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Spotify marks its first anniversary in the US with 13 billion listens, a whole lot of sharing goin' on
They grow up so fast, don't they? Spotify's US launch was just over a year ago, and the streaming music outlet wants us to know just how big its baby is getting. Americans listened to more than 13 billion tracks on the service in the first 365 days, and they shared more than twice as many -- 27,834,742, to be exact. Not surprisingly, just over half of that socializing went through Facebook, as you can see in the company's sugar-coated chart. Spotify is likewise flaunting 2,700 years' worth of time spent skulking around its app platform. Don't feel any pangs of regret if you forgot to buy something for Spotify's birthday, by the way: the company isn't holding any grudges and says you'll "love" what it has gift-wrapped for year two. We're hoping that involves more free radio stations and fewer holdout musicians.
Echo Nest is the man behind the Spotify Radio curtain
The Music Genome Project is in some serious trouble. The fancy algorithm behind Pandora is facing an increasingly popular competitor in the form of Echo Nest. The company's "music intelligence platform" and its accompanying API are already powering iHeartRadio and Nokia Music's Mix Radio. Now it's getting baked into the streaming media service du jour -- Spotify. Echo Nest's capable automated mix-making was already available to Spotify users via Echofi, but now the Swedish media company is using the tech as the basis for its updated radio service. Check out the PR after the break for a few not-so-subtle jabs at Pandora and its restrictions on free users.
Spotify Radio feature turns into an app, offers Pandora-like stations with unlimited skips
While Spotify has had little trouble cranking up its subscriber base so far, one feature that has notably been lacking is its radio / auto playlist feature. Today (tied in with an appearance by CEO Daniel Ek at LeWeb 2011) that's been upgraded, as the freshest preview builds move the Radio section down among the new Spotify Apps, where it now lets you drop in any song from your library for it to automatically create a radio station of similar music around. Subscribers not interested in upgrading yet can find similar functionality tied to Spotify's library with the EchoFi tool, but this venture represents the service's debut of an "all-new intelligent recommendation engine" meant to dig the tracks you want out of its millions-deep library. Advertising "unlimited skips" is a clear jab at Pandora, but it's not immediately clear if you'll still need a premium paid-up account for truly unlimited listening (well, maybe not). Hit the source link to grab a Radio-enabled preview build and see if some algorithm can defeat even the mightiest Yacht Rock playlist crafted by our own Brian Heater.
