In October 2017, Microsoft announced that it would be ending its Groove Music streaming service by December, with all music from users transferring to Spotify as part of a new partnership.[109] In December, Spotify and Tencent's music arm, Tencent Music Entertainment (TME), agreed to swap stakes and make an investment in each other's music businesses.[110][111] As a result of this transaction, Spotify gained a 9% stake in TME with TME gaining a 7.5% stake in Spotify.[112]
If true, this would be startling news; a band once celebrated by John Peel but only remembered by a few dozen people would be incredibly unlikely to pop up on the preeminent music-streaming service. In fact, my friend had merely upgraded his Spotify software, which now displayed all the songs by Bogshed that were already sitting on his computer, as well as Spotify's own library. But "whoah" was still an appropriate reaction; with this development, Spotify are taking on iTunes, Apple's market-leading music player and online store. After all, with your own and much of the world's music accessible through Spotify, why take two metaphorical bottles into the shower now that one can do it all?
Spotify launches service to take on iTunes
This is just a quick "heads up" post. If you're not familiar with spotify, I recommend you try it out, if it's available where you are. It's probably the cleverest and slickest music app I've seen online since liquid audio (which became itunes music store).
Today we are delighted to announce the launch of libspotify, our first step in opening up Spotify as a music platform. By releasing libspotify we will allow third-party developers to write applications for our service and offer the possibility of creating an exciting new range of features. Libspotify and any applications built with it will be available to Spotify Premium users as of today.
Developers interested in using libspotify can head on over to our developer site for more details. Initially we are offering support for Linux on IA-32, but we have plans to open up Spotify to more platforms and provide additional access to our services in the near future. 2ff7e9595c
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