The company already offers Bluetooth speakers with the HTC Rhyme, but according to the tipsters and more substantial “wireless boombox” is in the pipeline. That would use Bluetooth to stream audio from HTC phones and tablets, as well as presumably offering some degree of remote control over playback.

HTC has apparently been in talks with Spotify previously, as well as other streaming music providers, around powering a service for HTC devices, but the negotiations failed to go anywhere. Instead, Iovine is believed to be using his heft in the industry to create a Spotify rival, something fellow music execs are tipped to approve of as it could potentially dilute Spotify’s rising star.

The service will be preinstalled on HTC devices, though it’s unclear as to whether it will demand a subscription or, like Nokia Music on the Finnish company’s Lumia devices, be a free addition intended to encourage shoppers to pick HTC phones and tablets rather than those of rival manufacturers, even if they run the same underlying OS. Pricing plans and other details are still being worked on, supposedly, but HTC is tipped to have “long harbored” ambitions around streaming music services. The company already offers streaming video using its HTC Watch rental system.

HTC could reveal the new music platform as early as the Barcelona mobile show at the end of February, where it’s also tipped to be bringing three new Android smartphones – including the Ville and Edge – and a new tablet. We’ll be at Mobile World Congress bringing back all the details as they’re announced, and you can keep up with all the news in our MWC 2012 hub.

The President has chosen to use everyone’s current favorite service for hosting free to listen to and fee to stream Spotify, here sending out his musical love with links directly to the songs themselves. What better way to get in tune with the 2012 Obama Campaign than to listen to the same music the President is listening to? Of more than 500 million playlists on Spotify right this minute, we’re going to go ahead and guess that this one is about to become one of the most popular. Check out the full playlist on Barack Obama’s Tumblr page or head below to see each song with a link directly to your Spotify account – you’ll have to grab one of those, too, if you want to listen.

No Doubt Different People
Earth Wind & Fire Experience feat. Al McKay Allstars Got To Get You Into My Life – (Live)
Booker T. & The MG’s Green Onions – Single/LP Version
Wilco I Got You
The Impressions Keep On Pushing – Single Version
Performed by Jennifer Hudson; Dreamgirls (Motion Picture Soundtrack) Love You I Do
AgesandAges No Nostalgia
Ledisi Raise Up
Sugarland Stand Up
Darius Rucker This
Arcade Fire We Used to Wait
Florence + The Machine You’ve Got The Love
James Taylor Your Smiling Face
REO Speedwagon Roll With The Changes
Raphael Saadiq Keep Marchin’
Noah And The Whale Tonight’s The Kind Of Night
Zac Brown Band Keep Me In Mind
Aretha Franklin The Weight
U2 Even Better Than The Real Thing
Dierks Bentley Home
Sugarland Everyday America
Darius Rucker Learn To Live
Al Green Let’s Stay Together
Electric Light Orchestra Mr. Blue Sky
Montgomery Gentry My Town
Ricky Martin The Best Thing About Me Is You Feat. Joss Stone
Ray LaMontagne You Are The Best Thing
Bruce Springsteen We Take Care Of Our Own

As a reminder – we’ve got so much coverage of Spotify from the first few months it was released here in the United States that it’ll make your eyes bleed. Head to our timeline below to get a great dosage of all the fun as it went down throughout 2011 and up here to 2012.

The company was off the ground in 2006, and by the early part of 2007 it was attracting millions of new users on a monthly basis. In case you never heard of this platform, iLike offered free music streaming and sought to offer recommendations and social sharing opportunities based on listening history. Think of it as a Pandora, Playlist.com, or Spotify. More than $17 million in funding went to iLike.

The problem was even though iLike was generating as much as 1.5 billion pageviews per month, it didn’t have a great revenue model. Therein lies the problem with so many other failed music services that offer so much to users but don’t do enough for themselves. Struggling, iLike was snatched up by Myspace in 2009 for a reported $20 million. But just like Myspace, iLike continued on a downward path. So long and rest in peace.

[via GigaOM]

“Spotify has yet to become popular with artists because artists don’t see the financial benefit of working with Spotify,” McGuinness believes. “That’s partly the fault of the labels, and the labels partly own Spotify.” Details of exactly how much Spotify pays each label and each artist per play are closely guarded secrets, though previous leaks have suggested the balance is tipped decidedly in the direction of record labels.

According to insiders, Spotify and rivals like Rhapsody are forced to agree to huge upfront payments along with payout deals based on the biggest income of either minimum subscriber fees, per-play costs or total company revenue. Each label can insist on the best terms of all the negotiated deals their counterparts have arranged.

