In the fall, you will be able to create playlist directly from the mobile app. “Given the shift to mobile consumption, we thought we needed to have a mobile creation approach,” Porter said. Evidence of this lies in listening hours - two-thirds of the service’s 30 million monthly listening hours are on a mobile device. Today’s move was also motivated by 8tracks’ shift to mobile.
#8tracks mobile add to listen later full#
“We are Switzerland - we don’t have any intention to be a full on-demand service,” he said. And it’s true that you can’t just search for an artist or song to stream it like on Spotify.
#8tracks mobile add to listen later free#
When I asked Porter whether it was easy to sign those deals with content holders given that many music labels want to get rid of the free tier of streaming services, he told me that music labels were enthusiastic as 8tracks is all about music discovery. 8tracks has been profitable since 2012 and now has an in-house ad selling team. It will cost more or less the same for the company. With today’s new approach, the company will pay that fee directly to the record labels rather than SoundExchange, the entity that handles royalty collection for services like 8tracks or Pandora. Like heavyweight competitor Pandora, the company already operates under a particular radio-like license, meaning that it pays fees to content holders every time someone streams a song. This new feature will help turn active listeners into DJs.īehind the scene, things won’t change much. When you favorite a song on 8tracks, it will be added to your crate, a personal repository of songs that you like. If it’s not available, the other options still work. Now, you can just search for an artist or song and see if it’s in 8tracks’ catalog. “The longer game is to have a complete library of content,” Porter said. Overall, the new music library features 6.5 million songs already, and this is just the beginning as the company plans to sign deals with major music labels as well. The company signed licensing deals with independent labels and aggregators INgrooves, CD Baby, Dim Mak and DashGo. So 8tracks had to find a way to rely less on these APIs and boost playlist creation numbers. And sometimes, SoundCloud removes copyrighted content if a song wasn’t uploaded by the content holder. Second, SoundCloud provides a free API, but doesn’t have solid metadata and can start charging for this API. First, many people are ditching iTunes in favor of subscription-based streaming services like Spotify or Rdio - they don’t have MP3 files on their hard drives anymore. But there are a few issues with these options. It reduces the friction when you create a playlist.”Ĭurrently, when you create a playlist on 8tracks, you can find and add songs either by searching SoundCloud or by uploading files from your computer. “This our first foray into direct licenses. “Historically, DJs on 8tracks have been primarily relying on SoundCloud streaming or their MP3 collection - it’s been a bit of a drag,” founder and CEO David Porter told me. As a reminder, 8tracks true advantage lies in its community - the service is all about creating playlists and sharing them so that you can find the perfect music depending on your favorite genres and current mood. So there! LOL!īasically, this cover and title has very little to do with the songs in the playlist, and everything to do with teasing my siblings.Music streaming service 8tracks just signed a few licensing deals with independent music labels to make playlist creation much easier. It hasn’t stopped me from taking as many dang photos as I want where my foot happens to be mere inches away from my coffee cup. I’ve gotten a lot of grief for this over the past several months, let me tell you ?Īnd yet. Somewhere along the line “human element” became a synonym among us for “foot in the picture.” And my sister, brother, and sister-in-law have taken to posting images on our group chat, where they’ve purposely inserted their feet in places they don’t belong. But I guess not everyone is so laid back about it… It turns out there are a lot more foot-near-a-coffee-cup pictures in my collection than even I realized! It doesn’t bother me – my feet are clean, and often I’m wearing socks. That led to some gentle ribbing, particularly about the images where my feet were also visible. I told them it was “the human element” and that I thought it made for a more compelling image. Months ago, my siblings and I were discussing my many coffee-cup photos, and how the majority of them also had my hand in them. The Human Element from lclarke522 on 8tracks Radio. If you like those, you’ll probably like this ?Īs usual, you can listen to it on the 8tracks website, on the 8tracks mobile app, or via the player below. I have a new playlist to share! It contains 20 new-to-me tracks, and is pretty similar to most of my other non-themed playlists.