Facebook is dipping its toes into the music biz this week with a brand new feature that makes it easier than ever to share your favorite tunes with all your social network friends.
The new Music Stories feature rolls out to iPhone users today and allows you to share 30-second song samples from Apple Music and Spotify by simply copy and pasting a link into your status update.
Here’s a preview of how it works:
Google revealed that it’s getting into the subscription video streaming game today with the introduction of YouTube Red.
The new $9.99-per-month service will give customers ad-free access to all of YouTube’s content, but the company plans to charge customers extra if they sign up through iOS.
Tim Cook may like the “runway” for Apple Music’s take off, but Spotify is currently soaring.
Apple’s competitor in the music streaming business found itself in the No. 1 position on the iPhone App Store’s Top Grossing charts for the first time in the United States. This is on the same day that the Apple CEO Cook told the audience at the Wall Street Journal Digital Live conference that Apple Music has 6.5 million paying customers.
SAN FRANCISCO — A slick new feature coming to Ultimate Ears’ Bluetooth speakers will let you stream your friends’ music from the palm of your hand.
Called Block Party, it lets up to three friends connect to the same UE speaker. Then the self-appointed DJ can pick and choose from each person’s tunes, pulled from streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify. The DJ can skip songs and jump from playlist to playlist, and it’s all shockingly smooth and simple.
Apple Music cranked up the volume on music streaming, turning an insider topic into water-cooler fodder as musicians, industry bigwigs and tech analysts weighed in with questions about the future of the music industry.
Seemingly everybody is suddenly talking about Apple Music subscription numbers and the chances of competitors like Spotify and Pandora. But in all the media buzz about who’s winning and who’s losing, almost everyone is disregarding another major player — Rhapsody, the streaming music service that just happened to spark the streaming revolution.
The confetti from Apple’s splashy launch of its music streaming service has barely finished falling. Now comes startup Geekin Radio, with a streaming service that debuts today. It seems like odd timing.
How will it ever emerge from the shadows of Apple Music? CEO Gavin McCulley is aware of his timing and likes his company’s chances because Geekin Radio’s mobile app is the only streaming service that is an actual social network, offering a shared listening experience, perfectly synced, with back-and-forth chatting in real time.
Dr. Dre’s long-awaited third album, Compton, was streamed a massive 25 million times on Apple Music, and had half a million iTunes downloads in its first week, according to new figures released by Apple.
“Welcome to Spotify, Mr. President,” tweeted the streaming music giant Friday morning. That’s right: The president of the United States just shared two vacation playlists — and he didn’t use Apple Music.
The two music lists, titled “The President’s Summer Playlist: Day” and “The President’s Summer Playlist: Night,” contain 20 songs each, showing an eclectic taste with a diverse artist representation, including the Isley Brothers, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding and (ugh) Coldplay.
Apple Music has some amazing playlists created just for you, with humans behind the scenes making perfect mixes of music that fits your specific style and music tastes.
You can make your own playlists, too, and share them out to friends and family, but what if you want to see other people’s playlists? There’s just no way to pop on to Apple Music and see what playlists strangers are making.
Now, however, a new website called Playlist Hunt brings you the next best thing: a site dedicated to sharing and playing playlists by its members.
Spotify is planning to introduce a new “gated access” model that will make its free streaming plan a lot less attractive, according to a new report. Those who choose to opt out of paying for the service could see it become extremely limited, with access to just one or two songs from big album releases.
Taylor Swift shares a few more details about her Apple Music beef and subsequent reconciliation in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, while reserving her harshest words for Apple’s streaming rival Spotify.
Maybe you’re like me, and you’re interested in trying Apple Music. Maybe, though, you feel locked in to Rdio or Spotify, because over the years you’ve set up an extensive library of favorites and playlists. Favorites and playlists you count on.
Well, good news! Migrating your whole life to Apple Music is just $4.99 away.
Some of the streaming numbers on Apple Music’s biggest tracks — particularly on newer hip-hop songs — are said to be rivalling the number of listens on Spotify, according to a new report.
Apple Music has only been around for a month, but music label insiders claim it has already surprised people by attracting more than 10 million subscribers.
Spotify doesn’t want to go down without a fight. The service is debuting Discover Weekly, a new playlist for every user that updates every Monday with unique recommendations for each person. One of Apple Music’s advantages over Spotify is its personalized playlists for users’ tastes, and now Spotify is matching it.
