Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Readies a Rival To Spotify
Barence writes "Microsoft has confirmed it is preparing to launch a music streaming service. The service will be a direct rival to Spotify, hugely popular in the UK (but unavailable in the US), which allows users to stream music for free in return for listening to around a minute's worth of advertisements every half hour. 'It will be a similar principle to Spotify but we are still examining how the business model will work,' said Peter Bale, executive producer of MSN." The article claims that the new service will boost the popularity of the Zune player, though how this is to happen is not explained. There doesn't seem to be a close tie-in between device and service, as there is between the iPod and the iTunes Store.
No, with Spotify you can choose the songs you listen to yourself. It's basically iTunes with a massive library and occasional adverts.
Actually I say occasional adverts. For some reason mine has completely stopped playing any. I have no idea why but I'm not complaining!
Last.fm haven't 'cut the UK off', in fact the UK is one of three countries (along with the US and Germany), where Last.fm is still available for free.
It is accessible to someone in USA.
What you need to do is use an UK based proxy to register, claim that you are from UK and use a postcode that is valid in UK. (The proxy needs to support using the POST method to get the registration form sent.)
After you have registered, you can log in and use the service from anywhere without further need for proxies. I did this a while ago and it is really worth testing out.
As a related note... Spotify doesn't have an Linux client but the windows client works very well under Wine. (Or well, in theory. I'm having some ALSA relate problems but I'm pretty sure that the cause is my Wine configuration.) It also has a mac client.
Last.fm, at least in the UK (I'm not sure about in the US) doesn't allow you to create playlists, or listen to one song over and over an unlimited amount of times. Nor does it allow you to listen, start to finish, to an album.
Spotify does. As previously stated by someone in the comments, it's basically just iTunes with a massive, cloud-stored library of music that plays as soon as you click it (the buffering is completely unnoticeable.)
Laukei
Chrysler isn't one of the biggest - not by a long shot. Try Toyota, VW, GM ( yes still ), Ford , Honda , Renault-Nissan, and even Hyundai are bigger than Chrysler. Now if you said Chrysler are one of the crappiest.......
Well everyone at work uses it, so the best way I use it to discover music is to actually listen to each other's playlists.
To share a playlist just right-click on the playlist click 'Copy HTTP Link' and IM the link to a friend.
Other than that I just basically search for genre, i.e. 'acoustic', order by popularity and let it play.
They also have Artist radio (which I don't use very much), which basically looks like listening to a random set of tracks from similar artists.
I've actually discovered a lot more music I like on Spotify than any other service for a long time.
It's actually that good a service that I'm probably one of the few people paying the monthly £9.99 p/m to listen to music without interruption, as I think the service is actually worth paying for.
Their ex-staff might have financial difficulties, but I don't see anything in that link that shows that Microsoft has financial difficulties.
So far they don't look like they're hurting.
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY09/earn_rel_q2_09.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/default.mspx
If that's considered "financial difficulty" I wouldn't mind having more of that.
Maybe on July 23 they might declare a loss against all odds...
mine stopped playing adverts too - i heard that it's a bug in the linux client
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
yeah sorry - i mean a bug introduced by running the windows binary on wine.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I'm all for competition, but previous music efforts by Microsoft have been hilariously bad. This interview is comedic gold for cluelessness. An actual Q&A with Hugh Griffiths, Head of Mobile at Microsoft UK: