Rdio has just launched in Spain and Portugal! Rdio is quickly becoming one of the main players in the digital music streaming space.
Things you’ll love about Rdio:
Play any song, any time, as much as you like, without ads.
Find over 12 million songs from major labels and thousands of international and domestic independent labels.
Discover new music and re-discover old favourites by following friends, people with similar taste in music, and influencers.
Manage and access your music, no matter where you are.
Listen offline by syncing music to your mobile device.
Hear all the latest music, the moment it’s released.
Create and listen to collaborative playlists.
Let Rdio help you decide what to play next, with artist radio stations, customized radio stations from other peoples’ collections, and recommendations.
Share music with friends — start by connecting Rdio with Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm.
Im not really one for charts, but there are a lot of people who want to see who is leading the charts for any given time. Thus, here is the official UK Charts iPhone applications.
Rhapsody has announced their music streaming service is now available in Germany and the UK via their Napster deal. A few months ago it was announced that Rhapsody acquired Napster, but that was for the US assets, thus they needed to signed a deal with the remaining Napster service in Europe.
Spotify is yet to launch in Germany to compete with Napster and Simfy, but this is expected to change very soon!
The IFPI have release some very interesting figures with regards to growth in 2011.
Digital trade revenue was up 8 percent to $5.2 billion.
That was the first year the growth rate increased since IFPI records began in 2004. Previously, growth rate of 10 percent in 2009 had sunk to five percent in 2010.
Globally, digital is now 32 percent of labels’ income, up from 29 percent (that is 52 percent in the U.S. and 71 percent in China). Download volume grew 17 percent to 3.6 billion.
Adoption of subscription services grew 65 percent to 13.4 million consumers. Remarkably, in Sweden, subscription contributes an impressive 85 percent of digital music revenue generally, thanks to its local hero Spotify.
Ian Rogers just interviewed Jon Irwin the Rhapsody President. In the interview he seemed to spend a lot of time talking about Rhapsody competitors and how their products were really limited.. and not talking about why Rhapsody actually stands out from these other service.
Here at RouteNote we have been trying to sign with Rhapsody for about 3 years and in that time they have been refusing to add new partners. I can’t really see Rhapsody ever leaving the USA, thus its a bit of a waste of time!
SoundCloud has just raised around $50 million in funding, valuing the company at $200 million. Its great to see music startups gaining a lot more VC money and SoundCloud is an amazing product.
SoundCloud is aiming to do what YouTube did in video, but for audio, and I think they have already achieved this!
Ever wondered how Turntable.fm looked after their music licensing, well here is how they do it. Turntable.fm co-founder sat down with Techcrunch to talk about the basics of Turntable and how they are just focused on running their product only in the US.
