty ad campaign with the band Phoenix, demonstrating how the process works. Facebook friends using Spotify are automatically recommended in the “Follow” tab, and below it Spotify recommends musicians. The service also auto-follows musicians a user has starred. In the words of the subscription-based music service, “[The ‘Follow’ tab lets you] get musical recommendations from your must trusted and most inspiring musical influences.” Much like Twitter, Vine, or Facebook, you can follow your friends or celebrities, creating a de facto social network centered around music. It remains to be seen how effective this social network will be, but this is a major step into the social sphere for Spotify.
Spotify Runs TV Ads
Spotify is finally ready to enter the world of mainstream advertising, airing ads during NBC’s The Voice in an effort to expand on its 6 million paying subscribers. These 6 million put Spotify handily ahead of competitors like Rdio and MOG, but the future of the streaming model supporting these services is far from perfect, and music industry criticism of the financial repercussions of a subscription model could result in more than just grumbling in coming years. The old rumor that Spotify aims to become an all-in-one destination for all forms of media online – one to compete with Netflix and Hulu – has gained new breath in light of this ad push. Could Spotify be gearing up to take new ground, and potentially silence its most vocal critics by balancing its financial woes in the process?
Spotify Finally Arrives for Windows Phone 8
For three months, Windows phone users have been kept from Spotify. The app wasn’t released on the Windows platform immediately, but it’s now up in the store as a beta version. The original Windows Phone 7 Spotify app was built through a third party via Microsoft funding, with the goal being to get the app onto the app store as soon as possible to fuel the demand. The issue for Microsoft was that after the shift to 8, the app had to be rebuilt from the ground up, which explains the three-month lag time. But, the wait is officially over, and the app is ready to download, now across the full spectrum of platforms.
Music Market Up 3.1% With Rise Of Digital Sales
Nielsen has released some research that shows digital music accounting for 55.9% of all sales with digital music stores besting brick and mortar locations for the first time. While streaming services seem to be slowly catching up with digital download–Spotify has just closed its download service–that is still some ways away.
