Apple is currently the largest music vendor in the world, having sold over 25 billion songs via iTunes as of February. Well over 435 million people have active iTunes user accounts, storing their credit card information with Apple, and Apple has over 28 million songs in its global catalog. In addition, there are probably well over half a billion Apple mobile devices – iPhones, iPads, and iPods — in the market today.

But, despite  rumors for well over two years that Apple is going to launch a streaming music service, and the fact that over 200 million people are using iTunes in the cloud, the music giant doesn’t have a streaming music product to compete with the likes of Spotify and Pandora.

Yet.

Today it looks like those rumors might finally come true, as Apple and the world’s largest record label, Universal Music Group, appear to be close to a streaming music agreement.

According to The Verge, Apple and Universal are just days away from an agreement. The stumbling block that has scuttled previous agreements is cost — Apple has been asking for a royalty payment schedule that’s about half of the 12 cents per 100 songs streaming music leader Pandora pays.

(Spotify apparently pays 35 cents, iHeartRadio pays 22 cents, and even at 12 cents, Pandora can’t seem to turn a profit.)

Apple wanted six cents per 100 songs, but apparently will not get it. It’s likely, however, that Apple’s size and market position has enabled it to drive a harder bargain than any existing music streaming business.

Last time rumors of an impending Apple streaming music service reached this level, Pandora stock took a nosedive. Today it’s down slightly again, but not nearly as severely, suggesting the bad news is already priced in, or that Pandora’s strong subscriber growth — topping 200 million registered users just days ago — is building a competitive hedge against any future Apple product.

I’ve asked Apple for comment, but it is unlikelyApple will say anything about negotiations that, while they may be close to complete, are not yet finished.

photo credit: Orange_Beard via photopin cc

The best part of any Grand Theft Auto game is the radio. Driving around while flipping through the stations builds an amazing amount of atmosphere for Liberty City or San Andreas.

If you’ve ever wished you could quickly cue up the songs that blast from those radio stations on your computer or in your car, you’re in luck. Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar Games just put all the stations from each GTA game (since GTA III) on music-streaming service Spotify.

The link to Rockstar’s Spotify profile isn’t working right now, but you can still get to it by clicking here to open Grand Theft Auto IV’s “Electro-Choc” playlist. Then click on the “Rockstargames” name to open its entire library in the Spotify application.

From that menu you can subscribe to any playlist that you wish. Keep in mind that you’ll have to download Spotify, which is free, if you want to stream on your PC. If you want to stream the music on a mobile device, however, that costs a monthly fee.

Rockstar puts all the radio stations from all the GTA’s on Spotify. Fantastic stuff spoti.fi/110uT7b #Spotify

— John Davison (@jwhdavison) April 11, 2013

Sadly, only the music is on Spotify. That means you won’t hear any of the great DJ chatter featured in the games. Still, this should help in your pursuit to feel more like Tony Versetti … just don’t start running over pedestrians on the sidewalk.

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That’s not a huge move, but given that it’s the first increase in more than a decade, the music industry has a legitimate reason to scream and shout, and let it all out.

“It is hard to remember a year that has begun with such a palpable buzz in the air,” Frances Moore, the CEO of the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) said today in a statement. “The music industry has achieved its best year-on-year performance since 1998. The direction of travel toward growth is clear.”

Just two years ago, Moore said, the major digital music services such as iTunes and Spotify only were in 20 international markets. Now, they’re in over 100 countries, including Brazil, India, and Russia. Digital music sales are clearly where the growth is, and markets as diverse as the U.S., India, Norway, and Sweden, digital revenue has overtaken physical revenue.

Source: IFPI

Global digital music revenue

Music still has a long way to go: digital revenues were 34 percent of the music industries revenues. And they’re growing fairly slowly, too. Digital revenue of $5.6 billion in 2012 is up only about 10 percent from 2011′s $5.1 billion.

But the trend is, finally, up.

And it’s not just downloads. The IFPI says that subscription revenue is up also. In fact, it’s growing quicker than the download business: up 44 percent from 2011. In some countries like Sweden, South Korea, and France, more people subscribe to music than download it, a trend that appears to be catching on in the U.S as well.

