Spotify has just announced that Arcade Fire has released all of their albums on Spotify.
To celebrate, Spotify compiled our top Arcade Fire tracks. Take a listen here and be sure to add these talented Canadians to your playlists today!
Spotify has just launched their upgraded Spotify Radio service that takes a direct shot at Pandora. Spotify Radio offers unlimited stations and unlimited skips, so it is a mile ahead of the competition (potentially makes Pandora and We7 pointless).
Features:
A unique radio experience
Thanks to our all-new intelligent recommendation engine and multi-million track library, Spotify Radio is a music discovery experience without equal.
Unlimited skips
Don’t like a track? Skip it. You can skip as many times as you like. It’s your radio station.
The new Spotify Radio is being rolled out as we speak but you can also get the preview now! The preview version available for you here.
el Guincho is scheduled to release his new album next Monday, but if you want to listen now then you can. el Guincho has added his entire album for streaming via Soundcloud. Check it out below.
If your an avid reader of the RouteNote blog you will know im a huge fan of Chromeo. I just received a tip that their new album is currently up on NPR for streaming. Click here if you want to have a listen.
Business Casual is the new album from Chromeo and it be available to stream on NPR until its release on Sept. 14. Let us know what you think about the album.
We have received a tip that Tesco’s is currently working on a digital locker service which is built on the cloud. The aim for Tesco’s is to bring CD and DVD sales in-store to digital version available online.
“The way it would work practically is that when you buy a disc in store or online, that title would be put up into your Digital Locker which would immediately be accessible from devices registered to that locker,” explains Blueprint Digital CEO Richard Bron, whose company is working with Tesco on the scheme.
October is pegged as the likely launch date.
Given the diversity of the music that we get uploaded to RouteNote, this might be of niche appeal, but then that’s what RouteNote is about – helping the little guys. Enough of our own trumpet – Bootsy Collins, Parliament Funkadelic’s bassist (among other roles) is taking the head lecturer’s chair at the online Funk University being launched by SceneFour, a PR house that works on corporate events and launches for groups like NIN and Al Gore. Soul and Funk music has more on this:
As Funk University’s Lead “Professor,” Bootsy will provide extensive lectures on funk, the bass, and his body of work with James Brown, George Clinton, Parliament Funkadelic, and solo projects. In addition, Collins has arranged an impressive ensemble of the music world’s finest players to provide an intense curriculum designed to promote and teach funk to intermediate and advanced players. The lectures, lessons, and exercises will be accessed through streaming video, with tablature downloads available. Bootsy’s bass school will also hold “office hours” where students are able to get their questions answered online. The entire staff will be reviewing and holding regular competitions throughout the year.
The university will feature video lectures and classes, practical tests and all the traditional coursework featured in more conventional courses, but they haven’t released details of any course fees, requirements or qualifications, so perhaps the term University might be a little grand, but it still looks like good fun at this early stage.
The fabulously soulful Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings just played at NPR’s SXSW showcase, and are streaming their new album ‘I Learned The Hard Way’ for free through the NPR website. These guys knock Amy Winehouse into a cocked hat, and have a richness and fidelity of sound that has come straight from the seventies. For the purists among you, there’s an LP available from their record label’s online store here. Here’s why they think you should buy their album:
Produced by Bosco Mann and recorded on an Ampex eight-track tape machine by Gabriel Roth in Daptone Records’ House of Soul studios, this record drips with a warmth and spontaneity rarely found since the golden days of Muscle Shoals and Stax. Sharon’s raw power, rhythmic swagger, moaning soulfulness, and melodic command set her firmly alongside Tina Turner, James Brown, Mavis Staples, and Aretha as a fixture in the canon of soul music. From the lushPhilly-Soul fanfare that ushers in “The Game Gets Old” at the top of the record, to the stripped down Sam Cooke-style“Mama Don’t Like My Man” at the tail, the Dap-Kings dance seamlessly through both the most crafted and simple arrangements with subtlety and discipline. I Learned the Hard Way is the “Daptone Sound” at its finest.
Brit Award winners Florence and The Machine have released a new video for their track ‘Dog Days Are Over’, which is available for your viewing pleasure on their website. A strange mix of Barbarella and Jane Austen, seasoned with Monty Python animation and Ziggy Stardust makeup. The track is bearing up pretty well under the usual vampiric draining by pop radio stations that a Brit win usually entails – by the way, did anyone ever hear from that Speech Debelle girl again? I guess not all music awards are created equal… shame that talent needs so much money to swim against the tide of marketing.
They’ve not announced a specific date, but Business Week are carrying this story, in which Senior Vice President Paul Brown claims they’re in talks with various ISP’s, web hosting companies and mobile providers to co-ordinate service provision in the States before the year is out:
“We’re buying server space in random parts of the states and there are licensing discussions too,” Brown said “But they are going fine because we’re in a long-term partnership with the labels and publishers.”
They are also in discussions to port their smartphone app, that’s currently on Android and the iPhone onto the BlackBerry and Palm Inc. smartphones – a small but significant expansion of their customer appeal. Expansion into the USA will see a big jump in Spotify’s user numbers, which will necessitate improvement in their per-user revenue figures unless they are to start losing huge amounts of money. It’s for this reason that they have been restricting signups in Europe, so perhaps there’s a new model or a magic bullet, or perhaps they’re just bullish about the steady increase in their ad revenues being able to fully fund a free user by the time they’re ready to launch in the new territory.
Either way, if you’re an indie musician, sign up with RouteNote and we’ll get your music on Spotify for you ahead of their expansion.
Spotify currently boasts 7 million users, all of them in Europe. Not bad for a product that was only released in October 2008 – this figure does only relate to the number of people on their free service, but their £10 a month premium service is also gaining traffic at a remarkable rate; they had “more than 250,000″ premium users on 23rd Jan ’10, and are now boasting 320,000 paid subscribers, (as of the 17th March ’10), and increase of 28% in under 3 months, and an extra £8,400,000 a year into the coffers. Spotify still needs to up their percentages though, according to UMG’s [Universal Music Group's] SVP [Senior Vice President] Rob Wells [and they would know, because they've taken shares in the business], they need to have around 10%-12% of their users as premium subscribers [they're currently at about 5%] to have a viable business in the long term. This might change as more and more advertising dollars go online though – as both Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek and industry analysts Kantar Media are saying:
[Table via TechCrunch's article on the same]. Other interesting facts are that 15% to 18% of the Swedish population use Spotify – and the Swedish music industry’s revenues are up, and that Spotify’s p2p based system is actually using more interwebs than the whole nation of Sweden. There are rumours of a Spotify set-top box and/or home stereo system, a bit like that Sonos thing, but running off your Spotify premium account.
Other signs of Spotify’s ambition came from comments about Apple – Ek described them as having a freemium model like Spotify’s, as everyone (in his opinion) downloads a lot of free stuff and then buys the stuff they really like on iTunes:
“The vast majority of people’s libraries are free from Limewire or trading through friends. And then there’s a small portion of tracks that they’ve bought… I really believe that if music could be legally available on any device that you wanted… I think the music industry would be radically bigger than what it is today”.
He also thinks that Apple will change the way that iTunes works, to allow remote access from anywhere to your iTunes music account on a cloud: “People want to share, to access independently. I think it makes a lot of sense for them to do something in that area.”
