spotify

Given all the license restrictions roaming the music industry, few Web site owners are willing to integrate tracks into their pages. But Spotify just made it much easier to do so.

The streaming company today launched the Spotify Play Button, a service that enables Web site owners or bloggers to integrate a song, album, or playlist into their site. Spotify said it will allow Web site owners to embed the player for free and will take care of paying the artists on its own.

"You want to give your fans access to any song, album or playlist of your … Read more

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Links from Thursday's episode of Loaded:

Spotify users who have taken advantage of the company's no-cost, no-limits listening won't be held to any new limits just yet.

The music-streaming company announced today that it will extend its "honeymoon for unlimited free listening" for an indefinite period of time. When Spotify launched last year, the company said that users would be able to listen to free, ad-supported music for six months. After that, they would have been subject to a 10-hour monthly listening cap.

Spotify's decision to extend the unlimited listening isn't necessarily a surprise, since the company has been doing … Read more

Here's a message that Spotify and Rhapsody will surely forward to the handlers of Adele, Coldplay, Tom Waits, Paul McCartney, and especially those guys in The Black Keys: Subscription music services saw revenue increase 13.5 percent last year, while the number of the sector's paying customers climbed 18 percent.

That's according to the Recording Industry Association of America, which yesterday released year-end music shipment statistics for 2011. The RIAA reported that subscription revenue went from $212 million in 2010 to $241 million last year. The number of users rose from 1.5 million to 1.8 … Read more

Sean Parker is an enemy of music artists.

That's according to Patrick Carney, drummer of the rock band The Black Keys. Carney offered his opinion of Parker during an interview with radio station WGRD.

"He's an ass----," Carney told the station. "That guy has $2 billion that he made from figuring out ways to steal royalties from artists, and that's the bottom line. You can't really trust anybody like that."

Parker is an investor in Spotify and Facebook, but his connection to Spotify is presumably only one part of why Carney finds … Read more

Spotify's announcement late last year that it would be offering an application platform for developers seems to be paying off.

The streaming-music company announced today that there are 12 new apps available on its service from a host of companies, including Universal, Sony, Warner, and Def Jam.

For classical music fans, Spotify boasts a new app called Classify that allows users to find songs based on composers, eras, and moods. Def Jam Recordings has unveiled an application designed for hip-hop and R&B fans that will "give you new experiences in music discovery and curation." There'… Read more

If Beats Electronics acquires Mog, the maker of the popular headphones has plans that go way beyond subscription music.

CNET broke the news three weeks ago that Mog, an also-ran subscription music service, was for sale and AllThingsD yesterday reported that Beats intends to acquire Mog, but the deal has yet to close.

A Mog spokesperson did not respond to an interview request. A Beats representative wasn't immediately available.

Sources close to Beats say managers intend to build a Web store that will sell music, headphones, and numerous other products. Apparently, the idea is to cash in on the … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Despite the success of Spotify and its competitors, music sharing still hasn't caught up to what Napster offered before being neutered by the courts, that service's founders, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, said today.

During a on-stage discussion at South by Southwest here, Parker and Fanning argued that though new technologies and licensing models finally allow music lovers to legally access and discover vast collections of songs online, even the best new services are still philosophically behind what Napster originally offered its users.

Parker, who appeared earlier this week alongside former U.S. vice president Al Gore … Read more