In the end, “damned by faint praise” seems the most apt description for the U2 manager’s attitude toward Spotify and other streaming services. “I see no reason why the Spotify model should not be part of the future, it is essentially honest so it’s to be encouraged. I’d like to see it adopted everywhere, quite honestly” he concluded. However, as to whether Spotify is “a means of monetizing distribution for product or is it promotional?” McGuinness asked himself, “at the moment I’m inclined to treat it as promotional.  If we have to choose where to put records on their debut we’re unlikely to give it to Spotify. I’d rather give it to a DJ on a great station.”

The new numbers are a good sign for Spotify and help to reassure the music industry that this model works. Spotify operates as a freemium service that allows both ad-supported free accounts and paid premium accounts, all with unlimited playback, although it recently implemented monthly caps on the free accounts.

The new 20 percent ratio doesn’t include people that have tried Spotify but then trailed off. And Spotify believes that its Facebook integration and month-long free trials for its premium service have helped boost its conversion rate. Currently, Spotify offers an ad-free option for $4.99 per month and an ad-free option that also allows for use on mobile devices for $9.99 per month.

“We have achieved some pretty great results in terms of the ratio of paid users,” said Spotify’s US managing director Ken Parks. “We have an enormous internal effort to drive conversion and engagement with the service. We are very focused on growing in our existing 12 markets as well as expanding in other markets.”

[via Financial Times]

There’s also a speed and performance boost promised, including higher offline music playback quality. Better playlist management tools are also in the pipeline. However the Napster brand will continue in the UK and Germany, as Rhapsody reckons it’s better known there, and the existing Napster staff will keep their jobs.

Rhapsody has over 1m paying subscribers in the US, spending at least $4.99 per month on the streaming music service. That figure was bolstered by acquiring Napster’s US operations from Best Buy last October, leading Rhapsody to go on to claim it had the highest number of US subscribing users of any paid-streaming service.

Financial terms of the deal between Rhapsody and Napster International have not been revealed.

There’s also time-consuming and expensive data collection, made mandatory by the agreements, with little in the way of standardization for reporting to each individual label. Even the raw tracks themselves are supplied in different formats with different data tagging, and must be fettled into a consistent shape before they can be deployed.

To cap it off, a “most favored nation” clause means that even if one label negotiates a more service-friendly deal, it can later insist on the same terms as agreed with a different label. The best terms are shared between all the labels; the reason, insider Michael Robertson (former CEO of MP3.com) says, streaming media services often find it easy to get a first label onboard, knowing they’ll share in any good deals negotiated down the line. Spotify and others aren’t free to go to other suppliers, since the labels and publishers hold the copyrights.

It’s well worth reading if you’ve ever wondered why Spotify and other services have such difficulty spreading into new markets – the much-delayed Spotify US launch is a good example – and, indeed, how labels are making their money in the new digital age. The fact that the labels are likely to get even tighter with the splitting up and sale of EMI doesn’t bode well for fairer negotiations in future.

Similarly, listeners can also create as many artist radio stations as they like, with no demands to pay. Songs can be saved to playlists for later listening, and of course shared using Spotify’s usual social networking integration such as posting an update about the track to your Facebook wall.

Beginning a new radio station is as straightforward as clicking “Start Artist Radio” in the artist’s profile, or alternatively dragging a seed track to the “Radio” option in the sidebar. After that, Spotify’s algorithms do the rest.

The updated Spotify Radio service is part of the company’s recent push to be more than just a music jukebox. Earlier this month, the Spotify Platform – complete with apps – was released, integrating song lyrics, concert search, ticket purchase and more into the core experience; check out our hands-on report here. Spotify Radio will begin rolling out over the next few days.

Of course if your pals don’t use RDIO or Spotify, they’ll just have to listen to the sample version of the song you’ve shared via their own interface, but still, cool beans! Have a peek at the app right this second over at the Android Market listing for SoundTracking and download thusly. You’ll also find that it’s a neat way to find new music by seeing covers of albums as they’ve got a trending wall that shows up by image – tap in and connect! This SoundTracking ecosystem has 1 million users on it already and counting – find your iPhone friends right out of the box.

Then for those of you hoping for more Spotify app connections in the near future, head back to our hands-on with the Beta version of Spotify Platform, that being the desktop version of Spotify that’ll now allow you to work with Rolling Stone, Moodagent, and more in the near future. I heard you liked Spotify so I put some Spotify in your Spotify, that’s what they’re saying here. Have a peek at that, download the app above, and have a great musical day!

What we’ve got here is the first look for the public at everything Spotify and partners showed off last month in their presentation on what they call their Spotify Music Platform, in other words apps inside the Spotify environment. What’s been released today is a beta download that anyone can access but whose full set of features only premium users can use. This will be true of the whole apps bit of the future of Spotify as far as we’ve heard, and it does remain true here today. Have a peek at what this beta is packing here:

As you can see we are currently limited to the first set of apps as no other developers have been allowed in during this pre-release timeframe, but we can expect cool bits in the near future. In the video you’ll find everything working beyond slick, seeming to almost be pre-integrated before the download of each app occurs. We’ll see how this all plays out once we see developers releasing their own non-major-label apps into the Spotify wild soon.

