Spotify have reached the 3 million Premium subscriber mark. 20% of their 15 million users are now opting to pay for the ad-free, unlimited service, showing that the streaming giant are well on their way to hitting the conversion figures they aimed for.

The figures are up from 2.5m in November and 2m in September, showing the fast rate of growth is remaining consistent.

"We have an enormous internal effort to drive conversion and engagement with the service", Ken Parks, chief content officer at Spotify.

Parks also defended the free ad-supported model which some artists and labels have criticised, stating its allowed them the breathing room to build up customer loyalty, a loyalty that will soon pay dividends for the artists featured on the service.

"This is a healthy model. As it scales it gets better for everybody.We are very focused on growing in our existing 12 markets as well as expanding in other markets."

The fact that half of Spotify's paid-for users are under 30 is a superb achievement in itself, considering they are a traditionally difficult demographic to corner.

2011 was a busy year for Spotify; not only did they launch their internal app platform, but also announced a high-profile partnership with Facebook, a deal which undoubtedly helped drive subscriber numbers.

Via: FT

Facebook have announced a new social music feature, rolling out across their network today, called "Listen With Friends".

Music fans on Facebook will now be able to see what their pals are listening to from within the Facebook Chat pane, and jump into playback of a track at the very same point their friends are listening to. Up to 50 people can listen at once, which then opens a group chat window where they can discuss the music being played.

"You can listen to the same song, at the exact same time--so when your favorite vocal part comes in you can experience it together, just like when you're jamming out at a performance or dance club," said Facebook product designer Alexandre Roche on the Facebook blog.

You'll be able to identify who is listening to music by a small musical note icon that pops up next to their name. However, the service is currently limited to songs being played through Facebook partners Spotify and Rdio. While more services are set to be added, you'll likely be out of luck if you're playing locally stored files through a platform like iTunes.

The service should be rolling out to all users today, so keep an eye open for it when you're browsing the network.

Griffin are doing a great job of catering for budding musicians on the iPad at CES 2012, adding two new music-making tools that beef up the potential for sonic creativity on the Apple slate.

First up is the StudioConnect, which, when combined with the GarageBand app, turns your iPad into a feature-rich portable music studio.

An all-in-one interface, it handles audio and MIDI-IN, as well as MIDI-Out connectivity. Instruments and mics can be hooked up through a mono 0.25-inch connection, as well as plugging a mixer into the stereo 3.5mm jack.

Left and right line-level RCA plugs are onboard, as well as a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack for monitoring your creations.

Griffin have also launched a slightly more basic music tool called MIDIConnect. It adds a standard 5-pin DIN MIDI-in port to your iPad, letting you plug in guitars, keyboards and the like, as well as a MIDI Out port that can be used to turn your iPad into a MIDI controller, at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated one.

"GarageBand has put powerful audio production tools within reach of any musician with an idea and an iPad," said Mark Rowan, president of Griffin Technology.

"We've made it easy to connect your real instruments with GarageBand and control every aspect of your project."

StudioConnect will be available from February for $149.99, with MIDIConnect landing sometime in the spring for $79.99. No word on UK pricing yet or availability, but Griffin usually do a good job of getting their gear over here at roughly the same time.

For more news from CES 2012, click here.

Heavy-metal superstars Metallica have confirmed they are working on a 3D movie project.

Responding to rumours that were circulating on the web, the band stressed that the movie would not be ready until the beginning of 2013 at the earliest.

"We're here to tell you that, yes, there is indeed a 3D project in the very early stages of production!" said a statement on the band's website.

"We wish we could tell you more right now, but we don't have all the finer points nailed down just yet".

They went on to add: "What we can tell you is that we are planning on being in a theatre near you sometime in 2013 and as you hear us say ever so often, this will be the space for all the details as we finalize them."

It's not the first time that Metallica have got in front of the camera's for a movie. Back during the years 2001 to 2003, they let a documentary film crew follow them around during the recording of their album St. Anger, including many counselling sessions with their on-call shrink.

Fans are hoping that the 3D movie will match, if not exceed, the joy that the Spice Girl's Spice World brought to cinema multiplexes up and down the land.

