Spotify

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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In its current form, Spotify offers free ad-supported access to its music library. These advertisements are short but cannot be skipped, forcing users to sit through a brief clip before their music returns. The company is testing a major change to the way that system work, allowing users in Australia to skip as many advertisements as they want without any limitations.

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Samsung and Spotify are partnering up, pushing the streaming music service across phones like the new Note 9, smart speakers like Galaxy Home, and other devices like TVs. Announced at Samsung's Unpacked 2018 event in New York City alongside the new Note 9, the deal will see Spotify integrated into Samsung devices out of the box.

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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 Google revealed their first Google Clock app - slightly different from the clock app we've used before. For some users this will be a new download, for most it'll just be an update to an already-installed update. Either way, there's a big change coming through. This app now allows users to use streaming music for their alarm sound in the morning.

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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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Spotify is sending out a survey to certain users that contains an interesting question: would those users be interested in a data-only mobile plan from Spotify that includes the streaming service as a bundled feature? The company doesn't currently offer any such plans, but the question hints at a business idea Spotify has behind closed doors.

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Spotify is dumping its controversial artist conduct policy, which saw R. Kelly and others denied promotion on the streaming music service. The company had launched its new guidelines around hateful content and conduct only a few weeks ago, effectively threatening to bury the music of artists with little route to recourse.

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If you take a peek at Spotify's newest news release, you'd be forgiven for thinking everything is rosy. There they suggested they'd reached 75M Premium Subscribers and 170M Monthly Active Users. That's no small feat. It isn't quite enough, yet, to stay total operating loss for the quarter.

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There's little Spotify has to catch up on when it comes to streaming music. They've got a whole lot of the market cornered for several reasons - not least of these because they've been in the business the longest. Spotify's most recent update - today - should serve to move the streaming music service even further out ahead of the competition.

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