Freetards rejoice. Spotify has ditched the 5 play limit imposed on UK users of the free version of its music streaming service, Spotify Free, which until today kicked in after six months usage and meant that no one track could be streamed more than 5 times — it would become greyed out after the limit had been reached.

Removing the cap, which was introduced in April 2011 (along with a number of other changes to its free offering), brings it in line with other European markets where Spotify began ditching the 5 play limit in March, notes Music Ally.

The U.S., Australia, and New Zealand have never had a cap, while in Europe, France seems to be the hold out. What hasn’t changed, however, is the 10 hours of streaming per month limit associated with the Spotify Free tariff, as the company continues to nudge users towards becoming paying customers.

Here’s what Spotify has to say on its blog:

We’ve got some mighty fine news for all Spotify Free users. From today, there’s no more 5 play-per-song limit. You can listen to your favourite songs as many times as you like.

That’s right, no more greyed-out songs. The tracks that you couldn’t listen to before will once again be available for your listening pleasure.

Give it a try.

As I noted when Spotify first introduced the 5 play limit, along with a cap on the number of listening hours overall for its non-paying customers, the idea of drawing a line in the sand between paying users and non-paying users made sense within the context of Spotify’s freemium model. And for many, the inconvenience of ads, however repetitive they are, wasn’t enough of a reason to upgrade to a paid account. Introducing false scarcity was always going to be more effective. In that context, capping free usage to ten hours per-month was an easy message to convey, while the 5 play limit seems idiosyncratic to say the least and, as I speculated at the time, probably came at the request of the major record labels who Spotify remains entirely reliant upon.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Spotify’s new terms for non-paying users, however, is that after 6 months they’ll only be able to play each track up to a total of 5 times. This, of course, produces artificial scarcity and therefore it could be argued that it will push more users to pay for a subscription. But it also feels arbitrary. Why five plays? Is the sixth play more expensive to serve than the previous five?

More broadly, however, despite today’s small change to Spotify Free, it appears to remain the case that a free, ad-supported music streaming service without any limits remains nonviable. The economics simply don’t work, however hard you try to crowbar in a freemium model.

Meanwhile, despite reports of its imminent world-wide launch, no word yet on when Spotify plans to bring its U.S.-only free mobile Internet radio feature to its mobile apps in the UK (or elsewhere outside the U.S.). Rightly or wrongly, the Internet radio model, which imposes arcane rules such as how many tracks by the same artist can be played sequentially etc., has a different royalty rate to a pure “on-demand” offering.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Soundrop, the social “listening room” service that is similar to Turntable.fm, has found a lot of success on the music streaming service Spotify, with 500 million streams of its rooms in its debut year. Now, Oslo, Noway-based Soundrop is taking its growth strategy up a notch: from today, people can also create and embed listening rooms in Facebook, too.

The Facebook service will let people embed existing playrooms on to Pages — specifically fan pages — on Facebook. There, people can add a mixture of audio tracks (from Spotify) and videos (from YouTube and Vevo), and then interact with each other on the page while in the room together. Artists that have signed on early to use the Soundrop Facebook feature include Matisyahu, Delphic, MC Lars, Owl City, Dan Deacon, Devlin, Nick Cave, Franz Ferdinand, Hot Chip, ABBA, Public Enemy and Greg Dulli from the Afghan Whigs.

For now, you cannot create a room on Facebook and embed it on Spotify, although that seems to be the plan longer term as the service continues to grow. At the bottom of this post are two screenshots of how the two different playrooms on Spotify and now Facebook look compared to each other.

Facebook is a first in a couple of ways here: it is the first third-party platform outside of Spotify where users can consume Soundrop’s service; and it is the first time that Soundrop has incorporated videos into the experience — in this case, using content from YouTube and Vevo to do it. This, of course, helps also increase engagement on Facebook — a much-coveted metric for the social network as it continues to ramp up its advertising and other revenue-generating strategies.

“The Facebook app is a step up for us to add more pixels to the big picture,” Inge Sandvik, co-founder and CEO of Soundrop, told me in a Skype interview from the Midem music conference in France.

But it’s also just one step in what Soundrop hopes to do eventually: “Our strategy is to give everyone our SDK to embed the rooms in apps, websites, mobile apps. Everywhere,” he said. “We want to scale out the rooms everywhere. They are going to be accessible from TVs, cars, phones, tablets, laptops – all in real time.”

The idea here is that the listening rooms remain the same rooms from platform to platform, with only the interfaces varying depending on where they are getting used.

