Music identification app Shazam has published its list of top songs and artists for 2014, plus some hit predictions for 2015.
Spotify's Billion Dollar Business Comes Mostly From Paid Subscriptions
Spotify has grown to be a billion dollar earner, with premium subscriptions making the bulk of the business. But don’t count out free users just yet.
T-Mobile Launches New Low-Cost Family Plan
T-Mobile is going after AT&T once again, and this time they’re trying to compete with them (and Sprint) on their family plans. Family plans generally save families a lot of money because not all of the users in the household use tons of data nor do they all need that much. Generally speaking, most parents use very little data while the children tend to hog up most of the data. T-Mobile’s new plan is designed to deliver 10 GB of 4G LTE data to a family of four for the low price of $100. As you can see from T-Mobile’s own table, their plan is
Google Buys Songza Music Streaming Service
There are a lot of music streaming services out there on the internet, however there are only a few that are seriously successful. One of the reasons why Songza is unique to other music services and applications is that it is heavily focused on the social and crowdsourcing aspect of online music. The site itself has tons of curation for users’ own wants and desires, without just throwing vast databases of music at them. This is very similar to what Beats Music has been doing and is likely Google’s response to Apple’s buying Beats for $3 billion. Obviously, Google didn’t pay anywhere near $3 billion
T-Mobile's New Free Music Streaming Violates Net Neutrality
Normally, when a company violates something such as Net Neutrality it generally is in the company’s best interest and they are looking for ways to make things more profitable and less valuable to consumers. A perfect example of that is with what Comcast is doing to Netflix (and others) in terms of requiring them to pay for prioritization in violation of Net Neutrality. This ultimately hurts Netflix and Netflix users that might be on Comcast, resulting in everyone but Comcast losing. Now, T-Mobile as part of their Uncarrier 5.0 and Uncarrier 6.0 initiatives made an announcement that they would be allowing users to stream music for
T-Mobile's New 7 Day Test Drive, Wideband, VoLTE and Free Music Streaming
So, last night T-Mobile made a lot of announcements with their new Uncarrier 5 event, that follows their Uncarrier 3.0 and 4.0 which eventually rolled into their Uncarrier 6 strategy as well. So, we can call last night’s event Uncarrier 5-6. Anyways, last night T-Mobile made three big announcements, mostly circled around their network and how they plan to make their network the best in the US at the most reasonable prices of all their competitors. Let’s talk about one of the most interesting things T-Mobile has announced so far at the event, and that’s their 7 day free test drive of T-Mobile’s network. T-Mobile’s
Beats Seals The Deal with Apple for $3 billion
As had been previously rumored, Apple was expected to buy Beats to the tune of $3.2 billion, and after all of the due diligence had been completed the end result was that Apple would be buying Beats for $3.0 billion. The deal is being broken up into $2.6 billion in cash and $400 million in stock, which may end up valuing the deal even more if those who get stock decide to hold on to it and Apple’s [AAPL] shares continue to rise. According to Apple’s own CEO Tim Cook, “It’s all about the music.” Ultimately, Apple is buying a competing service to iTunes Radio
Spotify Data Breach, Only One User Affected
Spotify has stated publicly that they had an internal data breach that resulted in some unauthorized access of their systems and internal company data and that only one user was affected. According to Spotify, this issue only affects Android users and as a result, they are asking Android users to update their Spotify Android clients whenever prompted by the Google Play Store. Spotify has made it clear that no users’ data was compromised outside of the single individual and that no login or bank account data was compromised during the breach of Spotify’s systems. However, they did make it clear that they highly recommend that all
High Court Rules Kim Dotcom Gets $17 Million in NZ Assets Back
The High Court of New Zealand has ruled that Kim Dotcom must have all of his assets seized by the New Zealand government returned to him immediately and that barring an appeal from the Crown Prosecution, all $17 million in assets will be returned to him, including his cars, helicopter and any cash seized on hand. Thankfully for Kim, he’s already successfully launched a replacement service for Megaupload called Mega as well as a music service called Baboom. When the New Zealand goverment, in conjunction with the US and Hong Kong governments seized all of Megaupload’s assets illegally (without any due process) it slowly became