UPDATE: this platform is officially going to be referred to as “Spotify Platform” – per Spotify.

You can download this beta version of Spotify for desktop by heading over to Spotify’s download page, clicking the links you need to make the business occur: [download/preview]. You can currently get this build for Mac or PC, the version we’ve demoed above working on a Mac. Other than that, here’s what Spotify has presented thus far:

Also included in this expansion was Spotify’s addition of “Favorite Friends” to your friends list on the right of your display so that after you’ve collected thousands of pals, you can sum up the best of the best up at the top. Interestingly enough, one of Ek’s best friends had the most popular Prodigy track on earth in his favorite list which Ek then played for the audience. Very simple stuff for the original setup. As for the several apps that are about to work with Spotify soon, have a peek here – first there’s TuneWiki whose most powerful feature is its ability to find tracks by listening to them and display the lyrics of songs as they’re played, as seen in this official Spotify Apps video:

As for LastFM, you’ll again be able to discover tracks, but you’ll have the full LastFM library and resources at your fingertips, all inside the Spotify world for listening to the tracks you find. For SongKick, you’ll be tracking your favorite artists as they work with you the listener to provide personalized concert calendars and ticket listings, this again inside Spotify. Basically what you’re looking at here is a tie between the platforms. Each of these apps aren’t all that different from their original form on their own sites, it’s just that they’re able to play tracks through Spotify now. We’ll see how this all pans out in the coming weeks.

In the time since Spotify started up, Sweden adopted it on a major scale – 33% of the country uses the service! What’s more impressive is that in that time music piracy fell 25% in the country – there’s no denying that there MUST be some sort of a connection. Ek went through this and a collection of other impressive numbers on how fast Spotify is growing both in the USA and abroad, noting that Facebook has played a big part in this growth in the past few months. Then he spoke about the next big step for Spotify.

Today Spotify becomes a music platform. What this means is that the environment will be open to third party developers who will be able to make HTML5 applications inside the Spotify world. The first set of groups to work in this new world include Rolling Stone, Fuse, Billboard, and Pitchfork. As Ek said,

“Today, we become a music platform, with the launch of really innovative, integrated apps … integrations that keep Spotify simple but layer in fun & social experiences. We’ve turned our client in an interactive platform where third-party developers can easily build HTML5 Spotify Apps via JavaScript.” – Ek

Sound like something you want to be a part of? Have a peek at who is already on board above and get ready for a whole new collection of apps! UPDATE: Spotify Apps is live!

The apps will be free – at least initially – and available to Spotify users regardless of their subscription status. Currently, only premium subscribers get ad-free and mobile device access to the Spotify catalog, while ad-free listening on the desktop also requires a monthly fee; however, apps will be made available to both paying and ad-supported listeners.

There are now 2.5m paying subscribers Spotify claims, helped by the company’s deal with Facebook in September. A US launch took place earlier in the year, with the service running in Europe for several years before that; concerns among labels about whether Spotify could find enough users willing to pay hamstrung US negotiations.

We’ll know for sure what Spotify has to show us in just a few hours time, with the company readying a press event in New York City to make its big announcement. Stay tuned for all the details!

The team at Spotify seems to be excited about the prospect of becoming a middle-man for music if what Kafka’s source says is true. As Kafka notes, an industry executive he spoke with says that some of the big music labels working with Spotify are “philosophically aligned with the idea of using Spotify as an ‘authentication layer,’” and that they “see this as a value-add and they’re not worried about cannibalization.” If you’re thinking about how many layers the music really truly needs to go through to get from the musician to the ear of the listener, this would be two to three rather than just the none in downloading straight from the musician.

And what with Google Music now set up to essentially be that zero with their newfound ability to allow musicians sign themselves up to the Google Music market, what does Spotify hope to do here by widening their stance? We shall see on Wednesday. Hopefully we’ll also see a new set of labels signing up for the team too, I’m really crossing my fingers for a few more rarities. Hang around SlashGear for the full scoop.

[via All Things D]

As well as creating playlists, it’s also possible to use the system to control actual playback. Saying “pause,” “play the next song,” “play the previous song” and “what song is this?” is all supported; the plugin Maddox released uses the same SiriProxy software as we saw controlling Plex media playback among other things.

You can grab the relevant Spotify for SiriProxy files here, and Maddox has released them as open-source if you fancy a tinker. Obviously you’ll need an iPhone 4S in order to actually use Siri, since the whole proxy system relies on Apple’s remote servers crunching your spoken commands.