The vision is an ambitious one. In a Stockholm hack day last week, Soundrop built a multiplayer game based on Firefox’s BrowserQuest massive multiplayer online game.

“You can walk around in a world and go up to the Gangam Style guy [PSY] and the music will start playing, or you can go into the house of dubstep and meet Skrillex,” says Sandvik.  ”It’s a visual way of discovering the exact same music that others are listening to in real time, but with a totally different UI. We are building parallel dimensions and in this way people are consuming the same music and are able to piggy back on other fans ability to curate music for them.”

Sandvik says that Soundrop has yet to launch this formally but plans to, probably later this year.

As part of this expansion of the Soundrop service, the company is also honing in on ways that it will use the platform to make more money. Longer term, as I’ve written before (when Soundrop picked up a $3 million investment led by lead Spotify backer Northzone), there are plans for licensing rooms and other services around the listening experience.

But the case of today’s service, it’s about aggregating more audience on to platforms, like Spotify, Vevo and YouTube, where the artists are already popular and making money through ads or royalty payments. “We only drive traffic to places where artists are making money,” notes Sandvik.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s speedy, and for a streaming music service like Spotify making the jump from desktop software to the browser, that’s of the utmost importance. This is just an early beta of what will rollout next year, so I’ll forgive the missing features and say I was impressed with the feel. But discovery still has a long way to go to unlock the potential of near infinite music.

To set the stage, in September I broke the news that multiple industry sources had confirmed Spotify was building a browser version. Yesterday, the company supposedly closed a massive $100 million+ round of funding valuing it at over $3 billion. And today, The Verge revealed that a test of the browser version’s beta is now available to some users. Spotify has confirmed with us that it will be rolling out the beta over the next few weeks and months, and it will have more news in Q1 of next year.

The browser version could be a big boon to Spotify because it means you can listen to your playlists or nearly any song no matter what computer you’re on. That includes work or public computers you can’t install software on, or the ability to play form your ad-free subscription while on friend’s laptop at their house. If Spotify is going to convince people to pay $5 or $10 a month, they’re going to want access from anywhere. That’s what the browser version delivers.

So what’s it like? I wrangled an invite link to try it out. This link play.spotify.com is currently giving some people access too, so give it a shot. But here’s what I think about Spotify for the browser.

It performs a lot like the desktop software, which is good news. My biggest worry was that the time it took to search the world’s catalogue of music or start playing a song would be annoyingly slower than on the downloadable version. That’s not what I found. It’s built on Flash, and with a decent wi-fi connection I saw tracks starting to play in less than a second. The only delay is a few seconds when you first open it up.

As for the design, it’s got cascading navigation similar to Spotify’s iPad app. That means if a band catches your eye off the homepage and you click, their artist page will slide out on top. If you don’t dig them, the edge of your previous screen is still visible, which makes it quick to jump back there.

Navigating to Search, What’s News, Radio, and Playlists is much easier than on the desktop, as the little iTunes-style links have been replaced with bigger buttons. The permanently visible “Now Playing” section is bigger and easier to control too. You won’t have to squint to find the pause button. A nice little bonus is the song name and track time appear in the browser tab.

Oddly, there seems to be no way to view album art full-screen. Also, why don’t music services have a “laid back mode designed to help you DJ without sitting down at your computer. I’d love a view with huge cover art, controls, and play queue, but with search and navigation minimized.

One noticeable absence is the Play Queue section, which lets see what you’ve got coming next and as well as your listening history. Another is the Spotify third-party app platform. You won’t find Pitchfork’s curated playlists or Last.fm’s personalized recommendations. However, I’d imagine the app platform may be ported to the browser version eventually.

Unfortunately, those apps were a solution to Spotify’s biggest problem: discovery. When you have most of the world’s catalogue of music at your fingertips, it can induce decision paralysis. “If I could listen to anything, what would I listen to? Ummmm.” Spotify’s browser version is sadly not as helpful as it should be.

Here you get all the same What’s New suggestions from the desktop, including new recommended albums, trending playlists near you, new releases, and 5 top tracks near you and in your country.

A nice addition to the What’s New section is top tracks in the world. There you’ll find your favorite horse dancer PSY’s “Gangnam Style” to contrast with America’s love of country music. The browser version currently lacks the Top Lists section, though. This let you go past the top 5 tracks and explore the top 100 songs or albums in any country or the world.

