Spotify, the trendy music on demand service that has garnered tremendous media attention in Europe, has finally launched in the U.S. as rumored last week. Spotify announced earlier this month that it would become available in the U.S. “soon,” though open negotiations with Warner Music Group were reportedly preventing the company from setting a firm launch date. Apparently Warner finally came around. The Spotify service lets users stream unlimited music on demand, and also build and share playlist...

Popular European streaming music service Spotify could launch in the U.S. as soon as next week, AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka speculates. Spotify announced earlier this week that it would be taking its talents to the U.S., but it gave no indication as to how soon the launch might occur. AllThingsD says the smart money is on a launch next week, and the blog has historically been accurate with its coverage of the Stockholm-based music start-up. Kafka reaffirms that Spotify only has deals inked with three of t...

Custom music steaming company Spotify on Wednesday announced that it will soon launch its popular service in the U.S. The company has been rumored to be in negotiations with major U.S. music labels for more than a year now, and it looks like those negotiations finally panned out. ”The award-winning music service that’s taken Europe by storm will soon be landing on US shores,” the company said in a statement on its website. “Millions of tracks ready to play instantly, on your computer and ...

We can’t say it comes as much of a surprise, but Google has just taken the wraps off of a service many of us have been waiting for years to see… or should we say, hear. Google’s freshly unveiled Music Beta service will give users a cloud-based solution for storing and streaming their digital music collections — and we mean, their entire collections; Google’s service supports the storage of up to 20,000 songs as opposed to the 1,000 tracks supported by Amazon’s Cloud Drive prod...

Following recent reports that Microsoft will soon be killing off its Zune suite of entertainment services and replacing them with a new offering, All About Microsoft has uncovered what may end up being Microsoft’s Zune successor. The blog’s tipsters claim knowledge of a new set of services currently being developed by Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division. These services, codenamed “Ventura,” are said to be focused on media discovery and consumption — much like Zune....

A report on Wednesday claims European streaming music extraordinaire Spotify is “a few weeks away” from signing a new deal with Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company. Reuters cites people familiar with the talks in reporting the deal, which will give Spotify access to Universal’s massive catalog of music in the U.S. Spotify has already inked a deal with Sony and the company is thought to be getting close to a U.S. launch. Despite the company’s progress, howeve...

Following rumors that streaming music provider Spotify was close to reaching its first deal with a U.S. record label, MediaMemo reports that the company has finally put one in its win column stateside. Spotify today signed a deal with Sony that will give the service access to Sony’s music catalog in the U.S., according to the report. The terms of the deal are said to be very similar to Spotify’s European deals, which would give U.S. users access to ad-supported streaming to a computer for free or ...

Spotify, the popular European streaming music service provider, is finally nearing a deal in the U.S., the New York Post reports. Following more than a year of negotiations with U.S. record labels, Spotify is said to be close to a deal with Sony and has “gained the support” of another label, according to The Post’s sources. Spotify launched in Europe in 2008, offering unlimited streaming music on demand. In its current state, Spotify offers free ad-supported access to users, as well as two p...

First and foremost, Internet radio lovers have some serious cause for celebration as Pandora announces a somewhat workable resolution to the ongoing royalty dispute that nearly drove the company into the ground. By somewhat workable, we mean it’ll keep them in business but it’s still paying the highest royalty rate in radio. What does this mean for Pandora users? Well it means they can keep using Pandora of course, and 90 percent of users will experience no changes whatsoever. For the other 10 per...

The winners of our recent Slacker Radio Plus giveaway won’t be the only ones excited to learn that Slacker Radio’s mobile app has just received a major upgrade. Version 2, 2.0.2 actually, is now available and it includes a variety of bug fixes and enhancements. Highlights include faster performance / app response and much (MUCH) shorter gaps between songs. Transition gaps were one of the few complaints users had with Slacker but now once the app gets rolling, users can move through that 4 million-...

We knew we had a few slackers in our audience and sure enough, you guys blew us away with some pretty remarkable levels of slackerdom. For those who missed it, Slacker celebrated its recent million-download milestone by throwing some free one-year Slacker Radio Plus subscriptions our way to dole out. We decided to hand them out to a select few who take slacking to a whole new level, and here are the winners:Tomnia, who is such a slacker it took him an hour just to build up enough motivation to leave a comment...

There are a few big players out there when it comes to customized Internet radio but lately, Slacker seems to be shining brighter than the rest. This past week, the company announced two major milestones: First, Slacker now has well over 2 million songs in its library. For comparison sake that’s about four times the size of Pandora’s library. Beyond that, in less than four months since the app was released, Slacker’s BlackBerry offering has already hit the 1 million download mark. Wow. It to...

You won’t see it on the dedicated BlackBerry page just yet but rest assured, Pandora has launched the highly anticipated BlackBerry Storm version of its mobile streaming application. When we told you about initial BlackBerry availablility last month, there were two main caveats: 1) No T-Mo. 2) No Storm. Resourceful as our readers are, it was quickly discovered that the whole no T-Mobile thing could be circumvented pretty easily. The lack of a Storm-compatible build however, would prove to be a slightly ...

Sad news from custom internet radio land as Last.fm announces some big changes that are sure to upset plenty of listeners. While the company has never provided an official API in the past, it has turned a blind eye to third-party developers with apps that stream Last.fm content to computers and/or mobile devices. No more — according to an official statement, the CBS-owned company will be releasing a formal streaming API and it will only be available to developers with an API account. Fair enough. The pr...