Spotify

In her Soundbite newsletter this week, Ashley Carman covers Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee. Lee is bucking the system by keeping the album, which earned a stellar Pitchfork review, off all the big music services like Spotify.

Instead, you can download WAVs from this Geocities site — I love that I just wrote that — or listen to it on YouTube.

Monthly active users were up 19 percent year-over-year to 615 million, while subscribers were up 14 percent to 239 million. Co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek noted that the company just turned 18-years old, and “as an adult company we are now consistently profitable, which is great news.”

Ok, so where’s Spotify HiFi, Mr. Man?

The music streaming app tells Bloomberg that 25 percent of subscribers in the US, UK, and Canada are listening to audiobooks — a sign subscribers are taking advantage of Spotify Premium’s free 15 hours of audiobook content.

Spotify also tells Bloomberg that purchases for additional audiobook listening hours have “more than doubled” since the end of last year.

Spotify just announced a new integration with Substack, which will allow Substack creators to distribute free and paywalled podcast episodes on the platform. For listeners, this means they can link their Substack and Spotify accounts. Last year, Spotify made a similar move with Patreon.

Both video and audio-only formats are supported in the more discrete player that can be resized from small to very small to best suit your desired desktop layout. Spotify says it’s only available for Premium subscribers right now. You’ll see the miniplayer toggle at the bottom right of the desktop player when available.

Update March 14th, 4:20PM ET: We just saw this server-side change go live in our app.

I’ll be telling my grandchildren this was Napster.

The artist pulled his catalog in early 2022 over its then-exclusive Joe Rogan deal, which Young said had resulted in Spotify spreading vaccine misinformation. Now, with the exclusivity deal over, Rogan’s podcast is also available on Apple and Amazon, and Young can’t keep his music off all of them.

He’s still not happy about Spotify’s lack of high-res audio quality, though.

The company put out a new statement today criticizing Spotify’s complaint to the EU about restrictions on its iOS app:

Fundamentally, their complaint is about trying to get limitless access to all of Apple’s tools without paying anything for the value Apple provides.

What kind of computing platform could possibly offer developers that kind of flexibility? Who would make such a thing?

Sharing music statistics online became a yearly tradition thanks to Spotify Wrapped. Now, Apple Music’s Replay feature is turning up the frequency with monthly breakdowns (after YouTube Music added seasonal updates in 2022) and will also note “milestones” for users, like the total number of minutes they spent listening to that one album. Users, of course, can share their music recaps online every month.

TechCrunch reports monthly Replay recaps will only be available to users “who listen to enough music.”