These are often-requested features by fans of any music application/service that doesn’t have them (especially gapless playback), and Spotify is now adding them, so that will be welcome news for their users. Click the title for more details.

For this to work in the face of stiff competition from Mog, Spotify, Rhapsody, and rdio it must:

• Not just run on Winphone 7, but also Android and iOS
• Have a strong playlist generation feature
• Have fully featured mobile clients that do more than the competition’s
• Have a very large library of music
• Have an open API so other’s can build apps and uses for it

If this just comes out for Xbox and Winphones it may be very good, but it will remain a niche product.

Follow the link for initial details from Digital Trends.

I hope this isn’t right. Rather than re-inventing the wheel they’d be much better off just partnering with an existing service and getting them to support Beats audio, which *supposedly* has an API for other applications to take advantage of.

Click the title link to see the original story in the L.A. Times.

Meanwhile we Android users can just tap our fingers and wait for it to show up for us….

Given his close ties to Apple (the PC company, not the former record label), this is not so much a decision based on principle as simply a competitive business move designed to benefit his cohorts at Apple. Click the title above to see the original story in the Telegraph.

Interesting comparison of rdio and Spotify catalogs in the US…

The desktop version of Spotify (especially the new one with app integration) is fantastic for music discovery. Unfortunately their mobile clients lag far behind.

This excellent looking app for iOS adds in EchoNest-powered radio and playlist generation features to fill in that gap.  Readers of this blog know my love for all things EchoNest, so if you’re the fortunate iOS-based user of Spotify, get this now!!!

I wonder if/when it’ll be out for Android? 

Cricket and it’s “Muve” music service is not discussed much, but they are neck and neck with Spotify for number of US subscribers. Only Rhapsody definitely exceeds it in # of US subscribers.  (Roughly 1 million according to this article.)

In any case, it looks like a bargain way to get cell plus music as a service. A bit too “bargain-y” for me, but if you’re on a budget it may be a good way to go. 

Forbes has a very MOG-complimentary article. While there’s lots I really like about MOG (like their flexible and powerful “artist radio” feature), I wouldn’t go this far.

My biggest concern is the stability and features of their android client.  It still doesn’t have some very basic features like the ability to add/remove songs from playlists (I mean c’mon, what’s up with that omission?!?!), and I run into many more issues just using basic play/fast forward functions than when using any of its rivals.

Having said that, MOG the company has a fun attitude, the web client manages to be minimalist yet fairly powerful, and the mobile applications sound quality (when set to high quality streaming) is second to none.

I keep hoping they’ll eventually add the basics of playlist management to the Android client, and squash a few more bugs.  If they do that, then I’d be more comfortable saying the same thing this article does.