After yesterday's false start, UK Apple fans can finally get playing with the Cupertino team's latest service, iTunes Match.

The service prematurely went live yesterday across the UK, France and Australia, lacking full functionality and having a troublesome sign-up system. despite launching just a few hours later, Apple still went through the trouble of refunding users who had jumped on too early to the service.

In the early hours of this morning however the service returned, in a fully functional state, offering users a year's subscription for £21.99. This follows last month's US launch.

iTunes Match is Apple's own unique take on streaming services. It scans a user's iTunes digital music library, offering 256kbps high-quality versions of all your tracks, ready to be streamed wherever you are, regardless of the original quality of the song.

iTunes Match works across practically the whole Apple ecosystem, with iPads, Macs, iPhones, iPod Touch devices, Apple TV as well as PCs able to stream from Apple's servers.

However, Apple have come under fire for some elements of iTunes Match, namely that it also scans and offers high-quality streaming versions of songs that a user may pirated.

Got a music-loving philanthropist on your Christmas gift list? Then why not pop a Fairshare Music giftcard in their stocking?

For every track you buy through Fairshare Music, half the profits go to a charity of your choosing from a list including Amnesty International, British Heart Foundation, British Red Cross, Centrepoint, Friends of the Earth, Great Ormond Street Hospital, NSPCC, Oxfam, Sue Ryder Care, Teenage Cancer Trust and WWF.

Giftcards work with the same charity incentive, and can be bought in £5, £10, £15 and £25 forms. With a catalogue of over 16 million tracks to choose from, and with many albums priced at a competitive £5, that's ample opportunity to both rock out and help out a good cause over the Christmas season.

"The giftcards are a win-win situation - you get to give a great value, feel good gift and the recipient of your gift gets something they actually want, a choice of music from a huge selection of the latest tracks or some of the classics," said Lee Cannon, Co-founder of Fairshare Music.

"If the millions of people who downloaded music in the last year all downloaded in this way, a huge £6.5 million could have been raised for some really worthwhile causes."

For more info, visit www.fairsharemusic.com.

Today marks the launch of Rara.com, a new mobile and web browser based digital music streaming service that's set to rival Spotify.

Offering somewhere in the region of 10 million tracks, including all the major labels, Rara.com sets itself apart by not aiming at tech-savvy musos, but those less comfortable with concepts like streaming and only a casual interest in music. It aims to achieve this by simplifying the "speadsheet" style interface of rivals like iTunes and Spotify, collecting tracks into a UI full of colourful, customisable music hubs.

Launching in 16 global territories simultaneously, including the UK and North America, Rara.com has the potential to reach 900 million users when its total roll-out is completed.

"The vast majority of music services today are designed for people who know a lot about music and are technically literate," said founder Rob Lewis, whose name may be recognised by those who are familiar with Omnifone (the independent unlimited cloud-based music vendors) whom he also founded.

"If we're going to make digital as mainstream as the CD was (which is what we need to do with CD revenues heading in the wrong direction), we need to reach people who know less about music and less about technology."

According to Rara's research, these casual tech and music users/listeners account for 80% of the potential streaming market.

While the simple UI addresses the tech-savvyness issues, Rara are looking to a strong focus on editorial content and curation to push the service's potential as a music discovery tool. To do this, they will be enlisting the help of a number of high-profile associate editors, kicking off with a tenure by grammy-award winning Brit, musician Imogen Heap.

"I'm honoured to be the first associate editor of Rara.com," said Heap.

"As a musician I've been searching for the direction where the music industry is going to go, and how it's going to manage to pay the artists in this ever-wider sharing, free-music-download world. I think [Rara is] really exciting; it's very easy to use, and isn't boring, flat and lifeless like so many players are.

"It speaks to you. I believe it's the future of music making sense again."

That mass-market aim will be aided by the news that Rara.com comes with one of the biggest global partners in the world of tech, HP. Rara will come pre-installed on all 2012 HP computers with a bookmark "quick-link" directing users to the web-based service straight out of the box.