Canadian singer-songwriter and musician turned high-fidelity music spokesman, Neil Young, announced that he’s fed up with music streaming service. Sure, there’s a lot less money in streaming than selling albums, but Young revealed to fans that he’s pulling his albums from Apple Music and other services today because the music just sounds too horrible for him to tolerate.
The Pono Player creator told fans this morning that the sound quality was dramatically reduced by ‘bad deals’ made without his consent so he has no choice but to pull his entire catalog from Apple Music, Spotify, and Tidal so that you, the fan, aren’t harmed by hearing his music in the worst quality in the history of broadcasting — which is probably the way you’ve been listening to his music the past five years.
Here is Young’s full explanation:
Spotify and Apple Music are now the two major players in the battle for music streaming supremacy, but if Facebook has its way the world’s most popular social network may also become the best place to discover and listen to tunes.
Facebook is in early talks with record labels to develop a music streaming service of its own, according to a new report that claims the social network has some bold plans for the future of music.
A new e-mail campaign from music streaming app Spotify is aiming to hit Apple right where it hurts — its service fees.
Spotify is notifying its iOS customers to let them know about the 30 percent extra Apple tacks onto its Premium service when listeners pay $12.99 a month through iTunes. It directs them instead to Spotify’s own website, where the same option with the same features only costs $9.99. You can see the image accompanying the e-mail below.
The best feature about Apple Music has to be the incredible playlists the app builds for you based on your music tastes. But if you’ve been using Spotify for the past few years, you’ve probably got a lot of carefully curated playlists of your own.
You could rebuild you Spotify playlists manually when you switch to Apple Music but no one’s got time for that, so some clever developers have created a brilliant set of tools that will let you export Spotify playlists and add them to Apple Music. The process is a little tricky, but it makes the move to Apple Music so much better.
Here’s how to import your Spotify playlists to Apple Music:
If you were hoping to listen to Prince on Apple Music, thinking that the purple-clad passionate one’s music would be on the service like many other exclusives on Apple’s new streaming service, you’re out of luck.
The artist currently known as Prince has pulled all of his music from streaming services, except for one: Jay Z’s Tidal, which reputedly has the best terms for mega artists like the Purple Rain lead.
Turns out that doves will cry after all, since they can’t listen to Prince on Apple Music or Spotify.
No one has shut up about this album since it came out in October 2014. Taylor Swift’s “1989” sold over a million copies in the first week alone and continues to sell well even today, largely due to the fact that it was previously nowhere to be found on streaming services. That is until Apple Music launched and Swift suddenly had a change of heart.
Still, since everyone I know buzzed about this album and the media certainly buzzed about it given the Spotify melodrama, I had to give it a listen. I didn’t want to buy it because I truly didn’t care that much, but I cared enough to listen if I was already paying for a streaming subscription. Now that I’m officially an Apple Music member, I got to stream “1989” in its entirety while I was cooking my lunch.
Two minutes after Apple Music launched Tuesday, Hans Metzke was listening to it on his device. He hit pause on his excitement to send out this Tweet: “And we’re live! Awesome! Bye Spotify.”
Apple Music users immediately took to social media to sing the praises of Apple’s new music streaming service. At the same time, many were saying farewell to music streaming’s current king, Spotify.
Whether Apple Music, which is currently free for the three months, will usurp Spotify or the other big player, Pandora, remains to be seen.
Apple Music’s launch is just days away, and Spotify is already running to catch up to the free trial Apple thinks will convince you to become a paying customer.
In an attempt to match Apple’s controversial three-month free trial period, Spotify announced that it will extend its Premium free trials from 30 days to 60 its days, but only if you’re outside the U.S.
After waging a war against Apple Music in the name of indie artists, Taylor Swift has finally decided that she will let fans stream her newest album, 1989, on Apple Music when the service launches last week.
Swift announced her decision to make the album available on Twitter this morning, saying it’s the first time she’s felt right in her gut that now is the time to embrace streaming.
The Taylor Swift/Apple Music controversy has reignited discussion about what exactly the trend toward music streaming is going to do to artists.
If you’re concerned that your favorite singer isn’t getting enough dough, you may be interested to check out Eternify, a brand new website which lets users play any song they want from Spotify’s catalog in loops lasting 30 seconds — gradually racking up pay-per-stream royalties for the artist or band in question.
“Music streaming’s virtually worthless for artists,” the website reads. “But we can change that.”
