Spotify may be one of the more successful streaming music services around, but man, the company is tweaking and adding features like it has something to prove. Spotify’s only been available in the U.S. since this summer, and since then, they’ve added mandatory Facebook registration for rookie users (which kind of sucks) and six months of free, unlimited tunes for newcomers (which is awesome). Last week, CEO Daniel Ek promised a big change was coming to Spotify, and today, he unveiled it: external devs can now create apps that link in to the service using "The Spotify Platform."
Amid all the doom and gloom around Spotify’s profitability for artists, the service has been doing quite well by the numbers. Without disclosing the breakdown by nationality, Spotify has announced that it has 2.5 million paying members. It appears that the expansion into the US market has afforded the music streamer solid growth.
We may call the glorious series of tubes the World Wide Web, but that doesn’t mean you can view every website’s content all around the globe. Many of the big name content providers – like Steam, Netflix, Pandora and BBC – employ region locks to limit their services to specific countries. But this is the Internet we’re talking about, so naturally, there are ways around the roadblocks.
Music lovers are funny creatures. We have this desire to own every track from a specific artist or group, but we also like variety, making collecting music an expensive hobby. Maintaining access to your entire music collection when you aren’t at home is also an issue. Services like Pandora and Slacker Radio have helped with this conundrum to some extent, allowing us to listen to a variety of music based on our likes and dislikes, but these services don’t provide the level of control you get from a large music library.
We never thought we’d say this again after last week’s horrify service outage, but it’s actually kind of a good week to be a Blackberry owner! When you’re done downloading free $100 worth of free apps to your Blackberry Curve, point your browser over towards Spotify, because the mega-popular music service just rolled out a long-awaited app to bring its tunes to RIM devices… kind of.
We've been duly impressed with Western Digital's media streamers, handing out high marks to both the WD TV Live and WD TV Live Hub in our reviews (
After months of rumors, whispers, and flat-out teasing by CEO Daniel Elk, Spotify finally hit the U.S. back in July. Even though the streaming music service still a bit green behind the ears in America, Spotify is no rookie; it’s been the proverbial 800 lb. gorilla on the European front for years. Now that you’ve had a couple of months to get used to Spotify’s deep catalog and basic abilities, it’s time to get serious and slip on your Maximum PC power user hat.
Spotify’s a pretty awesome streaming music service, but the Facebook integration it’s rolled out in the past week has left users with a pretty not-awesome taste in their mouths. Never mind the fact that new users need a Facebook account just to sign up now; even old users woke up the other morning to find their Spotify listening selections blasted on their Facebook feed. That sucks, so here’s how to disable it from either application.
Spotify has been pulling in new users by the boatload since it appeared in America a few months ago. The announcement last week that the music streaming service was being integrated with Facebook will likely serve to swell its ranks even more. But users that decided to jump on the bandwagon now that Spotify is open to all have suddenly found that they must sign in with a Facebook account to get access.
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