As well as the browser based offering, Rara can be accessed from today in the form of a mobile Android app too, with Windows Phone 7 and iOS apps to arrive hot on its heels. The mobile service makes use of system called "Network Aware Mobile Streaming", which can judge whether you're on a Wi-Fi or 3G connection, and adjust the data sent appropriately in order to keep you data usage at manageable levels. It pars down the visuals to keep data usage to a minimum, and greys out functionality only available over Wi-Fi.

Tracks themselves, though varying in bitrate from device to device, wherever possible are streamed using the EAAC+ codec, a highly compressed format that still manages to keep audio quality relatively high.

Pricing also looks fairly competitive, "radical" even according to the Rara executives. To coax people into giving Rara a try, the first 3 months access will cost just 99p, and £4.99 for the months following. To add in mobile music-caching functionality to ease the strain on your data plan, those prices jump up to £1.99 for the first 3 months, then £9.99 for the months thereafter. End your subscription and a short "grace period" allows access to your saved playlists for a limited time.

Some will argue that Spotify has the upper hand here, offering a free ad-funded model to lure music fans onto their service, but Rara are sticking to their guns, believing that offering the superlative, ad-free version at a reduced price is a more tempting gateway to subscription.

So does it have what it takes to topple the now-dominant streaming service Spotify? It's tough to say. Rara's main draw, in my opinion, is its colourful, inviting interface which displays its curated music. It's simple, but still isn't as simple as popping a CD in a player however. It also doesn't answer the big consumer turn off; ownership of streamed tracks. You're still effectively renting music with Rara, which even few Spotify subscribers feel comfortable with.

There's another question too. If Rara, aimed as it is at tech dunces and casual music fans, manages to convert the masses to music streaming, what's to say the newly-educated Rara subscribers wont jump-ship to more complex, fully-featured services? It may be more complicated, but the added features of apps, digital music downloads, a larger music catalogue to play with, collaborative playlists and deep Facebook integration within Spotify will surely begin to tempt users who cut their teeth on the simplistic Rara.

All this before you start considering the artists themselves, and the measly sums they make from music streaming.

However, Rara seem to have big plans in mind for the service. Hinting at significant announcements coming at CES, Rob Lewis made mention of plans to integrate the service into all forms of connected devices, including Blu-ray players, Sonos systems and car dashboards.

Head on over to www.rara.com to give the service a try.

It's been a busy few weeks for Spotify. First they reveal their superb new apps platform, and now they're looking to revamp their radio station and recommendation engines too.

Spotify list the features of the new update as:

·Unlimited stations - picking a track, artist or genre will instantly generate a station full of similar music. The station will play continuously with few or no repeats until you stop it. You can make as many custom stations as you choose.

·Available to all - The new Spotify Radio features will be available to both free and paying customers, worldwide.

"Spotify Radio is an amazing new radio experience, offering unlimited stations and unlimited skips," said Ken Parks, Spotify's Chief Content Officer.

"With our new intelligent recommendation engine and multi-million track library, the new Spotify Radio is a music discovery experience without equal."

The new radio features will be rolling out alongside the final release of the Spotify App Finder platform in the next few days. If you cant wait that long, visit http://www.spotify.com/download/previews for a preview the new player build.

Napster, the digital music download service that rocked the industry and changed the way we consume tunes forever, has closed following the completion of a merger with Rhapsody.

Though beginning life as an illegal P2P service, in the past few years Napster went legit, offering a subscription based deal.

Head over to Napster.com and you are met with this message:

"Napster has joined Rhapsody. The number one subscription service is now even bigger."

It's sad to see Napster, a service surrounded with so much controversy fade away rather than burn out. Afterall, without founders' Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker's revolutionary approach to music distribution in 1999, it's unlikely we'd have services like the US-centric Rhapsody today.

With the acquisition of Napster in place, Rhapsody are now in a better position to battle it out against Spotify, the steam-rolling music streaming service that launched in the US earlier this year.

Spotify have announced the next big upgrade for their music streaming platform. Described as the "Spotify revolution" and the "next big step for music". Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek revealed App Finder, set to bring a wealth of apps to the digital music service.

