The (I hear failing) New York Times has teamed up with Spotify to create a new subscription package:

Get a one-year New York Times All Access subscription for $5 a week, get Spotify Premium free — a $120 annual value.

TechCrunch is reporting that Spotify may delay it’s IPO until 2018:

TechCrunch has heard from multiple sources that the company is now weighing a plan to delay an IPO until 2018. The delay would give Spotify more time to build up a better balance sheet and work on shifting its business model to improve its margins, one source said.

Spotify has unveiled a new weekly series featuring exclusive recordings called “Singles.” This will replace their previous sessions series. Forbes reports:

The Singles program sees big name acts and exciting and up-and-comers recording a pair of songs for the service and releasing them only on the world’s most popular streaming music platform. The first will be a track of their own, and it will typically be a newer cut that the artist is busy promoting, while the second will be a cover of a popular song from any time in history. The first edition of Singles is available today, and it features Grammy-winning jazz phenom Esperanza Spalding, who re-recorded her own song “Unconditional Love,” as well as David Bowie’s “If You Can See Me.”

Ingrid Lunden, writing at TechCrunch, on Spotify’s new Daily Mix playlists:

Tapping into your own history of albums and tracks that you have listened to on the platform, Daily Mix brings together a selection of these alongside a few new things to create long, “bottomless” playlists of music to keep you listening. As its name implies, the playlists change every day, and range in number between one and six, depending on how prolific you are on Spotify.

Peter Kafka, writing for Recode, on Spotify passing 40 million subscribers:

Spotify, which is heading toward an IPO, has 40 million paid subscribers, the company announced today. But Spotify’s chief revenue officer, Jeff Levick, is leaving the company, sources confirmed.

Levick joined Spotify five years ago, when the company was just starting to build out an advertising business; he had previously been at AOL and Google.

Peter Kafka, writing for Recode, reports that Spotify denies that they are demoting songs in search that have been exclusives on other streaming platforms:

Spotify doesn’t like it when big-name acts take their music to Apple or Tidal first.

But it’s not punishing them when they do, by making their stuff harder to find in the music service’s search results, the company says.

That accusation, sourced to anonymous sources in a Bloomberg report out today, is “unequivocally false,” says a Spotify rep.

Good.

Ben Sisario, writing for The New York Times, details a new policy from Spotify where they give less promotion to albums on their service if they’ve been exclusives on other platforms first:

Executives at two major record labels said that in recent weeks Spotify, which has resisted exclusives, had told them that it had instituted a policy that music that had benefited from such deals on other services would not receive the same level of promotion once it arrived on Spotify; such music may not be as prominently featured or included in as many playlists, said these executives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss private negotiations. Spotify declined to comment.

It seems to be getting harder for Spotify to justify any claims that they’re artist friendly. Artists that are doing exclusives with other platforms are doing so because of the massive promotion, and in some cases monetary advantages, of locking in these deals. They’re doing what’s best for them in a world where rates-per-stream are awful (and Spotify wants them to drop even more) and this windowing strategy1 allows them to maximize their income for a small moment in time, and then push the album out broadly everywhere else and gain exposure as they tour. If the reports are true, Spotify’s trying to make that secondary broad push just a little more difficult, and therefore make the windowing strategy less attractive. I’m not a fan.

Spotify has announced the new “release radar” that will give you a personalized weekly playlist of songs from new, and recently released, albums. The Verge goes into more detail:

Discover Weekly focuses on a window of the last six months or so to decipher your taste and make suggestions. Release Radar can’t replicate that approach, because your favorite band may not release an album more than once every two years. Instead it takes stock of your entire listening history, then narrows the range of possible suggestions down to tracks that have been released in the last two to three weeks.

I’m still, mostly, an album-only listener, but I really like this approach to trying to get people to check out new music and tackling the problem of so many people not being aware that new music is out from artists they love. Hell, I follow this stuff for a living and even I would like a personalized page each Friday that shows me all the albums out today from artists already in my collection, and then below that gives me four recommended albums I should check out and what song to start with.