What most disappointed me is that there’s no truly innovative new discovery options which I’d heard were in the works. There’s not even ones stolen from Rdio’s game-changing Heavy Rotation section, which shows what you’ve been bumping lately. A core joy of on-demand music services is getting your fix of that song you can’t get out of your head. Without an option to view your listening history, you’re forced to add those earworms to a playlist or search for them every time you log on.

There’s also no improved way to follow influencers. I see celebrities, artists, and music experts becoming asynchronous DJs for the masses through on-demand services. Instead of tuning into a radio station, you’ll subscribe to one of these people’s playlists and check out whatever new tracks they add. The 555,000 people who follow Sean Parker’s playlist “Hipster International” shows there’s clearly demand for this. Finding people like Sean is not any easier on the browser version. You know what would be lovely? Recommendations of who to follow based on my listening habits.

I wrote this review after playing with Spotify’s browser app for a few hours, but remember this is a beta — not something you’d typically review. And while I’m judging it against the desktop software, Spotify doesn’t necessarily do the same. A little box in the corners tells me to “Install Spotify on your Mac for the full Spotify experience”.  Apparently this is Spotify Lite.

Still, with any luck there’s a reason we’re not seeing play queue, listening history, apps, better music discovery, and simpler influencer following. Spotify is hopefully in the process of overhauling these features so when they debut, this won’t just be an incomplete port of the desktop software. Instead it could be a portal that expands our musical consciousness. Our ancestors could only dream of exploring the greatest sounds from the corners of the earth at a moment’s notice. It’s time for Spotify to make that dream come true.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

New York City-based Aereo, a startup that streams network TV over the Internet, has today expanded its list of supported devices beyond Apple devices and Roku to all major web browsers.

If you haven’t yet heard about Aereo, and you live in New York, you better put your listening ears on. Many of us New Yawkers don’t have TVs (for many reasons) and so we miss out on lots of network television unless we seek it out on Netflix (months later) or illegally (immediately). But Aereo has essentially found a way to shrink an HD TV antenna down to tiny, and the company licenses out these antennas to users for $12/mo.

This gives you access to approximately 20 network channels streamed in HD over the Internet, but until now that was limited to Apple-style Internet: iPads, iPhones, Apple TV (from a compatible device), Roku (with firmware 3.0 or higher), and the Safari browser. Today, Aereo is bringing its magic to all New York City-based PCs.

Check out the full list:

• Firefox 11.0 or higher
• Chrome latest version
• Safari 5.0 or higher
• Opera 12.0 or higher
• Internet Explorer 9 or higher

Clearly Aereo has a real shot at disrupting cable television, and we’re glad to see this expansion at such a crucial time. But major TV networks aren’t so thrilled. Aereo is being sued by a group of broadcasters that includes ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox for not paying them for the network access.

But no worries. Aereo says that the over-the-air signals are free to anyone who wants to buy a digital antenna, which is what they’ve built and are now licensing out to their own users.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Look out Turntable.fm, Facebook has just launched its own simultaneous music listening group chat room feature. New “Listen With” buttons in Chat and news feed stories allow you to select a friend as your personal DJ. When clicked, you’ll instantly launch Spotify or Rdio and start hearing whatever that friend plays in real-time. Other friends can also join your group chat listening room where you can discuss and rave over what you’re hearing, just like if you were listening together in person.

Listen With will begin rolling out today for Spotify users, Rdio will gain support in the next few days, and Facebook plans to add more music partners soon. The new feature will force Turntable.fm to concentrate on public listening rooms and celebrity DJs, as simultaneous listening with friends will now be Facebook’s domain.

The feature could boost streaming service signups, because users won’t want to miss out on shared listening experiences with their friends. Previously, I could take your recommendations and listen individually via iTunes, pirated downloads, or a different service. Now I’ll need to sign up for whatever service you’re using to join your “Listen With” room. This could potentially weaken Spotify’s winner-take-all position by getting users to sign up for multiple streaming services. Technical problems stalling Listen With support for Rdio won’t help the browser-based service catch up, though.

While companies always say they’re “excited” for new feature launches, product designer Alexandre Roche was especially enthusiastic. He said Facebook’s internal tests have had “really positive feedback. Everyone really likes it.” When asked if Facebook would roll out a similar feature for video watching through Hulu and Netflix, Roche said that would be cool, “Maybe in the future”.

The way the feature works is, whoever you allow to see your music listening activity will also see a music note icon next to your name in chat if you’re currently listening. When clicked or hovered over, the name of the song they’re playing and the “Listen With” button appears. If someone clicks your “Listen With” button, they’ll hear exactly the same notes as you at the same time. The feature will open a Chat room for the two of you and publish a news feed story to your friends that “Josh is listening to music with Alexander Roche.”