The "best and the brightest" of the music and app industries are lining up to become a part of the re-vamped service, with the likes of Rolling Stone, Last.fm, Songkick, TuneWiki, Pitchfork, The Guardian and Fuse all readying apps for the platform.

All of these apps will be able to tap into and integrate with Spotify's catalogue of 16 million (and growing) tracks. For instance, an editorial piece from Rolling Stone magazine may come with an integrated playlist, letting you listen to an albumwhile simultaneously reading a review of it. Or, in the case of TuneWiki, turn Spotify into the most comprehensive karaoke platform in the world.

Powered by HTML5, it seems as though the App Finder will become part of the desktop Spotify application's left-hand toolbar, with pop-out features sitting on top of the usual Spotify experience.

No word yet on when the update will roll out, but we do know that all apps will be available to both free and Premium users of the service.

Tech gifts don't have to be about screen sizes or processing capabilities these days. In fact, they don't have to be physical gifts at all. You can put a smile on a loved one's face just by setting them up with one of the many ace online digital services and subscription packages that are tied into apps, download and streaming sites too.

From music packages like Spotify to productivity programs like Dropbox, there's something here for everyone.

When you're done here, be sure to check out the rest of Tech Digest's 2011 Christmas wishlists too.

BBM Music, the socially-orientated music downloading and sharing service exclusive to BlackBerry users, has gone live in the UK today.

First announced in August, the service costs £4.99 a month and gives users access to 50 tracks a month, with users allowed to swap out 25 of those tracks for new ones every month.

However, through integration with BlackBerry Messenger, users will have access to the 50 tracks stored on up to 140 of their BlackBerry-using friend's handsets, potentially giving access to 7,000 tracks on and offline each month to every user.

Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI are among the labels touting their artists on the service.

It's a very strange system. Quite fixed in its nature, it relies heavily on many of your friends using the service in order to maximize the tracks available to you, as well as having similar taste to your pals in order to enjoy it. It looks as though RIM are hoping word of mouth will push the service, as users hope to expand the range of their available music each month, in a similar way to Dropbox's storage-increasing referral system.

However, you do have to wonder who in their right mind would choose the service over alternatives. Limited to 50 tracks a month for a fiver (not including the random selections from pals), BBM Music pales in comparison to the unlimited access to millions of songs you get from Spotify mobile for £9.99 a month, now available on BlackBerry OS 7 devices. You can argue that the integration with BlackBerry Messenger gives the service a unique social aspect, given the wild popularity of the free messaging client, but with Spotify now so integrally tied into Facebook (and with everyone and their dog signed up to the world's largest social network), the BBM features themselves seem moot and limited in their scope.

Working on BB OS 7, BB OS 6, and BB OS 5 devices running BBM 6, the app is available now from the BlackBerry App World.

There comes a time when we all go shopping for a new sound system or radio, its a bit of an overwhelming experience sometimes isn't it? There are literally thousands of choices from hundreds of different companies. Sometimes you just want something nice and simple, that is where the cardboard radio fits in.

Sold by monsterstuff.co.uk and designed by Christopher McNicholl the cardboard radio is one of the simplest FM radio and MP3 players on the market and looks set to be a perfect christmas present for that one hippy music loving friend we all have. The whole outer structure is made completely of card and is fully recyclable.

It comes with four AA batteries and an audio input cable, making this the perfect portable music system for any office or picnic, when the weather decides to sort itself out. The radio only costs £24.99 and is available right now from monsterstuff.co.uk and is a great combination of environmentally friendly materials and technology.

As of today Sony are offering music videos directly through your Sony Home Entertainment products. Sony have teamed up with MUZU.TV one of the leading music video sites, set up in 2008, to bring the latest and greatest music videos to your front room directly through the Sony Entertainment Network.

The service will run through BRAVIA TVs, Blu-Ray Players, Home Cinema devices and Network Media Players. MUZU has a huge range of music video from every corner of the music world ranging from head banging metal to smooth jazz in a collection of over 80,000 videos.

The free service features chart videos as well as some from a wide variety of independent artists and record labels, live performances and all the latest news and interviews from the world of music.

