Wired Editor Chris Anderson has had a great influence on Spotify. His first book, The Long Tail, has been required reading in our office since day one and today we’re extremely excited to be working with him to bring another first to Spotify.
Starting today Chris’ new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, will be made available to all UK users.
Personally narrated by Anderson, Free considers a brave new world where the old economic certainties are being challenged by a growing flood of free goods – newspapers, DVDs, T-shirts, phones, even holiday flights. The audiobook supports today’s hardback launch of Free, published by Random House.
This is the first audiobook we’ve ever included in our catalogue. We’re going to trial it, see what people think and who knows, maybe this is the start of something new for us…
We’re pleased to let you know that we’ve stuck a deal with global digital distribution service Record Union to add their work to our growing catalogue.
Record Union is a fully online service, with all distribution delivered directly from its website, recordunion.com. Record Union offers artists simple music distribution, helping to overcome many of the barriers that have previously existed within digital distribution.
Both Spotify and Record Union are committed to supporting artists around the world by helping them distribute their music online. Yesterdays music update contained the first deliveries from Record Union and we will continue to get music from them on an ongoing basis.
So, if you’re an artist and have been looking for a way to get your music onto Spotify now you can check out Record Union.
Today we’ve got a contest for Spotify Premium users in the UK. We’ve hooked up with Matter club in London to hand out some concert tickets. We have two pairs of tickets for the following concerts:
If you’re a premium subscriber and interested in attending one of the shows leave a comment here on the blog, along with the show you’d like to see, and we’ll start picking winners shortly. For more details about the show visit the official Matter site.
R.E.M. have been producing hit albums for close to 30 years. Their last album, Accelerate, was another massive success and today we have a special release for Spotify Premium users in the UK.
Premium subscribers can listen to a special 4 track EP, Reckoning Live At The Olympia, which is a sample of their upcoming live album to be released later this year.
Last week was a little quiet in terms of new music but we’ve made up for it with this update. We’ve added 14,653 albums and singles today, in total 154,120 new tracks are now available.
The update is mostly CDBaby releases and is so big I don’t know where to begin but a few highlights include:
For a full listing of today’s additions please have a look at the Google Docs. The update was so large that I had to split it into a number of different files as Google has a 1MB limit for imports. I’ve also kept the column with the licensor name so you can easily tell what is from CDBaby.
So we have sorted by artist A-R, sorted by artist S-Z and the other two which are sorted by label A-M, sorted by label N-Z. As with every update not all albums listed may be available in your country and some tracks previously available may no longer be playable due to regional restrictions.
We have a number of pre-releases today for premium subscribers.
The Irish band, The Blizzards, have been touring heavily since their second album, Domino Effect was released last year. Today we have an exclusive Live Spotify Session, recorded just for us at a special studio gig in London. Spotify Premium users in the UK can listen to the session as a teaser for their forthcoming album.
In Sweden and Norway premium users can listen to the new album from R&B artist Maxwell. The much anticipated album, BLACKsummers’night, is his first studio release since 2001 and now available on Spotify.
For premium users in Spain we have the latest album from the Grammy winning singer Bebe. Her new release, Y., is out at the end of the month but premium subscriber can hear it on Spotify first.
It’s a sad day for music, the King of Pop has moon walked for the final time. Michael Jackson passed away last night and like many of you, we’ve dedicated today’s office playlist to the huge number of hits he’s had. His 1982 album, Thriller, is unforgettable to those of us who grew up in the 80s and the very first song ever played on the Mac OS version of Spotify was a track by Michael & Paul.
Rest in peace MJ.
Providing great sound quality has always been an important goal for us. When we launched last year we implemented what we think is a very nice sounding stream at 160 kbit/s. A little later on, after a lot of user feedback, we decided to make sound normalisation an optional setting for those who prefer their music unaltered. Now, we’re taking the next step in offering an unparalleled listening experience.
Today we’re really excited to announce that Spotify Premium users will be able to listen to music at double the current quality, this is the first of many new premium features we plan to launch. In the latest release of Spotify, premium users have the option to enable streaming at up to 320 kbit/s using the Ogg Vorbis q9 codec – the highest streaming rate for any online service.
If you are a premium subscriber you can enable higher quality streaming by going to the preferences menu and clicking “Enable high bitrate”.
Initially, not all tracks will be available at the higher bit rate. We’ve begun converting the most popular tracks first and over the next few of weeks and months we’ll be adding more and more high quality tracks until the entire catalogue is available in hi-fi.
We’ve recently released Spotify 0.3.17 which adds high quality streaming for premium users. We’ve also included some additional details to the playlists so you can see the total length of the list as well as easily see if you can edit it or not.
A small update for this Wednesday. We’ve added 461 albums and singles today, in total 6,405 new tracks are now available.
A notable addition is a number of releases off of Gambit Records.
For a full listing of today’s additions please have a look at the Google Doc. As with every update not all albums listed may be available in your country and some tracks previously available may no longer be playable due to regional restrictions.