The addition of Facebook integration with Spotify’s US launch most likely played quite a pivotal role in facilitating the traction and growth of the company’s subscriber count, and it’ll be interesting to see more userstatistics and data released by Spotify. Moreover, we’ll see how Spotify continues to do over the next couple months, especially since more media continues to become free. By offering a great user interface, a vast library of music, and no-strings subscription, they’re currently in a good place.

If you haven’t heard yet, Spotify will be holding a press event at the end of the month on November 30th to potentially talk about what’s next for the music-streaming service. How many SlashGear readers currently use Spotify? How many readers currently pay for a Spotify subscription, and what’re your takes on the service so far? Leave your thoughts below.

[via Spotify]

What exactly that new direction could be is now the topic of no small amount of discussion. Spotify’s service only launched in the US relatively recently, and as such it lacks some of the functionality the company offers in Europe: that includes MP3 downloads, for instance. However, adding those to the US app would hardly warrant a “global” event.

Another possibility could be video, though that would put Spotify up against established outfits like YouTube, as well as be something tricky to monetize through the company’s existing subscription model. Most recently, the company has suffered a few semi-embarrassing defections of smaller labels, unsatisfied with Spotify’s royalty payouts.

The app supports playback over WiFi and 3G, and you can choose whether to stream at regular or high quality. Offline playback is done on a per-playlist basis – tap the playlist and there’s a simple “Download” toggle at the top – with sync over 3G optional; you can also long-press on a playlist and pin it to the Start menu, make it collaborative (so allowing others to add tracks), share it via Twitter or other social networks, publish it or delete it. Playback controls are added to the lock screen, as shown above.

Spotify on Nokia Lumia 800 demo:

Search is supported, but if you’re less sure of what you’d like to listen to the app has a list of  new albums that have recently been added. Each has artwork, and you can long-press albums or individual tracks and choose to queue them, star them, add them to a playlist or share them. Add and Share buttons at the bottom do the same for the entire album.

Finally there’s the feed, where you see updates on what your Spotify People contacts are listening to as well as news from Spotify itself. Our only real criticisms are the absence of “top tracks” as you get in the Android Spotify app, and the Start menu icon, which is a stubborn green (the same as the Xbox LIVE tile, in fact) with no other color options.

The app itself is a free download, though you’ll need a Spotify Premium account – priced at $9.99/€9.99/£9.99 per month – in order to actually use it. More on the Lumia 800, meanwhile, in our full review.

You’ll have the same ability to play the tracks that are listed in your account, grab new tracks from the ever-increasing library of tracks Spotify offers. Screens are pulled back and forth like most Windows Phone-centric apps, and sound quality appears to be just fine. The green collection of colors is still in play, but it’s mostly a white situation where most other Spotify interfaces are black and gray.

You’ll be seeing this app appearing soon for your Mango devices and your same account will work fine. You will need Windows Phone 7.5 Mango get the app working, and no plans are in play to make the app work with devices with lower OS versions. Have a peek at our Spotify portal for all the Spotify news your heart can handle – note how the app has spread across a host of new platforms over the past few months here in the USA. Also head down to our Windows Phone 7.5 Mango review to know all there is about the newest version of Microsoft’s mobile OS.

The Boxee Box for iPad update now shows a new remote control at the lower right hand corner of your screen that lets you control videos you send to your Boxee Box from your iPad. The process of sending media files to your Boxee Box will also now resume where you left off for any files you played through the Boxee Media Manager.

Additionally, the Boxee Box service now has an option to select video quality when you stream files. This is helpful for those with bandwidth issues and provides more consistent streaming when you’ve got a weak WiFi connection.

[via Boxee]

First off is the relatively limited access. Spotify has been pushing integration into standalone HiFi, STB and other hardware, whereas to begin with PURE Music will only play on the company’s own eight-strong streaming radio range, plus the iPhone and Android apps. There’s no iPad app, though that will follow on in 2012, and neither is there local caching, allowing you to store copies of songs locally so as to play them back even when you don’t have a data connection.

Still, PURE tells us that the local caching is on the roadmap to be addressed, while the company also says its open to third-party integration so as to make PURE Music a really cross-platform service. The browser-based PC/Mac interface has also been designed with tablet browsers in mind, and so while there’s no iPad or Honeycomb app at present, you shouldn’t have any issues accessing the web-based interface instead. That’s handy for platforms – like webOS on the TouchPad or QNX on the BlackBerry PlayBook – which are very unlikely to see dedicated apps anytime soon.

From the browser UI, once you’ve registered each PURE radio, you can control the playlist remotely. Alternatively, all the playlist and catalog access, search and other tools are available directly from the radios themselves, which have had a firmware update to handle PURE Music this week. Unlimited clients using the same IP address can access the service simultaneously – so you can have multiple listeners at home, all playing different tracks – though currently there’s no synchronized playback as on Sonos.

Of the more than 15m tracks available – all up for purchase at 320kbps from PURE’s media partner, 7Digital – more than 95-percent are apparently ready to stream, each at 128kbps. PURE tells us it’s working on the hold-out labels currently. One advantage over Spotify is the PURE Tag service (now free for all users, rather than a £2.99 monthly subscription) that allows you to use your phone or PURE radio to identify music playing on the radio and then either buy the track individually or access it through your PURE Music subscription.

We’ll be putting PURE Music through its paces for a full review soon, but first impressions are reasonably positive. PURE is targeting a user-base that’s perhaps looking for less complexity than Spotify, instead after a relatively plug-and-play system; the risk with that is you can end up alienating early-adopters who are more tech-minded and miss the advanced features. Still, for a subscription price just half of what Spotify Premium costs, we can see plenty of people giving PURE Music a second glance.

The N9 already comes preloaded with access to Nokia’s Ovi Music store, allowing paid downloads on a per-track or per-album basis. However, Spotify relies on a subscription, a single monthly payment - $9.99 or €9.99 – granting access to the company’s full catalog of streamed tracks.

Interestingly, according to the app description at Nokia’s Ovi Store, the new software “is developed and maintained by NOKIA in cooperation with Spotify” rather than being the sole handiwork of the music company itself. That might suggest that Nokia is doing some coding work of its own, trying to feather the N9′s app options and make the platform more appealing.

We reviewed the Nokia N9 in full over the weekend, so make sure to check that out!

[via Twitter]

The company points out that the preview is unsupported so you use them at your own risk. The preview software also only supports specific Blackberry handsets. The app has been tested on the 9780/9700/9000 Bold handsets and the 8520 Curve. Spotify specifically notes that the Torch 9800 and smartphones on GSM networks and CDMA networks are not compatible at this time.

You can hop over the Spotify at this link, and download the preview app on a compatible phone from the device’s browser. If you like what the app is and want, it to make it to a normal feature let Spotify know. Let us know how well it works in the comments below.

What you can’t do is create or manage Spotify playlists, something Boxee reckons is best left to computers and tablets. You’ll need a Premium Spotify account in order to use the Boxee Box integration, priced at $9.99 or €9.99 per month, and of course a Boxee Box to access it on. They’re currently running at around $180 online.

Spotify previously announced a deal with Western Digital to put the music service on the WD TV Live range, joining an existing line-up of hardware from partners including Sonos and Onkyo. More details on Spotify here.

You’ll also be able to recommend tracks to your friends by sending them directly to their inbox. The integration is the latest move in Spotify’s push for growth, with the streaming music service announcing that it had partnered with Facebook for its sharing system. The deal also meant Spotify access in the US was no longer dependent on an invitation, though you’ll need a paid subscription if you want access on your Western Digital hardware.

The Western Digital WD TV Live is priced at $99.99, while the WD TV Live Hub is $199.99. A premium subscription to Spotify is priced at $9.99 per month in the US, £9.99 in the UK, and €9.99 in Europe.

“This deal will further extend Rhapsody’s lead over our competitors in the growing on-demand music market,” said Rhapsody president Jon Irwin in a statement. “There’s substantial value in bringing Napster’s subscribers and robust IP portfolio to Rhapsody as we execute on our strategy to expand our business via direct acquisition of members and distribution deals.”

When Napster was acquired by Best Buy in 2008 for $121 million, it had about 700,000 subscribers but then faced a large decline. The current Napster subscriber base hasn’t been revealed, but it will add to Rhapsody’s subscriber base of 800,000.

Although both companies were among the earliest music service providers, they have struggled in recent years to gain more users and especially so with newcomers like Spotify that offer a significant amount of music for free. Spotify is also now tightly integrated with Facebook, giving it even greater access to a large pool of potential subscribers. Its been reported recently that since its integration with Facebook, the service adds about 250,000 new subscribers each day and has already hit over 4 million users.

[via PCMag]

That integration – which now means all Spotify sign-ups will need a Facebook account – had seen users bombarding their Facebook walls with information on what music they were currently playing. In return, Spotify offered six months of unlimited streaming, something the company says around 250,000 people a day are clamoring for.

Whether this private listening feature will be sufficient to diffuse complaints remains to be seen, though Spotify did go on record earlier this week with a more in-depth description of the privacy setting. For a temporary fix, meanwhile, you can enable Private Listening via the new option in the File menu of the Spotify app.

However, to get that unlimited access package, you’ll need to have a Facebook account, since the company has merged its own login system and that of the social network. In a statement, also given to MusicAlly, Spotify described it as “like a virtual ‘passport’, designed to make the experience smoother and easier.”