Edd Uzzell, Category Development Manager, for Sony Europe stated that:

"As one of the largest digital entertainment services, Sony Entertainment Network aims to bring new ways for consumers to enjoy music, movies, games and more. By continuing to add new and exciting partners such as MUZU.TV, we feel we are perfectly complimenting the existing music services we prove, giving our customers a wealth of choice for enjoying music content whenever they want it."

A great addition to the vast array of services already offered by Sony, a free music video channel will save you all the time and hassle of flicking between music television channels where you are forced to watch whatever they think you should watch. Browsing on MUZU.TV it is a really well presented website with plenty of content and features to keep your ears, and now eyes, full of music for the foreseeable future.

The Who's windmilling guitarist Pete Townshend has marked Apple as a "digital vampire" during his talk at the first annual John Peel lecture in Salford last night (October 31st).

Stating that the internet is "destroying copyright as we know it" and causing new artists to struggle, the "My Generation" star levelled much of the blame at Apple.

"Is there really any good reason why, just because iTunes exists in the wild west internet land of Facebook and Twitter, it can't provide some aspect of these services to the artists whose work it bleeds like a digital vampire, like a digital Northern Rock, for its enormous commission," said Townshend.

"Apple should employ 20 talent scouts from the dying record business to give guidance to new acts and provide financial and marketing support to the best ones."

Townshend also spoke of the dilemna struggling new artists must face when their music is shared illegally.

"A creative person would prefer their music to be stolen and enjoyed than ignored. This is the dilemma for every creative soul: he or she would prefer to starve and be heard than to eat well and be ignored."

Townshend is not the only person to attack Apple as the root cause of a flailing music industry. Jon Bon Jovi famously stated that the late Steve Jobs was "killing the music business" through the creation of iTunes and growth of digital music in the wake of the iPod.

Rhapsody have announced that they are to purchase the infamous Napster service from gadget retailers Best Buy in a move that they will hope will keep them competitive alongside the ever growing popularity of Spotify.

Upon closing the deal, Rhapsody will take command of the services offered to Napster subscribers, whil eBest Buy take a minority stake in Rhapsody. Subscribers to either Rhapsody or Napster will now both be able to access both services, once the deal is finalised at the end of November.

"This deal will further extend Rhapsody's lead over our competitors in the growing on-demand music market," said Jon Irwin, president of Rhapsody.

"There's substantial value in bringing Napster's subscribers and robust IP portfolio to Rhapsody as we execute on our strategy to expand our business via direct acquisition of members and distribution deals."

"We're excited to welcome Napster music fans to the best on-demand music experience anywhere," continued Irwin.

"Our new members will have more places to connect to the music they love and to discover new favourites, guided by Rhapsody's rockstar editorial team and the tastes of other Rhapsody members via our innovative social features."

Popular music streaming service We7 is going underground as the company prepare to relaunch this week, creating an interactive Tube map-like playlist based on the artists and tracks that have been most popular over the past year.

Each line, laid out in a Union Jack pattern, represents a different musical genre. And just like the real Tube map, some stops are a bit more enticing than others; I wouldn't be caught dead riding the "Rock" line to "Nickleback".

Check out the map below.

"We7 is about creating a smart, personal and intimate listening experience. We believe most people want radio stations that are personally tailored to them with the opportunity to occasionally request songs", said Steve Purdham CEO of We7.

"It's like having your own personal DJ who knows what you want to hear. As music streaming moves from early adopters to the mainstream we want to be at the forefront of delivering a simple and easy to use service that everybody can engage with."

We7 offer tailored online radio stations, free of charge to all users. To get more control over what tracks you hear, £4.99 a month gives you unlimted access to the We7 catalogue on your desktop, while £9.99 a month gives you mobile access too.

Here's a story to tickle the interest of video editors across the globe. Ever spent all night searching for license-free music and samples to accompany your YouTube vids? It's not that easy if you haven't, especially to find something that sounds half decent.

Enter Vimeo. Better known as an online video hosting site, they've just launched the Vimeo Music Store. There you can browse a catalogue of over 45,000 (and growing) tracks and samples that can be downloaded and used legally under personal or Creative Commons licences.

