Spotify partners with Festicket to help find festivals for you based on your listening history

Spotify and U.K.-based music festival travel-booking platform Festicket have partnered to make it easier for you to find the next festival you might want to attend. The feature is aptly called Festival Finder and will give you a list of 10 upcoming festival based on your Spotify streaming history. All you need to do is enter your Spotify login details to generate your list. If you’re interested in a festival, you can buy your tickets and even book your travel arrangements. According to TechCrunch, Festicket hopes to turn its festival catalogue and expertise into an “intelligent engine for festival discovery” with the hope of pushing more bookings in the future.

Spotify will let artists submit unreleased or new music to its playlist editors

A new feature Spotify is testing out in beta will allow artists to submit their unreleased or new music directly to playlist editors for curated playlist consideration. So, for any artist or manager who have a Spotify for Artists or labels using Spotify Analytics, they can submit their songs and these will be made available to over 100 editors Spotify employs around the world. What’s important for these songs to be considered is that they include as much information as possible, including genre, mood, the cultures the artist or song represents, if it’s a cover, and other data that can help the editors classify the song. And if these tracks are submitted seven days in advance, these can be automatically added to the artist’s followers’ Release Radar playlists.

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Report claims Apple Music has surpassed Spotify in terms of paid subscriber count in the US

A recent report from Digital Music News claims Apple Music has overtaken Spotify when it comes to paid subscribers in the US. The story cites an anonymous source from a major US-based distributor who shared a report of a subscriber tally for different music streaming services like Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, and Sirius XM. Both Apple Music and Spotify now have over 20 million subscribers with the former just “a hair ahead” at “20 million plus” members. The new information claims Apple Music is set to widen this distance in the coming months. At the moment, Sirius XM Satellite Radio, which operates in North America exclusively, is leading at over 33 million subscribers.

This report follows up a story in The Wall Street Journal back in February that claims Apple Music’s growth rate was on paced to eventually pass Spotify in the US. Apple’s growth rate was pegged at five percent, compared to Spotify’s two percent. Based on these figures, Apple Music would surpass Spotify in the summer.

Spotify tests out new Lite app in Brazil

A stripped down version of Spotify’s app is currently being tested in Brazil. Spotify Lite will let users put a cap on the data used to listening to songs and the app itself is just 15MB (instead of the 100MB size of the full app). But there are a few caveats to this. It doesn’t have offline listening or high-quality playback, no Spotify Connect support (so no linking to your home speakers), and is currently available for Android users. You also can’t pick songs to play, everything is in shuffle, which as Tech Radar points out means the app might not be designed for premium account users. No word yet when it’ll make its way out of testing or out of Brazil.