Although that mandatory registration didn’t go down well with Facebook’s critics, the usage figures would suggest that people are quite content to register with the service if there’s free music to be had. After the initial six months of unlimited access, Spotify downgrades each account to 10hrs of access per month, obviously hoping users will stump up cash for what previously they got free.

“To us, this is all about creating an amazing new world of music discovery. As most of our users are already social and have already connected to Facebook, it seemed logical to integrate Spotify and Facebook logins. We already use Facebook as part of our backend to power our social features and by adopting Facebook’s login, we’ve created a simple and seamless social experience.

From today, all new Spotify users will need to have a Facebook account to join Spotify. Think of it as like a virtual ‘passport’, designed to make the experience smoother and easier, with one less username and password to remember. You don’t need to connect to Facebook and if you do decide to, you can always control what you share and don’t share by changing your Spotify settings at any time.

We’re constantly trying new things, always looking for feedback and we’re always going to listen to our users, making changes based on this feedback wherever we can.” Spotify statement

Six months is plenty of time for you to decide if Spotify is worth the $4.99 or $9.99 month charge to keep things going. Spotify has an impressive collection of free tunes for you to listen to. I have had a free account for a while now and it has a lot of stuff I like, but it was missing several artists that are popular. I have yet to find all the music I like on any digital music service so that lack of artists isn’t uncommon.

Facebook and Spotify announced this week at the f8 developers conference that they would be tying up. The result of the tie up between the music network and the social network will be links to songs in your news feed with the ability to listen. However, the music you hear on Facebook will be counted in the month’s free service. Normally the free plan is only good for ten hours in a month making the unlimited listening with Facebook very welcome.

Update: Spotify contacted us to say that after the six months free, users will be able to keep the 10 hour monthly free plan.

[via Lifehacker]

We’ve seen a preview of the Ticker before, which will appear at the top right corner of your screen, showing real-time status updates from your friends. Now with music integration, you’ll also be able to see what you’re friends are currently listening to on Facebook and you’ll be able to access that music from the Ticker to listen along. When you do so, your friend or friend of your friend, who is listening to that song, will get a notification.

This new form of sharing is what Facebook is calling “real-time serendipity.” This opens up many new opportunities for music sharing and discovery. Spotify will also be powering music in posts with play buttons in the revamped News Feed area. Simply clicking on the play button lets you listen and share free music and lets you help your friends discover new music.

According to the latest figures leaked, Spotify has signed up 1.4 million users total in the U.S. That may be impressive, but what’s more amazing is that the company has also more than doubled their paid subscriber base within the last two weeks.

The majority of these paying customers are subscribed to the $10 per month plan that allows for ad-free streaming as well as the ability to stream to both iPhones and Android handsets. The latest count reveals that Spotify currently has 175,000 paying customers in the US.

This is a huge difference from rivals such as MOG and Rdio, which have each yet to reach 100,000 users after a year. Longstanding Rhapsody took several years to reach its current number of 800,000 paying customers.

However, this conversion rate is still less than what Spotify is used to in Europe. Here in the US only about 12.5 percent of free subscribers convert to a premium plan, while in Europe that number is 15 percent.

[via AllThingsD]

The patent in dispute is fairly broad, encompassing any “device for the distribution of music information in digital form.” Filed back in 1995, the patent was later purchased by PacketVideo with the obvious intent of collecting licensing fees from it. Below is the main description of the items covered by the patent:

“a central memory device which is connected to a communications network and has a databank of digitized music information and, a terminal which is connected to the central memory device via the communications network, the central memory device being equipped with a retrieval module and the said modules having the capability to interact via the communications network in order to order and transmit selectively chosen music information, wherein the selectively chosen music information is organized with a defined format for transmission in a digital music information object, the format including a core and a number of additional layers, the core including at least one object identification code, object structure information, a consumer code and an encryption table and the one or more additional layers including the actual music information, wherein the central memory device has an encryption module for encryption of the music information object before transmission using the encryption table, and wherein the terminal has a decryption module for decryption of the music information object before its reproduction using the encryption table, an interpretation module for interpretation and reproduction conditioning of the music information object as well as an authorization device having identification information for identification of the terminal and of the consumer which is retrievable by the interpretation module and by the decryption module for authorization checking.”

It seems like this patent would apply to a number of other music streaming services as well, including MOG, Rdio, Pandora, and Rhapsody, to name a few. Whether those music service are already paying a licensing fee to PacketVideo is unclear. And if not, this could mark just the first round of patent trolling for the company. Spotify is currently one of the services making the most headlines for sure, having garnered possibly 70,000 paid subscribers in its first week. If you haven’t tried it yet, you can get an invitation from our SlashGear Spotify page.

