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Spotify set for US launch

Swedish music streaming service Spotify is set to launch its popular service in the US on Thursday.

Published: 14 July 2011 07:39 CEST

Spotify set for US launch

Spotify reportedly plans a formal announcement for early Thursday morning in the United States, where the service will be made available by invitation and subscription.

Founded in 2006, Spotify is one of the world’s biggest streaming websites and is currently available only in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands because of copyright issues.

It said in March it had reached one million paying users. Around seven million people use its free version

Earlier this year, Spotify slapped restrictions on its free version, slashing the amount of times a track can be played and the total amount of music users can listen to without paying.

In May, it unveiled an application enabling users to synchronize playlists and songs purchased through its service with Apple’s iPod, in what industry observers saw as a clear challenge to Apple’s iTunes.

The young Swedish company had previously focused solely on online streaming.

Also in May, a report in Forbes based on unnamed sources said Facebook was testing a service that would allow songs from Spotify’s vast library of music to be streamed to members of the social network.

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New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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