Spotify sending out a limited number of invites to Canadian users

You’ve been waiting for it and now you can have it… almost at least. Spotify has started sending out invites to people who signed up on their page saying they were interested in using the service once it went live. At the moment, only a limited number of invitations are being sent out but it is said that a full-scale launch in Canada will be happening in the coming weeks. They haven’t announced how much the subscription price would be but reports claim it will be similar to the US$10 fee they charge in America. The good news for those getting first dibs on the service is they won’t have to pay anything just yet. They will charged only when the service goes live for everyone.

Source: Ubergizmo

Digital music sales drop for the first time since opening of iTunes Store

Looks like streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify are hitting digital music sales where it hurts. Billboard reports digital track sales have dropped 5.7 percent to 1.34 billion units for the first time in 2013 since iTunes Store opened 10 years before. Album sales also dropped 0.1 percent to 117.6 million. Streaming services that provide unlimited seem to entice listeners to subscribe to them instead of buying albums that cost roughly the same price.

Review: Rdio streaming music service

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

A few weeks ago during a Telus event, we met some folks for Rdio, a streaming music service with over 7,000,000 songs. Rdio is available as a website and also has clients for the iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone mobile devices, which can play streaming music or cache songs for offline playback. There are also clients for the Roku and Sonos systems. The web-based service also offers a native desktop client app for Mac OS X and Windows.

Click to read more ...