Spotify’s recent Q1 results show overall subscribers up to 217 million, with paying subscribers reaching 100 million for the first time. At the same time revenues are rising to $1.68 billion while the bottom line is still one of loss - or around -$159 million this quarter - slightly down year-on-year.

In Q1 I also discovered a limit to Spotify’s capabilities that did not impress me much - the maximum 10,000 tracks you can download to your mobile devices. I for one am ...

Let me preface this piece by saying that I’m one of the biggest music fans of all time. I have an extensive collection of vinyl and CD - running well into the many thousands - to such a degree that I really ran out of space. So as logic dictated - I took to digital media as the only rational way to consume, ’store’ and organise music nowadays.

Back in my youth we had Vinyl to play at home, and tape or cassettes to play in the car or on the move (Sony Walkman anyone?)....

We’ve seen a number of rumours floating about - stating that Apple / iTunes is looking to suspend its iTunes Downloads Store some time around March 2019 onwards. The end result of this being less choice for consumers and still lower revenues for musicians - who already face diminishing returns across the board.

It’s likely another nail in the coffin of the Apple Eco-System (for me) and will probably accelerate my departure from the Apple platform - as Music has been one of ...

Some of you more eagle-eyed music fans will have noticed that Spotify changed a few weeks ago. What has long been one of my most significant and favourite ’Music Discovery’ tools has now been changed detrimentally and beyond all recognition (fubar for sure).

There are no longer any related songs, no popularity bars next to each song, and worst of all - you can no longer scroll through all the tracks by album in one long list - like you used to. Now you have to dip in and ...

I will preface this article by saying that I am a long term music fanatic - having amassed some circa 10,000 12" records over the years, as well as a considerable volume of CDs - music is a constant in my every waking moment. Over the past 10 years I have gradually and almost fully transitioned to digital. I’ve been using iTunes since 2010, and am an early adopter of Spotify. I buy between 2 and 10 albums worth of music on roughly a weekly basis - this comes from a variety of sources - ...

Taylor Swift is not the first to remove her entire catalogue from Spotify and nor will she be the last. Following on from her disingenuous pretense at offering better service to UK fans by forcing them to buy her whole pre-release album instead of being able to download individual promo tracks like the rest of the world could do. It’s not a surprise that she’s taken these latest extreme measures, but the reasons she gives are nothing more than record label bulls**t spin - in an ...

Apple’s recent $3.2 Billion purchase of Beats has been seen as ’extremely generous’ by many industry commentators. As a counter though, a recent article in the Telegraph goes so far as to predict the imminent demise of Spotify in the face of this acquisition - somewhat erroneously claiming that the only thing left to Spotify is to sell itself to a similarly large benefactor (e.g. Google / Facebook}.

We all know that iTunes revenues have been falling in the face of ...

For some people Glastonbury 2013 belonged to the Rolling Stones, whilst the dance music fraternity had Chic featuring Nile Rodgers to celebrate - Chic for me was the highlight of the weekend. It drew me to arrive at the conclusion that there are actually inherent similarities between Keith Richards and Nile Rodgers in that they are both supreme proponents of the guitar riff, and pretty much all their biggest hits are derived from singularly catchy riffs - Stones is mostly blues-tinged though ...

The Coachella festival always signals the start of Spring proper for me, I of course look forward to hearing some of my favourite bands play live, as well as seeing what advances YouTube / Google make in their coverage.

As far as the YouTube interface goes, I preferred last year’s version - with the Social Media shout-outs appearing to the right of the main video. I also felt the who’s playing and who’s on next was better done last year too. As per last year - shout-...