Of course, the IFPI says that illegal and pirated songs are still a major roadblock to music industry nirvana. Megaupload figures prominently in this narrative, and the IFPI says that FBI estimates of “damage to the creative industries” by pirating on Megaupload was in the region of a half billion dollars.

All told, the IFPI and its national affiliates found and requested removal of 15.9 million infringing music files in 2012, a process that it says “remains an unsatisfactory and inefficient remedy to tackle massive online infringement.”

All told, however, the music industry is finally going up and to the right in revenue as well as impact, with 68.9 billion legal streams of music in North America alone in 2012, along with 1.6 billion albums sold.

One thing that doesn’t appear in the IFPI’s massive 36-page report?

Any mention of the man who dragged the music industry kicking and screaming into the digital age: Steve Jobs.

Image credit: IFPI

A Soundrop room on Facebook is a page running the app, which streams music and video from YouTube or Vevo at the top, provides for comments and chatting under the video, and features a social playlist with songs that people can upvote, promoting them to earlier spots.

Source: John Koetsier

A Soundrop listening room on Facebook

It sometimes seems as if a million startups focused on music and social, but I like this one. Soundrop streamed more than 500 million tracks last year as an app on Spotify, so it’s not exactly unknown and untested, and the app seems simple, fun, and useful. Soundrop rooms on Facebook are the exact same as on Spotify: Comments, votes, and songs playing are synced on both platforms.

Soundrop is focused on the needs of artists, saying “We help artists and labels accelerate their traffic and engagement” on its partners page. That’s smart, because as MySpace discovered an Internet age ago, fans follow where bands lead.

CEO Inge Andre Sandvik referenced that in a statement, while also acknowledging Facebook’s status as the world’s leading social network. “We’re excited to make Soundrop available in the main place where artists connect with their fans,” he said.

The company is headquartered in Oslo, Norway, but has offices in New York, L.A., and London. You can try the app at multiple musicians’ Facebook pages, including Matisyahu, Delphic, or Owl City. Or, continuing the Scandinavian theme, even ABBA.

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Today we know Pandora as the Internet’s radio station that broadcasts over billion hours of music a month. But the company originally started life as a music kiosk service for record stores. And in between, it experienced a savage decade of near-death experiences.

“Pandora actually started as a company called Savage Beast Technologies,” Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy says in a new Total Disruption video. “The vision was to provide software to help people buy more music in music stores. Unfortunately, that was a dying business.”

Source: A Total Disruption

Joe Kennedy, Pandora CEO

Savage Beast struggled for three to four years, Kennedy says, without success, as the music industry transitioned in great pain and with great resistance to digital. Pandora also refocused on digital music, but the pivotal moment was the launch of the iPhone app store.

“We literally dropped everything we were doing,” Kennedy says. “And to this day, Pandora is the second most popular app in the iOS app store.”

The struggle wasn’t over — after four years in the music store business, it took a year to refocus on personalized music, delivered directly to music lovers via the web. The company’s first profitable quarter wasn’t for another five to six years after that — and Pandora had to advocate for laws relaxing music royalties to make it happen, as growing revenue doesn’t really matter if expenses grow faster.

As of today, Pandora has 150 million registered users in the U.S., with a third of them tuning into the service every single day, listening to over a billion hours of music every month.

But Pandora still faces a long road ahead, with possible encroachment into its business model from Apple, still challenging revenue numbers in spite of a growing subscriber count, and possible competition from Spotify.

Here’s the story:

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

Facebook wants you to know that its 13-month-old Open Graph platform, the platform that allows app makers to create experiences that give them exposure through Facebook Timeline and Ticker, is every bit the big deal it promised at launch. The company today touted new stats around the crop of Facebook-enhanced music applications to prove its point.

Since late September of last year, Facebook members have streamed 62.6 million songs for a total of 22 billion plays through Timeline music apps. These applications, as you’ll recall, connect to Facebook to allow members to seamlessly share what they’re listening to with their friends, and to listen along with friends’ selections.

Facebook’s role in creating a fabric between the people who use Timeline music apps and their friends on the social network is proving to be a boon to third-party app makers, the company iterated once again.

