Yesterday we reported that the streaming music store Spotify was finally expanding to the United States.
Spotify, once dubbed “the music piracy killer,” has a large selection of music, availablein Ogg Vorbis format (using q5, appx. 160kbps encoding for its free service and 320kbps for its premium service), with simple-to-use GUI and ad-supported monetization model. Spotify’s ads run less frequently than what you’d expect with commercial radio and you can get rid of the ads completely by signing up to their premium service (that costs €9.99 per month or €0.99 for 24 hour period).
Today, the service has announced a deal with the IODA (Independent Online Distribution Alliance) that will make 2 million new tracks available including audio from Bob Marley, Prodigy and Stephen Fry.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek adds, via TechCrunch: “One of the challenges all music services face is providing a wide range of music for users of all conceivable tastes. We’ve worked hard to add classical, punk and indie content from different sources and this deal with IODA is another leap forward in our mission to provide users with the biggest, most diverse musical catalogue on the planet.”
“Spotify has created a compelling product that redefines the notion of user-friendly and clearly speaks to the desires of the music fan,” says IODA CEO Kevin Arnold.
Result for: distribution alliance
One month after launching their MySpace Music streaming service, the company has announced a new deal that will double the amount of indie music available through the service.
The deal, with the Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA), will add more than 1 million tracks from over 3000 indie labels to MySpace Music.
IODA founder and Chief Executive Kevin Arnold added that the songs will be added to the service in December.
MySpace music currently has several million tracks available to its 120 million users from the Big 4 labels as well as independent music distributor, The Orchard, whose catalog is over 1.3 million tracks.
Frank Hajdu, executive director of MySpace Music, noted that it was looking to add as much content as possible, as efficiently as possible.
“Many, many services that have been launched, they build their content catalogs out over time. If you wait indefinitely, you’ll never launch,” he added.
Hadju also noted that it was still in talks with the largest independent distributor, Merlin, who is in charge of digital distribution for over 15,000 labels.