[via TechCrunch]

The Wall Street Journal has confirmedthat its iPad app “will soon remove all purchasing options in the app in response to Apple’s new rules.” Whereas before, would-be subscribers could hit a button in the app and be taken to a sign-up page in the iPad’s Safari browser, now they will have to call customer service or manually visit the newspaper’s site.

Similarly, the Kindle for iOS app has been updated, with Amazon saying that v2.8 “removes the Kindle Store button.” Spotify too has an amended version, the changelist of which only includes “compliance with new rules for subscription-based apps.” Ereader apps from Kobo and Barnes & Noble have also been changed so that they no longer link to web-based ebook stores.

“We remain concerned that Apple’s own subscription [rules] would create a poor experience for our readers, who would not be able to directly manage their WSJ account or to easily access our content across multiple platforms” a News Corp spokesperson said of the changes, referring to Apple’s preference for its own in-app purchasing system. While that allows for recurring subscriptions to be bought without leaving the software itself, it also takes a 30-percent cut for Apple’s pocket and limits what access content providers have to subscriber information.

Meanwhile, Google Books is now no longer present in the App Store, with the search giant seemingly choosing to yank its software rather than comply with Apple’s rules.

Apple:
Mac OS X Lion available now!
Apple MacBook Air updated
Apple Mac mini refreshed: Sandy Bridge and dual-drive Server
Apple Thunderbolt Display revealed
OS X Lion update kills Flash Player hardware acceleration and more
Adobe admits OS X Lion Flash claims were false
iTunes 10.4 and iWork 6 Updates Released For OS X Lion Full-Screen Support
MacBook Air 13″ core i5 hands-on (mid-2011)
OS X Lion Sold Over 1 Million Copies In First Day
Complete Apple retail store faked quite convincingly in China
Apple Killing Off More Boxed Software From Stores
Apple Hints At iPhone 5 In September?
Apple Q3 Earnings Exceeds Expectations, $28.57 Billion Revenue, $7.31 Billion Profit

Intel, Microsoft, and Nokia:
Intel Q2 Earnings Beat Expectations, Netbooks Down, Cloud Computing Strong
Microsoft Reports Solid Q4 Earnings Thanks To Enterprise, Servers, And Xbox
Windows Phone Mango App Submissions In August Support September Launch
Nokia “Sea Ray” Windows Phone caught on video
Nokia Q2 financials “clearly disappointing” says CEO Elop: €487m loss

Google:
Google+ For iPhone Now The Top Free App In iTunes
Google+ Games Stream confirmed
Google acquires Fridge: Groups for Google+ incoming
Google+ hits 20m unique visitors; Social chief admits brand strategy was “a mistake”
Google+ Celebrity Acquisition Plan In The Works
Google Is Shutting Down Google Labs And Some Experimental Projects
What Google Labs Shutting Down Means for YOU the Google Lover

Spotify:
Spotify Reached 70,000 Paying Subscribers In First Week Of U.S. Launch
SlashGear Spotify Invites Now Up for Grabs!

Reviews & Hands-on/Unboxings:
Verbatim Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard Review
Mac OS X Lion Review
MacBook Air 13-inch core i5 Review (mid-2011)
Toshiba Thrive Review
Lenovo IdeaPad K1 and ThinkPad Tablet hands-on

The number is an estimate leaked out by music industry execs, but has not been officially confirmed by Spotify. CEO Daniel Ek said it was too early to confirm the data, but did find it to far exceeded their expectations. The 70,000 figure accounts for only the premium $10 per month subscriptions, meaning actual signups are far greater.

Additionally, this number sets Spotify as the fastest growing music streaming service in the U.S., where competitors like MOG and Rdio have each yet to reach 100,000 users after a year. The more established music service, Rhapsody, has attained more than 800,000 paying customers, but took several years to achieve that number.

If you haven’t tried out Spotify yet, make sure to grab an invite from us on SlashGear’s Spotify page. And if you have tried it already, let us know what you think and whether you’re upgrading to the premium membership.

[via BillBoard]

Just head on over to the special Google+ post Vincent has set up and give him a high-five, then bounce on over to our landing page and set yourself up with a free invite to Spotify! Our good pal Deanna from Spotify is the one to be thanking here, as she so diligently helped us get this awesome landing page for the freedom of Spotify all across the land! That said, know the following: US residents only!

Spotify is currently available in the U.S. by invitation only, but SlashGear asked us to set aside some of the very first invites for friends. All you need to do is enter your email address in the box to get an invite.

Head here for invites: http://www.spotify.com/us/slashgear/

You can get more knowledge on the subject here: SlashGear 101 : What is Spotify? then head forward in the swayback machine to see all you need to see on what Spotify is and what it means for you by hitting our Spotify tag portal. Then you’re set!

