Spotify has just opened up down under. Spotify is now live in Australia and New Zealand with over 16 million tracks.
This move shows that Spotify is planning on aggressively expanding globally in 2012.
Unlike it’s initial offering in the U.S. which featured only six months of free unlimited access, users in Australia and New Zealand will have full access to Spotify indefinitely. However, free accounts will be limited to 10 free hours of streaming each month.
Premium packages range from $4.99 to $9.99 a month.
Deezer is now available in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Deezer is a music streaming service that is expanding rapidly and is aiming for 200 countries by the end of 2012. At the moment Deezer has 20 million users, 1.5M paid subscribers, 15m tracks, 600K Facebook fans and 300K followers on Twitter.
“We are thrilled to launch Deezer in Canada, Australia and New Zealand and to play a key role in the music revolution,” said CEO Axel Dauchez. “This is a very exciting key turning point for Deezer following four years of extraordinary success inspired by passion for music”.
Disclosure: Deezer is a RouteNote partner. If you want to get your music onto Deezer, just signup for a RouteNote account.
I went home to Australia for Christmas and my little sister was always talking about a new song from Pez. Pez is a hip hop who performs a track called The Festival Song. It seems like this track has become the anthem everyone plays at the start of a festival in Australia. Its all a little weird, but its a great track. Enjoy!
Australian duo Fabulous Diamons have released a track from their forthcoming LP, Fabulous Diamonds II (not the most interesting name), which is due out on June 10th. The release is still dubbed “Track 4″, but Im sure it will have a very cool name at release!
Feel like going out, but only got your dark, intense face with you? Fear not! Massive Attack have announced a Spring tour, playing big venues in the States, Australia and Belgium (but not in the UK for some reason). The tour supports their new album Heligoland, their 5th studio album.Hopefully we can look forward to some gigs nearer to Bristol once they’ve come home after this lot:
03-12 Perth, Australia – Kings Park
03-15 Sydney, Australia – Opera House Forecourt
03-19 Canberra, Australia – Royal Theatre
03-20 Melbourne, Australia – Sidney Myer Music Bowl
03-23 Brisbane, Australia – Riverstage
03-25 Auckland, New Zealand – Vector Arena
05-07 Toronto, Ontario – Sound Academy
05-09 Toronto, Ontario – Sound Academy
05-11 New York, NY – Terminal 5
05-12 New York, NY – Terminal 5
05-18 Los Angeles, CA – Wiltern Theater
05-19 Los Angeles, CA – Wiltern Theater
05-25 San Francisco, CA – Warfield Theater
05-27 San Francisco, CA – Warfiled Theater
05-30 George, WA – Sasquatch Festival
09-03 Antwerp, Belgium – Sportpaleis
According to the BBC, iPhone owners in Australia got quite a surprise this week when they found their phones displaying a wallpaper of Astley’s photograph with a message: “Ikee is never going to give you up.”
The Ikee in question is a worm that affects a jail-broken phones, where a user has removed Apple’s protection mechanisms to allow the phone to run any software.
“The creator of the worm has released full source code of the four existing variants of this worm,” wrote Mikko Hypponen of security firm F-secure.
“This means that there will quickly be more variants, and they might have nastier payload than just changing your wallpaper.”
Bad things. Far, far worse than any Rick Astley song!
Currently the worm has only been found in Australia, where the hacker, Ashley Towns, who wrote the program lives. The 21-year-old said he created the virus to raise the issue of security.
The blending of Rick Astley into Towns’ security awareness project is downright genius; what says be careful with your hand-held device better than Rick Astley?
It has been reported by Spinner that Lady Sovereign was detained in Australia over the weekend after she spat at a nightclub doorman. Lady Sovereign arrived in Australia on the Friday to perform on Saturday at the Parklife Festival Tour. After pounding back a few at the popular Brisbane-area gay nightclub Beat, she was arrested for an altercation with the nightclub doorman.
On Saturday Lady Sovereign pleaded guilty to both assault and disorderly conduct in court. She was fined $400 Australian and forced to pay $200 to the doorman. Although the judge did not convict the rapper, he schooled her on the “serious health implications” that spitting has in public.
Even though she was reprimanded, she still managed to make her afternoon slot at the Parklife Festival. Shortly after, Lady Sovereign took to her Twitter account and slammed the local Brisbane law enforcement.
“Brisbane police need to go catch some real criminals … What a waste,” she wrote. “Spitting in someone’s face is nasty, but how about a guy dressed up as a girl running at you in the toilets and punching you in the head? Yes, that’s what happened prior to the spitting. So everyone please stop calling me nasty.
“If you was there you would understand,” she further explained. “The transvestite must have been a regular because I didn’t see no one dragging his ass out of the club that night.”
Not so tough in person, just on Twitter! Lady Sovereign just grow up.
Nokia has announced that it will be launching it “Comes with Music” offering in Italy, Sweden and Mexico in the coming months. Nokia initially launched their Comes With Music service in the UK and Singapore and its already announced it will launch in Australia later this month.
The company has also announced three new music phones in its XpressMusic range: the 5730, 5330 and 5030. The first two of those will be Comes With Music handsets in selected markets.
Music Ally has reported that over 445,000 people illegally downloaded the new U2 album. All these downloaded were alleged to happen between the 18th of February till the 3rd of March from BitTorrent sites.
The chart supplied by the company shows the spike in downloads following the album’s leak in February, apparently due to it being accidentally made available for sale on an Australian digital music store ahead of its official release on 2nd March.
The debate is always would these people have purchased the album if it wasn’t leaked on BitTorrent clients? No one can really answer that question, but I’m sure that certain sales would have happened because of this.
Overall this does make me think that the claims of the Pirate Bay in the last couple weeks that “80 percent of all their torrents are legal”, cant be true.