It's all very nicely laid out too, letting you search by genre, tempo and mood among other parameters.

The best part? Though a few tracks come with a reasonable price tag (£1.30/ $1.99) the vast majority are totally free.

Click here to give it a look.

Facebook and music streaming service Spotify are expected to announce a partnership through the social network at this week's f8 conference, following the news that Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek is to be a key speaker at the event.

Ek will be part of "The future of digital music" panel at the event where the Facebook team usually reveal coming innovations and features for the world's largest social network.

This year's f8 is set to focus on content and entertainment, with Zuckerberg's empire speaking about how movies, music, magazines, newspapers and TV shows will be brought to the network in the future.

Facebook integration would round off a strong year for Spotify, who've seen a steady rise in Premium subscription sales and the long-awaited launch of the service in the USA. Ek's presence highly suggests that Spotify will become one of the lead music content partnerts for Facebook.

Facebook Music with Spotify seems almost a certainty.

Via: TechCrunch

Name: Yeti Pro (Blue Microphones)

Type: USB microphone with analog XLR output

Specs: Click here for full specs

Price: £229 from Amazon

Blue Microphones set themselves a high standard when they released the superb Yeti microphone, but they're out to top even those lofty aural heights with the Yeti Pro. Could this be the finest USB microphone ever built? Read on to find out.

The Yeti Pro is a sturdy as it is big and beautiful. Rising 29.5cm in its included stand and weighing 1.55 kg with the base attached, the textured black and silver metal casing is quite the looker, reminiscent of a 1950's radio mic in some respects. It's about as far removed from the cheap plasticy USB mics that dominated for so many years.

Now the original Yeti was a great mic, so much so that we thought it'd be hard to top. But the Yeti Pro is full of so many extra bells and whistles as to completely justify its premium price tag.

The first thing you'll notice from this successor is the 5-pin XLR connector on the bottom as well as the usual mini-USB port, allowing for stereo analog recordings. As it's stereo, it's not your standard 3-pin connection, but Yeti throw in a converter cable to make hooking up analog connections pain free. It's worth noting too that the volume knob on the Yeti Pro's front dial is a digital one as opposed to analog, so you can keep pumping that dial up infinitely here, and will have no bearing whatsoever on input volume on analog recordings.

XLR support would be reason enough to give this model its "Pro" suffix, but Blue go the whole hog and add the ability to capture 24 bit/ 192 kHz audio too. The accuracy of the Yeti Pro therefore is quite astonishing. With three custom condenser capsules and four mic patterns (Stereo, Cardioid, Omnidirectional and Bidirectional) you'll easily be able to configure the mic to be just as effective at picking up full-room live band recordings as a simple voice-only podcast. Either way, the sound going in is almost identical to the resulting recording, with the high resolution sound files produced revelatory in their clarity.

A headphone jack also sits on the underside of the Yeti Pro. Recognised as a full USB audio device, the Yeti Pro therefore allows you to use your headphones to fully monitor playback, with zero latency, adding to the flexibility of the kit.

If you hadn't already guessed, it's an incredibly sensitive mic. While in many cases this is a blessing, there are a few occasions when this could frustrate too. It's a joy to be able to pick up quiet sounds without worrying too much about recording levels, but this of course has certain downsides too. Recording just a few minutes of spoken audio with the cardoid pattern in 24 bit mode, with the Yeti Pro standing on my computer desk, the mic picked up the whirring of my external PC disk drive. It's fantastic that a USB mic has sensitivity levels this high, but you're going to have to make sure your environment is pitch perfect before hitting the record button.

Likewise, it's a bit annoying that there isn't a quick-switch option to swap quickly between analog and digital recording settings. As it stands, you'll have to physically unplug the analog connections before making a digital recording. It's not ideal, but unusual for dual analog/digital mics either.

Verdict:

The Yeti Pro oozes quality. From its construction to the clarity of the recordings it produces to the flexibility afforded by the dual USB and XLR connections, it's head and shoulders above the competition. But quality comes at a high premium however, so unless you're a dedicated musician, podcaster or video editor, cheaper alternatives may suffice. They'll unlikely sound anywhere near as good though.