Up to 50 friends can join your listening chat room. As the DJ switches from song to song, everyone will follow along. To discontinue the shared experience, a listener can pause, switch songs, or close their music app. One of the main shortcomings of the feature for now is that you can’t substitute in a new DJ if someone in the Chat room has something they want to play for everyone else.

Roche says he’s a fan of Turntable.fm and that there’ll still be a place for it in the listening ecosystem. He thinks “Turntable.fm is more about finding a genre you like” and discovering music from strangers. I think Turntable.fm will need to differentiate itself, because a core use case has been subsumed by a much more widely adopted service. Since Listen With is purely social, Turntable.fm should  look to add more discovery features, such as tagging listening rooms by genre for easy browsing.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You may have forgotten that there was such a thing as “satellite radio,” what with all the streaming services available now, but it exists and its still going fairly strong. The latest way to listen to this form of radio is the Lynx, a Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capable player that records up to 200 hours of music and offers a full schedule of upcoming shows for your listening pleasure.

Priced at $250 it’s a pretty hard sell but if you’re trying to get satellite on the go or in your home, this may be an interesting alternative device. The device runs an unnamed version of Android.

The Lynx will be available “soon.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This week we bring you the Fujifilm X10, the Galaxy Tab 8.9, and my new standing desk. The standing desk, incidentally, is my second desk, which puts me firmly in the 1% camp when it comes to home workstations.

I write a little about my standing desk here but generally it’s a FREDRICK desk from Ikea set up so I have my keyboard and mouse at waist level and monitor by my head.

We also talk about Devin’s favorite camera this week, the Fujifilm X10, and my favorite Android tablet this week, the Galaxy Tab 8.9. I’ve included MP3 downloads and RSS feeds for your listening pleasure.

Download MP3

Subscribe in iTunes

RSS Feed

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Music apps using Facebook have seen their traffic double or even grow tenfold since f8, giving developers at companies like Spotify, and even Ticketmaster, more to love about Facebook’s big platform feature launches at its f8 developer conference in September.

According to a Facebook developer blog today, users have shared their listening activity more than 1.5 billion times using Facebook-integrated apps since f8. As we’ve been tracking in our AppData traffic tracking service, Spotify has been the biggest beneficiary, rapidly growing from 1.2 million to 2.4 million daily active users so far since f8. It has even seen some sharp spikes in recent days, although it’s not currently clear why.

The features driving the growth include the newly-introduced ability for apps to publish listeners activity to Facebook’s news feed and new home page Ticker, as we’ve been covering. Of course, so has the licensing agreements that Spotify and its partners have worked out — Facebook hadn’t been able to offer streaming music for years due to disagreements with record labels.

Timeline, the new version of user profiles, has yet to become available for most people, but Facebook says today in the post that it expects it to be ”one of the key channels for expression and discovery.”

Facebook also says it has helped stimulate the music industry’s ability to sell tickets for shows. Eventbrite, Ticketmaster and Ticketfly have all seen between $2 and $6 in direct ticket sales for every link shared, according to today’s post. Global online revenue for the music industry is forecasted to increase 7 percent to $6.3 billion this year, reported technology research firm Gartner; Facebook could now be helping to drive that.

The developer blog includes some other numbers seen by music app partners since f8, noting a 1350 percentage increase in number of Facebook fans of the band users are listening to on Earbits, a 246 percent growth in business for MOG, and a 30x increase in new users from Facebook to Rdio. Of course, any growth equals a huge percentage when the starting number is small, and that’s the case for all of these other services. Still, we expect the tight integration of music, and the new features, to keep the music industry liking Facebook for a long time to come.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook is asking third-party Open Graph app developers to voluntarily add a private mode to their apps if necessary. Its developer blog post outlines how Spotify and Yahoo! News are tackling Open Graph privacy issues by giving users other options. Without a private mode, some users who initially opted in to sharing their activity may choose not to use an app to listen to an embarrassing song or read a controversial article rather than have that news published.

By getting developers to implement their own private modes, Facebook won’t have to build more privacy controls on its side that might add too much friction to apps that don’t require it, such as those that only share benign content or rarely share at all. An option to retract previously shared activity will also reduce the backlash from users who feel like Facebook infringed on their privacy even though they authorized what a third-party app could share and with whom.

It seems that Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” may have been too frictionless for some. The new app authentication flow announced at f8 lets users permit apps to publish all their future activity without asking them again. While this relieves users from constantly filling out sharing prompts, it occasionally could reveal somewhat sensitive information or cause a chilling effect where users opt not to engage with an app at all rather than share.

