Spotify

Billie Eilish and Apple have been collaborating for a few years now, and the company announced today the artist is going to perform live on Thursday, February 25, in the Apple Music app, the Apple TV app, and on YouTube. This comes before the premiere of her documentary on Apple TV+, The World’s a Little Blurry.

In a virtual event today, Spotify detailed a range of updates and new features coming to the audio platform. One of the most interesting announcements is the new lossless “Spotify HiFi” that will be an add-on option for premium subscribers as the platform looks to increase its lead over rivals like Apple Music.

Spotify is continuing to expand the beta test of its Apple Music-style live lyrics feature. The company confirmed in a statement to Engadget today that the live lyrics feature is now available to select users in the United States.

The first iOS 14.5 beta brings a number of new features, but there’s also a nice surprise hidden in the release for Spotify users. Follow along for how to make Spotify the iPhone default when using Siri. We’ll also cover how to install the free public iOS 14.5 beta.

Apple has finally offered the ability to set Spotify as your default music player for Siri commands. This was previously only available on HomePods, and was a feature we asked for back in 2019.

The new behavior appears in the beta of iOS 14.5. The first time you ask Siri to play something, it lists all the streaming services you have installed on your device and ask you which of them you want to use. Once you have done so, Siri then defaults to that service for subsequent requests …

Spotify‘s paid subscribers hit 155M at the end of the last quarter of last year, up 24% year-on-year. This compares to the last-declared figure of 60M from Apple Music.

Total monthly active Spotify users, which include people on the free ad-funded tier, reached 345M, a year-on-year increase of 27% …

In 2018, Spotify filed for a patent that would utilize recordings of users’ speech and background noise to determine specific patterns. From that information, Spotify could then recommend certain music, podcasts, and even advertisements to users.

Spotify audiobooks have so far seemed a forgotten offering, with just a handful of titles added last year, but there is now an indication that the company is gearing up for a more serious push into this market.

The audio streaming company has just added nine titles, all classics with new narrations …

Spotify Wrapped has become a really popular way to look back at all your most listened to artists, albums, songs, and more. Even though your Wrapped 2021 won’t become available until the end of the year (usually early December), Spotify is out today with tips on how to use features and tricks now to get the most out of it so the results are the best reflection of what you really listened to throughout the year. And the first two tips are how to hide songs from Spotify Wrapped.

After finally adding support for standalone Apple Watch streaming in November, Spotify is now beta testing a major update to its CarPlay application. The latest version fo Spotify for iOS distributed to TestFlight beta users this week brings a new queue system as well as interface changes.

The Spotify Wrapped 2020 year-in-review roundup is now live for users around the world. It allows you to easily see your most listened to songs, artists, and albums in the Spotify app for iOS and Android. Here’s how it works.

Back in September, we saw Spotify finally start testing streaming support for its Apple Watch app, something we’ve seen arrive with other third-party services like Pandora months ago. Now it looks like the feature may finally be rolling out more widely.

Spotify has pulled further ahead of Apple Music in terms of paid subscribers, announcing that it now has 144M against the last-declared number from Apple at 60M. Apple last shared its subscribers way back in June of last year, but the lack of update since then suggests that growth since then has been relatively slow.

Digging into the details, however, reveals a mix of good and bad news for Spotify …

An enquiry has been opened in the UK into whether streaming music services like Spotify and Apple Music pay artists a fair royalty.

Apple Music pays more than both Spotify and YouTube on a per-stream basis, but artists say that the amount they receive from all streaming services is just a small percentage of a tiny sum …

Spotify has rolled out an update to its iOS app today with support for home screen widgets. This comes after Spotify beta tested iOS 14 home screen widgets with a handful of beta users last week. Read on for instructions on how to find the new Spotify widgets.

Since iOS 14 was released in September with the all-new home screen widgets that have proved hugely popular, Spotify hasn’t officially released an update to support the new feature. However, now iOS 14 widgets have been spotted in the Spotify beta.