spotify radio
Latest
Spotify Radio gets thumbs up, thumbs down on desktop
Pretty much from day one, the mobile Spotify Radio feature outclassed its desktop counterpart, thanks to the presence of one feature -- thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. The ability to more finely tailor the music selection to your tastes is a pretty essential feature for any automatically generated playlist. Finally, Spotify is bringing the buttons to the Mac and Windows clients in an update rolling out today. Your likes and dislikes are synced across platforms and, best of all, the update finally lets you view radio stations you've created through the mobile app on your desktop.
Spotify brings radio feature to iOS, offers streaming to non-premium users
Swedish music streamer extraordinaire Spotify is updating its iOS app this morning with a key new feature. Radio, introduced late last year for the desktop version of the service, is making its way onto iPads and iPhones in the States for both premium and free users. As with its desktop counterpart, users can generate an unlimited number of Pandora / Slacker-like radio stations using artists, albums, songs and Spotify playlists. The social functionality that Spotify loves so much is intact as well, with both songs and radio stations appearing in friends' Facebook streams. And since the radio feature is available across Spotify's pages, you can make stations based on friends' playlists -- or you can just pick "Create a New Station" from the top of the Radio tab. You can thumb up or thumb down tracks, with songs you dig populating a "Like From Radio" playlist, making those tracks accessible on different devices. Inter-device functionality also means that you can start a radio station on, say, your iPad and pick up where you left off by firing it up on your iPhone. Premium users get an unlimited number of song skips -- when asked how many skips free users get, Spotify simply told us that it would be "industry standard" (ie, the same number you get on competing services). Asked when such functionality will be hitting Android handsets, the company told us, "we think it's core to the mobile experience, and we're looking to bring it to all of the major platforms in due time." In the meantime, iPhone and iPad owners can download the update today. Update: Spotify dropped us a line to let us know that the update apparently isn't quite ready for prime time. Rather than actually dropping today, the latest version of the iOS app "will be available in the next few days."
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.
