Spotify and Starbucks on Tuesday announced a new partnership that permits visitors to identify music playing overhead in participating Starbucks stores.
The Sound of Starbucks, as it's called, also lets music lovers save identified songs to a playlist on Spotify.
This functionality and in-store overhead music experience is available starting today at select Starbucks location. The feature requires the latest version of the mobile Starbucks app and permission to use location services.
Spotify today announced it is partnering with Genius (not to be confused with iTunes Genius), to annotate your music. Genius is the crowdsourced musical knowledge startup that annotates music lyrics and other online content and Spotify is betting that this new feature will help retain its competitive edge over other music-streaming services.
Available at launch via a limited number of tracks through special playlists—called Behind the Lyrics and curated by Spotify and Genius—this feature adds backstory and commentary which pops up as you play tracks on Spotify.
Learn how to permanently delete your Spotify account from your phone or computer if you no longer plan on using this music streaming service or want to get rid of an unnecessary second account you might have.
Facebook is announcing today a brand new feature called Music Stories, basically a new post format for Facebook that should make it easier to discover and share music from Spotify and Apple Music.
Now every time you share songs or albums shared from Spotify or Apple Music using Facebook's iPhone application, these links will automatically get turned into the new post format which lets others listen to 30-second previews while on Facebook.
Following Apple Music introduction, Spotify has doubled down on music discovery and third-party integration, the two areas where it hopes to outsmart competition, with Monday's announcement of a Discover Weekly feature and deep integration with the Nike+ Running mobile app.
Unlike Apple's human-curated playlists for various activity types, Spotify's Discover Weekly playlists are entirely driven by algorithms and personalized to each user's listening habits, as per Re/code on Monday.
Presumably feeling the heat from Apple Music, Spotify has cunningly created a smart workaround for the so-called Apple tax, a 30 percent cut the company makes on sales of content subscriptions sold within apps.
Normally, when you upgrade to Spotify Premium in their iPhone and iPad, Apple brings up a standard prompt to confirm your purchase through the iTunes billing system. For those unaware, all in-app subscriptions are subject to the same 70:30 revenue split like apps sold on the App Store and Mac App Store.
But as The Verge said Wednesday, Spotify is employing new tactics seeking to encourage people who would subscribe to their Premium through the iPhone app to instead transfer their account onto the web and save $3 per month in the process.
Following Apple Music ad blitz with a massive Beats 1 billboard on Times Square ahead of the service's public launch next Tuesday, the world's leading music-streaming service Spotify has decided to extend its Premium trial from 30 to 60 days for users outside the United States, as noted by Android Authority.
Like Apple Music, Spotify Premium costs $9.99 per month, but Apple's service offers a three-month free trial period before charging users' credit cards. It was also revealed this morning that Apple Music pays an industry-standard royalty rate for free users of 0.2 cents per stream, comparing roughly to Spotify's 35 percent revenue share during the trial period.
If you ever wondered which artists you would be listening to if you were born in another time, now you can thanks to Rewind, a new feature by Spotify that helps you turn your music back in time.
By doing so, Rewind makes it easy and supposedly fun to know what you'd be listening to in another decade, based on what you listen to today and thanks in no small part to Spotify's rich knowledge graph about its user base.
Spotify has a lot to lose should Apple Music catch on with music lovers. Following Monday's WWDC 2015 keynote which saw, amongst other things, the announcement of Apple's ten bucks per month on-demand music subscription service, Spotify has felt compelled to share the latest stats to reinforce its position as the world's leading streaming music provider.
As of May of this year, the Swedish startup had more than 75 million active users, of which more than 20 million are on one Spotify's paid Premium tiers.
An iDownloadBlog reader has sent in a number of gorgeous screenshots of Spotify's major iPhone revamp. The software was just released to Spotify's beta testers a few hours ago ahead of its impending public release.
You may have heard Spotify stepped on Apple's toes with the announcement of new media types like news, video and podcasts, along with a flurry of feature additions like activity-based playlists, a cool Running feature and more.
With that in mind, we urge you to take a look at the screenshots included below and see for yourself how the new Spotify experience on mobile looks like.
Spotify is determined to give Apple's vertically integrated iTunes ecosystem a run for its money. At a media event in New York City, the Swedish streaming-music startup has moved into video, as previously suspected.
The service will now host video podcasts and other types of video content like news, much like Apple's iTunes. According to TechCrunch, Spotify will also serve up playlists that are more personalized and relevant to what you’re doing at the time.
Apple-owned Beats Music also features activity-based playlists, mostly human curated, so this is another shot across Apple's bow.
How times change. It used to be that Starbucks would partner with Apple on any relevant music-focused initiative. But as the balance of power has slowly but surely shifted from music downloads to streaming, Apple is no longer the preferred partner.
Announced Tuesday, a potentially far-reaching partnership between the U.S.-based coffeehouse chain and Spotify, the world's leading streaming-music service hailing from Sweden, will see Starbucks promote premium Spotify subscription tiers while granting Spotify users access to Starbucks' rewards program.