Internet radio playlist app 8tracks is doing especially well. “8tracks users generate four million shares back to Facebook weekly, resulting in 65 million story impressions, with Facebook now ranking as one of 8tracks’ major sources of referral traffic,” Facebook’s Lincoln Hochberg wrote on the company’s developer blog.

Songza, an application for finding pre-fabricated playlists based on mood and setting, is also seeing a big bump in referral traffic from Facebook. Facebook sent 1 million referrals to the service in a 30-day period, Hochberg said. Facebook-connected users also listen about 20 percent longer than other users, he added.

UK-transplant Spotify is also apparently continuing to see healthy growth from Facebook’s connective tissue, though the social network did not share any specifics on growth.

Altogether, Facebook said that song plays through Timeline apps have amounted to about 210,000 years worth of music. I’m not exactly sure what that statement means, but doesn’t it have a nice ring to it?

Photo credit: Yutaka Tsutano/Flickr

What does music streaming startup Spotify got hiding up its sleeve? Apparently an all-new web product that will let people stream music in the browser, and follow the listening habits and playlists of music influencers.

Spotify makes mobile and desktop apps that allow people to listen to music on demand and play radio stations of algorithmically selected tracks. Spotify, which maintains a library of 18 million songs, has more than 4 million paying subscribers and a total of 15 million active users.

The startup has experienced a healthy growth spurt ever since it launched in the U.S. and became buddies with Facebook, but it’s yet to release an easy-listening experience that works on the web. Currently, Spotify links, even the ones appearing on Facebook, direct the user to open the Spotify desktop application, which makes for a very clunky experience.

That’s all about to change, as Spotify is preparing to launch a browser-based version of its service, according to a TechCrunch report.

Few details are known about the Spotify web app, but sources told TechCrunch that it will include new features for finding music. The startup may also be exploring a lower price point for its mobile subscription plan.

Spotify declined to comment on this story.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

An iOS application called Sonarflow for Spotify, which hooks into the streaming service for access to 15 million tracks and counting, promises to point you to artists and songs that you’re sure to love.

Sonarflow for Spotify, a brand new application from three-year-old, Austria-based music discovery startup Spectralmind, is one of 15 mobile products competing today for best in class in the Innovation Competition at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2012 conference in San Francisco, Calif.

“Spotify has a lot of content … you can literally play any song you wish in an instant,” Spectralmind CEO Thomas Lidy told me in an interview. “But the problem there is you have to know the name of the artist or the title of the songs. If you don’t know them, it’s really hard to find music.”

click to enlarge

And that’s where Sonarflow for Spotify comes in. Sitting as a visual music discovery overlay on top of Spotify’s catalog, the application first presents the user with three different bubbles — starred, your top tracks, and top tracks — for touch-based music exploration. A person can then pinch to zoom into any of the circles, click on a artist for additional info, and double tap on tracks to listen to them.

“The visual aspect is really our strongest aspect here,” Lidy said. “We put a layer on top of Spotify where you can see what’s there … what you can find, and what you can discover.”

Sure, that sounds like a rudimentary, hierarchal approach to music discovery, and maybe it is. But where the application shines is in its ability to recommend new artists and send a Spotify listener down an unlimited number of musical paths. A click of the search button in the upper right-hand corner will display five new artists, denoted by white bubbles, around an artist the user already knows, and a tap on an artist will pull up all available tracks for playing. You can also star the new songs you discover in the app, which in turn saves them to your Spotify starred tracks collection.

In playing with Sonarflow for Spotify, I found the application to be a fantastic vehicle for musical enlightenment. Just a few clicks in and I was listening to pleasing tracks that I had forgotten, simply because I couldn’t remember the song title or artist name, and also unearthing several new favorite artists.

The application, however, isn’t yet ideal for a lean-back, automated listening experience, as Spotify’s own new radio feature proffers, unless you’re content playing straight through the tracks of one of the artists you discover.

That’s going to change in future releases, Lidy promised me. Two pending features, for instance, include an auto-playlist option and a way to create playlists by drawing a path on the screen, he said.

Still, we’re only seeing pieces of Spectralmind’s intelligence in this release, Lidy insisted. The company behind the application has been working on audio recognition technology since its earliest days and is capable of capturing the sound of music to make recommendations based on rhythm, melody, or voice matches. This proprietary software technology, which has yet to be baked into Sonarflow for Spotify, will make potentially infinitely more interesting recommendations in the way of fresh, obscure, and indie artists.

“Right now, very popular artists are popping up, but some people prefer to find music that nobody else is aware of,” Lidy said. “It’s not possible with typical music recommenders, because [they] work only if the music has been listened to by many, many people before. With audio-based recommendation technology, we can bring in any song from the 16 million songs on Spotify just by matching a user’s taste in terms of rhythm and melody.”

Vienna-based Spectralmind has 12 employees and has raised $1.175 million in seed and grant funding. The company, which started its life building products for media professionals, previously released a Sonarflow application for iPhone and iPad with similar functionality pivoting around a person’s individual music collection.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

The allure of MySpace may be long gone, but that hasn’t stopped Facebook from stealing a little musical inspiration from the former place for friends.

Facebook today made music a much bigger part of the social networking experience with the release of the “Listen” button for artist and band Facebook Pages, powered by streaming music partners Spotify and MOG.

“The new button will give music fans an easy way to listen to songs through their favorite services, such as Spotify and MOG, directly from Facebook Pages,” a Facebook spokesperson explained to VentureBeat.

Here’s what this means: Say you land on Justin Bieber’s Facebook Page (accidentally, of course), you’ll now find a “Listen” button sandwiched between the “Like” and “Message” buttons. Click it and Facebook will auto-determine your preferred listening music application and then send you down the path of musical discovery by playing the Biebs’ tracks. “I was like baby, baby, baby oooh … “

Believe it or not, Facebook’s band and artist music experience is actually a tad clunkier than what MySpace offers. Because the music is provided by streaming parters Spotify and MOG, the process takes a few clicks and requires you to open the third-party applications.

Still, the feature is bound to have profound implications for musicians with Facebook Pages, especially considering that the underlying music services are Timeline apps. As such, listening activity will be posted to the listener’s Timeline and to the Ticker, amplifying the Facebook effect we’ve heard so much about in recent weeks.

The “Listen” button is now live on all authenticated band and artist Pages, the Facebook rep said.

[via TechCrunch]

Photo credit: elpatojo/Flickr

Google Music is an oxymoron and Spotify is a friend to the artist, Warner Music Group chairman Edgar Bronfman, Jr. said Tuesday on his last day on the job.

Bronfman, Jr. expounded obtusely on the reasons why Warner Music Group has yet to sign a deal with Google and talked up the potential of all-you-can-stream music service Spotify in an interview with Peter Kafka at the D: Dive Into Media event in Dana Point, Calif.

In November, Google officially launched Google Music, its free cloud service for listening to music and downloading tracks from the Android Market. The locker and store hybrid offering has the backing of EMI, Universal, and Sony, but not Warner Music Group.

“We don’t have a beef with Google,” Bronfman, Jr. said, dancing around the exact reason why negotiations have yet to come to fruition. Google, he said, has to decide if it wants to be a content platform. Once they make that decision, he added, Warner will do a deal with the company.

“Every deal ultimately comes down to economics,” Bronfman, Jr. said, insinuating that Google’s terms were unfavorable to its artists. Google is unclear in how it wants to deal with the content industry, Bronfman, Jr. said, and that attitude is manifested in the terms of its music deals. The search giant has a conflicted ideology around content that dates back to its origins as a company focused on the value in the organization of content and not the content itself, he added.

In a perfect world, however, Bronfman, Jr. would like to see a deal between Warner Music Group and Google get done.

And while Google may not have the blessing of Warner, Spotify (Warner has a small equity stake in the streaming music company) absolutely does, Bronfman, Jr. made clear today. Spotify, he said, has been an incrementally positive development and is not slowing down the sale of downloads. Instead, Spotify gives individual tracks a much longer shelf life, he argued, saying that Spotify offers artists a real revenue stream. It is ultimately beneficial to the artist, he said.

The exiting chairman also spoke positively of Amazon, even though the company launched its own music locker system without a deal in place with Warner. Amazon, he said, has historically been a friend to the content industry, and he would like to see Warner support Amazon’s music platform in the same way it already supports Apple’s platform.

[Image via AllThingsD]