Taylor Swift pulled all her songs from Spotify the other day. The reason being that she feels music streaming services are still a big experiment and her music deserves a platform that values her work more.

Although I personally don’t mind Taylor Swift pulling her songs, Spotify itself does. They’ve written a lengthy reply and shared a few pretty cool statistics.

During its existence Spotify has paid over two billion Dollars (that’s $2,000,000,000) to artists. They also mention that there are over 50 million active Spotify users, of which 12.5 million are subscribers. In the rest of the article Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek debunks a few persistent myths about music streaming services. Definitely worth a read.

Gone are the days that you’d have to walk all the way through your house or office to pause Spotify or change the song. Spotify has added a pretty awesome feature to their Connect system.

Spotify Connect now allows you to remote control Spotify running on your desktop or laptop from your phone or tablet. The major advantage obviously being that your less mobile device is probably connected to much better speakers and can even connect to multiple AirPlay devices and other wireless setups.

The only requirement is that you have Spotify Premium, which became much more affordable with the introduction of Spotify Family a few weeks ago.

Here’s how to setup remote controlling:

1. Grab your phone or tablet and start Spotify;
2. Start playing your favorite tune;
3. Open Spotify on your desktop or laptop;
4. On your mobile device press the Spotify Connect button;
   
   
   
   
5. Select your computer from the overview;
   
   
   
   
6. Done!

Now walk away as far as you can from your computer as your WiFi signal lets you and skip to the next song. So cool.

Source: TechCrunch

A new update for Denied is in the works and I’d like to share a few of the features I’m about to add. Read the full article to see what’s coming in the near future.

The way Denied works, is that it picks up when Spotify, Rdio or iTunes change to a different song and then it puts that new track past a list of mechanisms - which I’ve labeled ‘judges’. The current version only has the ‘Rules Judge’ in place, who makes sure songs that match any of the user defined rules don’t get any airtime. In the upcoming update, Rules Judge gets some company.

I hate listening to the same song twice. Unless it’s my favorite song that day, then I can listen to it all the time on repeat. Anyway, some of Spotify’s (Artist) Radios have a limited supply of songs and you’ll notice the same song playing three or four times a day. The new ‘Originality Judge’ will put an end to this. It checks if a song was played before in the past x hours and will skip tracks that aren’t original enough.

The ‘Explicit Content Judge’ has been requested quite a few times and I’m happy to say he’s on schedule to make his appearance in the next update as well. Trying to play most Hip Hop and Rap playlists and a few of my favorite Eminem tracks is impossible when he’s on duty. Any song that’s labeled explicit will be skipped automatically.

Keep an eye out for more news and maybe a due date for this update. In the meantime, are there any judges that you’d like to see? Let me know!

I know quite a few people who share a single premium Spotify account with their partner/kids/dogs/cats so they don’t have to spend the $10/€10 a month extra per account. The drawback is that only one user/pet can use the account at the time; so if you’re blasting Queen and Azrael wants to listen to some Snoop Lion, you’re out of luck and will get cut off.

Spotify has come up with a solution for this, called Family, and it’s pretty great.

Instead of paying the full price for each user, Family comes with a discount for each extra user you connect. This means that instead of having to cough up $50 for five users, you’ll be charged only $35,99.

• Spotify Family 2: $17.99
• Spotify Family 3: $23.99
• Spotify Family 4: $29.99
• Spotify Family 5: $35.99

The even better part is that each user will have their own account, with their own preferences and favorites. A wonderful reason to stop the game of musical chairs and get everyone an account of their own.

Apple released OS X version 10.10 yesterday. It’s a free update and I think most of you will want to upgrade as soon as you get the chance.

All Danger Cove apps have been tested and work beautifully with OS X Yosemite. So, don’t let Denied, Porthole, AirVLC, coucou or Reign hold you back and have fun checking out all new features Apple has added!