Via: paidContent Spotify spent most of its first year saying it would refrain from adding “social” features and concentrate on just serving music. But the ice in Stockholm has thawed lately and today the music service added just that, amongst its first significant product updates since launching in late 2008. —New profiles: Users can friend [...]

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Via: paidContent After months of offering advance releases, exclusives and competition prizes as inducements to premium subscribers, Spotify is now doing the opposite. Sort of. The music service is making a song and dance about an “exclusive” new Jimi Hendrix video – it’s first ever video foray – that’s only available to its free users. [...]

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Via: paidContent From the record labels’ perspective, on-demand free music services such as We7 and Spotify have yet to deliver the goods. They haven’t made a dent in illegal downloading and they haven’t converted enough new consumers to pay for digital music. (Spotify’s 250,000 paying subs is an encouraging start, but is just 3.6% of [...]

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Via: paidContent Reasons for the delay actually aren’t totally clear. FT.com last month reported U.S. execs’ concerns about the ad-funded portion of Spotify’s freemium model. But that may not be the whole story. Asked about timescale on the fringes of this month’s Le Web conference, Spotify adviser Shakil Khan suggested something more mundane: “That’s the [...]

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Via: paidContent Rdio, the much hyped stealth music service from the founders of Kazaa and Skype, has chosen the iPhone as its launchpad, a good a place as any. This week, the heavily-anticipated music startup suddenly surfaced on the App Store, reachable only to private beta testers. That club appears quite small and restricted at [...]

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Via: N.Y. Times SAN FRANCISCO — With its deal this month to buy the Web music service Lala, Apple may be pointing the way to the future of music. In this future, the digital music files on people’s computers could join vinyl records, cassette tapes and CDs in the dusty vault of fading music formats. [...]

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Via: Music Ally There’s a story going round this week, originating from the Swedish media, that Lady Gaga only earned $167 from a million streams of her Poker Face single on Spotify. Not a great advert for the service – in fact, it ties into earlier grumbles from artists about the money they’re making from [...]

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UPDATE The report doesn’t say that they are just paying for streaming in Sweden, but instead list how many overall streams she’s generated. Also that this is just her performance royalty payment and doesn’t include what Spotify pays to the label who owns the master [Learn More]. Interesting article on streaming rates earned by Lady [...]

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