[via +Vincent Nguyen]

Before we go any further, you need to get some knowledge on the subjects of which we speak. We’ve got guides and major in-depth articles on both projects: SlashGear 101 : What is Google+? and SlashGear 101 : What is Spotify? for starters, then head on to the guides in cats and posts. Take a trip to our Google+ guide from Top to Bottom and/or hit up both keyword portals: Google+ and Spotify. Then you’ll be maddeningly intelligent, and it’s time to enter the giveaway!

UPDATE: we now have a special SlashGear landing page so that everyone can have an invite now – check it out! http://www.spotify.com/us/slashgear/

All you’ve got to do is the following:

That’s it! Get to it!

[poll id="15"]

Apple:
Apple’s New MacBook Airs To Launch Late Next Week
Apple’s Revamped LED Cinema Displays With Thunderbolt Coming Soon
Apple iOS 4.3.4 Released, PDF Vulnerability Fixed
ITC Finds HTC Infringes On Two Apple Patents

Google:
Android patent situation not critical insists Google CEO
Google+ Has Over 10 Million Users, 1 Billion Items Shared Per Day, Says CEO Larry Page
Google Activates 550,000 Android Devices Daily, Reaches 250,000 Android Market Apps
Google+ Corporate Accounts Testing To Launch Next Week
Google Games discovered in Google+ code
Android Market Files Hint At Google Music Store

Spotify:
Spotify US goes live
SlashGear 101: What is Spotify?
SlashGear Free Spotify Invite Giveaway

Microsoft:
Microsoft Reveals New Windows Phone 7 Mango Handsets From Samsung, Acer, And More
Fujitsu Windows Phone could be tweaked 12MP Android handset
Microsoft To Ship Windows Phone Mango Devices By September?

Netflix:
Netflix Announces Price Hike, Splits DVD And Streaming Plans
Is this the chance Netflix rivals have been waiting for?
Netflix lands on Nintendo 3DS today
Blockbuster Attempts Neftlix Customer Thievery in Wake of Price Hikes

Reviews:
Android Market 3.0.26 Hands-On and Review
Spotify Premium Mobile App and Service Review [USA]
Swiftkey X Review for Android Handsets
SwiftKey Tablet X Review
T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide Review
iRiver Story HD Review

First of all, lets get educated on both Google+ and Spotify. We’ve got guides and quite a few in-depth articles on both projects: to get into them, consider first hitting up our basic 101 posts: SlashGear 101 : What is Google+? and SlashGear 101 : What is Spotify? After that, you could take a swing down to our Google+ guide from Top to Bottom and/or hit up both keyword portals: Google+ and Spotify. Then when you’re full of knowledge, get yourself into this giveaway!

All you’ve got to do is the following:

1. Add +Vincent Nguyen (url: vincent.tv/+) to your Circle(s) on Google+*
2. Comment in our Spotify+ thread [a new post each day!] with some witty banter
July 15 URL: https://plus.google.com/103911183408644149411/posts/aYUYXLFYYw7
3. You’re entered into the contest!

*if you don’t already have access to Google+, send your name and email to giveaway @ slashgear.com

You’re already well on your way to getting Spotify for yourself – hours and days of magical musical entertainment for all!

Once we’ve picked you, the following will happen:

1. Vincent will ping you on Google+ to let you know you’re a winner.
2. You respond to that post.
3. Vincent gives you your invite code!

That’s it! Get to it!

[poll id="15"]

Lets start from the end: Spotify is a music streaming service that you can purchase a $10 subscription to, it allowing you unlimited use of their fantastically gigantic library of songs through your computer and your mobile device. Today we learn that there’s more to it than that: a whole Spotify ecosystem is in the works including Sonos, Motorola, and more! On a sort of similar tip, Microsoft has leaked its Tulalip social network plans – any match for Facebook and G+? That remains to be seen. Then just to throw you for a loop, check out some soft memory developed recently with the consistency of Jell-O. Yuck!

And what about that robot? It’s a gigantic Android! And it’s coming right at you! In some rather concerning news, Sony Ericsson has decided to blame Japan’s earthquakes on big Q2 losses. Maybe they should figure out how to harness time cloaking – a hole in time! Meanwhile the Pentagon has – oops – lost 24,000 files in a major network breach – kevin!

On the Apple front we’ve got news that the Apple A6 chip is in test production while TSMC keeps its heart set on taking Samsung’s job in this sector. On a very similar tip, a 3D Apple A6 CPU has been tipped while iPhone 5 overheat reports become more than just a whisper.

Google CEO Larry Page insists their swelling threats of IP litigation are not a problem and Google Games is discovered basically the same way Google+ was. Cisco Cius gets 4G LTE with Verison and the NYPD get electric cars – specifically – Volt!