Sonos partners with Amazon, adds voice support to its speakers

By early 2017, you’ll be able to use Amazon Alexa-powered devices (such as the Echo, Tap, and Dot) to control your Sonos ecosystem. Sonos has entered a long-term partnership with Amazon to introduce things like voice control to Sonos’ connected speakers. Aside from that, the Sonos system also adds Spotify Connect support, which will let you easily stream tunes on the music streaming service right into your speaker system. The support should go live in the coming weeks. Sonos earlier this year partnered with Apple to bring support for Apple Music into its system.

Source: Gizmodo

Spotify has 100 million subscribers, 30 million are paid listeners

Streaming music service Spotify revealed it has 100 million subscribers, 30 million of which pay for the service to enjoy ad-free music and the ability to save songs and playlists on a mobile device.

Despite its market dominance, Spotify reflects the delicate nature of running a streaming music service. According to Reuters, "Spotify, founded in 2006, pays more than 80 percent of its revenue to record labels and artists and has not yet shown a profit as it spends to grow internationally. Last year, it made an operating loss of 184.5 million euros ($209 million), widening from 165.1 million in 2014."

Apple Music, which competest directly with Spotify, announced last week that it had 15 million subscribers. Apple offers no free tier past a three month trial period.

Source: Reuters via Appleinsider

Spotify links now show up as 30-second clips on Twitter

You can say it’s a long time coming but finally, it’s here. Twitter is extending its Audio Cards feature to Spotify. It’s been almost a year since the feature came out and SoundCloud was the service of choice then. Now, for Spotify tracks you tweet, the link will also have a 30-second preview of the song. It can even show up in the curated Moments feed. You’ll be able to see these Audio Cards on the website as well as Android and iOS apps. Most of the tracks already show up this way but Twitter says the full rollout will be done in around one week.

Source: Twitter | Via: Engadget

Spotify lost US$194 million last year

Streaming music service Spotify has lost US$194 million in 2015, which is considered the biggest loss for the company. But it’s not all bad news for them as that is just a bit over what they lost in 2015 and their overall revenue rose to US$2.18 billion. This means it has been able to slow its losses while boosting revenue, a development Spotify needs as players like Apple and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) entered the streaming service market.

It is looking good for them but there are still some areas for concern, according to Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research. He emailed Mashable saying that content costs for Spotify are still quite high. They send about 80 percent of its revenue to the recording industry. And they are still incurring losses. “Their operating and net losses were both bigger in 2015 than 2015, and that’s a bad sign for future profitability,” Dawson said. And they are spending rather aggressively on things like staffing, public relations, and consultants.

Source: Mashable