Streaming music is maybe the best invention since mobile internet – allowing you to no longer store loads of tunes on your phone’s memory card or your PC’s hard drive, but to access any and all music you want through your broadband connection and listen to it whenever you want.
Spotify has announced its new features a few days ago, through a launch event in New York. The announcement itself was made by Daniel Ek, the company’s CEO, and shed some light on the evolution of the service with its aim to grow beyond its current 60 million strong user base (out of which 15 million – yours truly included – are paying customers).
According to recent reports circulating around the internet, Spotify’s free unlimited streaming business model was under attack by Apple, which has encouraged music labels to clamp down on the streaming company – with the not too well concealed goal of creating a better perspective for its Beats music service, under development. Apple’s music strategy is not the best one, though, at least not for the competition – and Spotify is already on the list of those complaining about it to regulators both in the US and the European Union.
As a matter of fact, I am a huge fan of music streaming – I use Spotify to listen to my favorite bands while playing at the euro palace or hunting for promotions at the europalace.com facebook page – call me a hipster, but it’s almost the only alternative I have at hand to the commercial music local radio stations broadcast. So, when I heard that Spotify wants to become the smartest music streaming service out there, I was glad.
With its announced new features, Spotify has grown beyond being just an audio streaming company – which is best shown by the fact that they plan to stream short form video content from several major media companies, like Comedy Central, ESPN, Adult Swim, BBC and NBC. Another new feature to be rolled out is the “tempo detection” algorithm, which will be extremely helpful for working out with headphones in your ears: it will detect the tempo you are moving with, and will find music that will adapt to that tempo, not getting you out of pace. Great!
Music streaming is the best alternative both to commercial radio stations and storing huge loads of music on your phone, desktop PC and shelves (in case you prefer to have your music in a more tangible form, like a CD, a DVD or a vinyl disc). And with these new features the experience offered by Spotify will be even more useful and integrate with your life in much more harmony.