UPDATED 14:15 EDT / AUGUST 26 2011

NEWS

The Music Streaming Wars Heat Up as Spotify Integrates with SoundHound

Online Music service Spotify has announced collaboration with SoundHound to enable both free and paid SoundHound users in Europe to access Spotify’s songs tracks. SoundHound makes music search and discovery applications for mobile devices. The collaboration gives Spotify Premium users access to the SoundHound music search engine, while SoundHound’s free and premium users will gain access to Spotify’s catalogue of more than 15 million songs.

Spotify European premium users can now load a song on SoundHound’s Android or iOS app using the ‘Play Now in Spotify’ button on their iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Android device. The requested song when played will launch Spotify’s service along with Spotify’s usual artist information, thus providing seamless integration between the two services.

The SoundHound music search engine helps users to find songs either by singing the song, analyzing the audio sample currently playing, saying the song name, typing the name or even by humming the tune. Its discovery features offer various social networking options and full Apple’s devices integration and help to find new songs.

“Spotify is a natural fit with SoundHound, the most groundbreaking mobile music search and discovery platform in the world,” said Katie McMahon, VP at SoundHound. “Our European users have been requesting seamless access to Spotify, and today they can enjoy SoundHound’s fast, beautiful and unlimited music search and discovery with instant access to listening to full tracks.”

Spotify, the music service provider based in Sweden, currently offers more than 15 million songs across Android, iOS and Windows phones. In July they have entered into the US market and later introduced its services on Windows phone. The company offers free version of music to all users at a slightly reduced sound quality along with advertisement between songs. The ad-free $9.99 per month premium version offers audio quality as high as 320 kilobytes per second.

Spotify’s rocky road is still turning out shining bright at the summit

Soon after the US launch, PacketVideo filed a patent infringement claim against Spotify in US District Court for the Southern District of California, claiming that Spotify is using PacketVideo’s patented technology to allow music to be accessed through Spotify’s cloud-based service. Interestingly in one of the other patent infringement claim case a federal judge has ruled that the MP3tunes cloud music service doesn’t violate copyright infringement when they only offer one MP3 file to various users. Music label company EMI filed the case for copyright infringement with theft.

Music streaming really heats up as Amazon, Google, and BlackBerry join crowd

Amazon after realizing the massive growth in online music industry launched its Cloud Drive locker service. The Cloud Drive offers 5GB of storage for free and 20GB for paid user at $20 per year. Amazon MP3 Store app would be used by Cloud Drive users to play and upload music on Android, and Cloud Player.

Google also recently joined the party and announced a new online music service in direct competition with Amazon and Apple services. Google will not offer any music download but offers streaming mode to users to listen to songs. Users can upload their music to the Google’s servers in the cloud and using the music service transfers them to Android devices.

Blackberry maker Research in Motion today introduced BBM Music, a limited social music app for Blackberry phones. Using the BBM music app, users can stream and store locally a maximum of 50 songs by paying $4.99 a month.

With cloud computing revolution, more and more users now started storing files online. And music services offerings are keep on arising from the haze of the cloud to cater the potential online music demand.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU