Music

Spotify and Apple Music are easily the number one and two players in the streaming music market, respectively, and while Amazon offers plenty of quick and easy access to music, the company is looking to be taken as a more serious rival to the streaming giants. A new report details Amazon's plans for making its Music Unlimited service more recognized among consumers, including its first national TV campaign in the US, and using its lead in the smart speaker market.

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Today, T-Mobile took the stage to talk about the improvements it's making to customer service. While that reveal was certainly an exciting one in this age of automated customer service lines, it wasn't the only thing T-Mobile had to announce. The company also said that it's going to begin offering some new perks to customers, and both of these perks are centered around music.

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A connected speaker, smart or not, is only as good as the number of things you can stream through it. In some cases, owners are limited to an OEMs own music service. Google, however, opts for giving users choice. That choice expands today with the addition of two more services, letting users access Pandora and Deezer on their Google Assistant devices. Provided they have a premium subscription to those services, of course.

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The competition in the music streaming industry has practically been whittled down to two major players: Spotify and Apple Music. And any advantage one can get over the other is, of course, a huge point in its favor. For this round, Apple Music may have gotten the upper hand with an exclusive partnership with Verizon that practically bundles the carrier’s Unlimited (for various meanings of the word) data plans with free Apple Music. At least for six months.

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Tim cook mentioned earlier this year that Apple Music wasn't "in it for the money." Since then, Apple Music paid subscriber numbers grew from somewhere below 38-million to around 50-million. It would appear that not being in the streaming music business for the money is working out OK for Apple over the last few months.

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Today we had a chat with Sonos VP of Software Antoine Leblond about the company going public. Sonos launched today on Nasdaq with stock symbol SONO, as it did so becoming a public company for the first time. The first and most important question we had for Leblond is the same we've had for every tech company that's hit the stock market in the past decade: How will this change Sonos?

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Amazon has announced that Amazon Music is getting Alexa Cast compatibility, bringing it one step closer to being a fully-fledged competitor to Spotify. Casting, of course, is not a new concept, but the Amazon Music app has been strangely missing that kind of functionality up until now. That all changes today, as you can now cast music from your phone to any Alexa device you might own.

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German ESA astronaut and geophysicist Dr. Alexander Gerst performed a solo live with music masters Kraftwerk. From space, live, Gerst played pre-set notes on an app from his tablet aboard the International Space Station, in Spacelab 2.0 Columbus. We've got the complete appearance in a video posted below, and from here you shall witness the greatness of our modern age.

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Apple Music may have arrived a little late to the party when it launched back in 2015, but it seems to be giving Spotify, the reigning king of music streaming, a run for its money nonetheless. A new report is claiming that for the first time, the number of Apple Music subscribers has surpassed Spotify Premium subscribers in the US. That's no small task, though Apple Music still has a long way to go if it wants to catch up globally.

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There is definitely an ongoing and rather encouraging trend of app developers, from Google to Facebook, creating “lite” versions of their apps for users in less privileged markets. The latest to jump on that train is Spotify with the unexpected arrival of Spotify Lite on Google Play Store. But while Google’s Go and Facebook’s Lite apps try to compromise very little from their services’ main features, Spotify Lite is almost all about compromises, making it a pretty barebones music streaming player.

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The next Spotify update will enable the rearranging of tracks inside a Playlist - glory be! This sort of feature editing is available on iOS device right now, and has been for some time. Spotify seems to have given Android a back seat to Android, in this situation - as used to be the case with many major smartphone app developers. But this is 2018, isn't it? Shouldn't developers bring the same updates to both major platforms at the same time?

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Google released their Google Podcasts experience in app form this morning to the surprise of Podcast lovers everywhere. Before now, Google had a podcast-collecting experience available in their Search app, but it wasn't particularly comprehensive. Now there's an app for that, and it's free, and we're expecting apps like Pocket Casts and Sticher to be ... disappointed, to say the least.

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