Users could always restrict app content to only be shared with certain friends.  The could also visit their profile’s activity log to delete past activity, but only after it had already been shared and possibly seen by friends in the Ticker. Facebook may now look to move away from the term “frictionless sharing” to reduce criticism around privacy.

Following f8, Spotify grew quickly thanks to listening activity published to the Facebook home page Ticker. It also heard user complaints about not wanting news of their listening to guilty pleasures shared to Facebook. It began rolling out a software update that lets users switch into “Private Listening” from the desktop app’s menu. Until they switched back, no listening activity would be shared.

Yahoo! News has implemented a more powerful privacy system that lets users turn “social” on and off, similar to The Independent’s privacy controls we reviewed earlier this month. Users can view a list of their recently read articles and delete that activity from Facebook right from the Yahoo! website. An option to be reminded of one’s privacy settings can also be enabled.

Facebook is taking a Platform-focused approach to privacy. Rather than overlay a one-size-fits-all privacy widget that wouldn’t adapt to different apps, Facebook is asking developers to build what’s right for their audience. This might mean strong controls for apps dealing with sensitive content, or no additional controls for those with a low risk of offending people through sharing.

Facebook already has its own Open Graph privacy controls. What was needed was controls right on the apps themselves, and this blog post should guide developers in that direction. However, if apps don’t voluntarily implement privacy controls when needed and Open Graph app sharing continues to hurt Facebook’s image, it may have to implement a mandatory privacy control system.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook has yet to create an easy and obvious way for users to Like the Pages of musicians they listen to, costing artists significant marketing opportunities. Since the listening activity of Spotify, Rdio, and other music service users began being automatically shared to the social network late last month, Facebook Pages of musicians have not been gaining fans any faster.

Musical artists and record labels should push Facebook to implement a better retention mechanism that helps them convert listeners into fans who they can then reach with marketing updates through the news feed. This could come in the form of a Like button for an artist’s Page on feed stories about users listening to them, or a a “Recommended Musicians” panel that suggests users Like the artists they listen to most.

Until then, Facebook is gaining compelling feed stories about listening habits and data it can monetize through ad targeting without returning the favor to musicians.

Musicians Need Likes, Not Listens, to Make Money

Currently, to Like an artist they have been listening to, users have to find a story about their listening activity in the news feed, Ticker, or Timeline. The use can then click through the artist’s name to visit their Page and Like them. A lesser known method is to hover over the artist’s name and use the Like button in the hover card. The hidden buttons and high friction flows mean only users already intent on Liking an artist will become fans.

Facebook’s music partnerships are making some money for musicians by driving usage of streaming services that pay out royalties when an artist’s songs are streamed. However, these royalties can be just a fraction of a cent per listen. Artists depend on concert ticket and merchandise sales that Facebook’s music apps aren’t helping them increase directly.

Many artists use their Facebook Pages to promote their tours and merchandise lines in the news feed, but only fans receive these updates — not listeners. However, the 20 most popular musician Facebook Pages and the Pages of a dozen smaller artists we checked showed no increase in the rate of new Likes starting on September 22nd when the music partnerships launched. Therefore, it’s important that Facebook make it easier for users to Like the artists listen to.

How Facebook Could Improve Listener Retention for Pages

There are several ways Facebook could do this. This simplest and probably the most effective way would be to add a prominent, one-click “Like this artist” button to stories about listening activity, as mocked up below. When users see who they’ve been listening to on their profile Timeline, or discover a new artist by clicking through a story about a friend’s listening activity, they could then instantly become a fan.

Facebook could also create a “Recommended Musicians” sidebar module that could be displayed to users while they browse the site or on the Music Dashboard that aggregates their network’s listening activity. It could show Like buttons for the artists they or their friends have been listening to most. There’s already a Top Songs module in the Music Dashboard that could be augmented with a Like button as I’ve mocked up below.

Getting more users Liking musician Pages could also benefit Facebook. These Likes fill a user’s new feed with rich content that increases return visits and time-on-site. They provide advertisers with something to target that can be indicative of a potential customer’s lifestyle. Finally, musicians own 37 of the top 100 most popular Facebook Pages, which shows how central people see music to expressing their identity — one of Facebook’s overall goals.

If Facebook want to keep musicians from bringing their content and fans to another social platform happy, and compensate them for the engaging listening activity stories they power, it should bridge listening and Liking.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook