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.
Its good to see that the UK Official Charts Company isn’t too far behind the times (only about a year or so!). They will be launching the UK’s first Official Streaming Chart at 1pm on Monday (May 14).
The chart will be drawn from data from ad-funded and subscription services from the likes of Spotify, Deezer, Napster, We7, Zune (X Box Live) and new mobile phone start-up ChartsNow.
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.
It seems as though Beats Electronics (Headphone maker) is just about to acquire MOG (the popular US based music streaming service). Sources are saying the deal hasnt closed, but it is very close according to Boomtown.
MOG currently has over 500,000 active users, but they seem to be falling behind Spotify and Rdio (who lead the market). MOG is also only available in the USA, unlike competitors who are spreading their wings around the world.
p.s. Beats’ majority owner is HTC, the Taiwanese cellphone maker, which put $300 million into the company last year.
Rdio has announced that they have a new design on the way. To me it looks a lot like Spotify built into a web app, but thats a good thing because that design works! I think this is a vast improvement for Rdio and their service is getting better and better by the day!
Spotify has just announced their launch in Germany!
Spotify Free – the unsurpassed free music service. Enjoy free, on-demand access to millions of songs on your computer. No gimmicks. Just listen and love it, month after month. Spotify Unlimited – all the special features of our free service, but with uninterrupted, ad-free access to Spotify on your computer. All for only 4.99EUR a month. Spotify Premium - the top-of-the-range Spotify experience. Premium gives you access to all the music, all the time. Listen online, offline, on your computer, your mobile phone and a whole heap of other devices. Enjoy enhanced sound quality and access to exclusive content, competitions and special offers. Premium costs just 9.99EUR. A special occasion deserves a special playlist. Here’s a playlist of tracks we put together just for you.
Simply visit http://spoti.fi/h0l-dir to sign up, or click on any of the ‘play’ links you see in Facebook to get started for free. Happy listening!
Deezer are trying to raise up to 100 million Euros to help them expand internationally in over 200 countries this year. Deezer already has Orange as a partner and investor, but they aren’t interested in investing any more money.
Should Deezer secure the funding, it will mean the company’s estimated value could rise to around 500 million Euros – an amount that is ten times its 2011 turnover.
In total, a reported 20 million people worldwide use the service; there are 1.5million Deezer subscribers, 500,000 Facebook fans and almost 200,000 followers on Twitter in France alone.
Are these numbers big enough to warrant an investment of over 100 million Euros? Only time will tell!
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!
Deezer
