Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 164
April 20, 2017
Facebook’s bold and bizarre VR hangout app is now available for the Oculus Rift
Facebook’s most fascinating virtual reality experiment, a VR hangout session where you can interact with friends as if you were sitting next to one another, is now ready for the public. The company is calling the product Facebook Spaces, and it’s being released today in beta form for the Oculus Rift. The news, announced this morning at Facebook’s F8 developer conference in San Jose, means anyone with a Rift and Touch controllers can join up to three other people in a virtual playground. There you can watch videos, take photos, and engage in a number of different VR activities together.
Spaces was first shown off at the Oculus Connect conference in October, when Mark Zuckerberg donned a Rift onstage and joined other Facebook employees in an early version of the product. We saw the Facebook exec play a game of chess, teleport to different locations, and even take a mixed-reality selfie with his wife Priscilla Chan, who dialed into the VR room using Facebook Messenger. While it built off similar experiences, like the existing Oculus Rooms feature for Gear VR and Oculus’ Toybox demo from two years ago, Spaces was bizarre and powerful enough to get everybody talking about what the future of VR technology could enable.
“We wanted the idea out there,” says Mike Booth, a product manager on Facebook’s social VR team, on why the company showed off Spaces so early. “Last year at F8, people didn’t know what Facebook was doing buying Oculus.” But by the time Oculus Connect rolled around that fall, it was clear Facebook was pursuing VR as a “people-centric computing platform,” Booth says. Having Zuckerberg demonstrate it was a way to communicate that to the world. The strategy worked — the demo became the most talked-about part of the conference because it illustrated exactly how Facebook imagined VR as a social instrument and not just a way to play immersive games.
Spaces as it exists today is not so different from the demo Zuckerberg showed off. You have a floating torso for an avatar complete with clothing and a custom animated face you get to design yourself. That avatar is then dropped into a roundtable environment with a number of different tools at your disposal, accessible from a panel under your wrist and from a console in front of you on the table. The entire idea of Spaces is to treat the platform as a place where you both create and pull in outside content to interact with, be it doodles you make yourself or games you play right there in VR, to photos and videos from across the internet.
For instance, you can toggle through the console to the art tab to produce a virtual pencil and start doodling in midair. Anything you draw is transformed into an interactive object, so you can illustrate a hat you can then wear on your head or a sword you can pick up and swing. There’s also a selfie stick that lets you snap portraits of yourself and your friends inside the VR environment.
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Sitting in the center of the room is a sphere of sorts that can change the background around you. It will accept any number of pre-rendered options, like an underwater environment or one that sends you to space. But you can also scroll through your Facebook account, find a 360-degree photosphere made from a smartphone panorama, and turn that into the environment. Booth says this is a way to relive memories with others. “It’s not like a chatroom. It’s not like, ‘Okay, we’re here. Talk amongst yourselves,’” he says. “You have your Facebook content. I’ve got mine.”
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Imagining the Retail Store of the Future
LONDON — What will the store of the future look like? Will we be served by fleets of gleaming robots, using built-in facial recognition technology to adjust each sales pitch to a person’s current mood or past spending preferences? Will there be voice-activated personal assistants, downloading the availability, color and fit of any and every garment to your smartphone? Three-D printing stations? No checkout counters when you leave? Could there even be floating, holographic product displays on the shop floor that change when a customer walks by?
Perhaps shoppers will make all their purchases from their own home, using virtual fitting rooms via virtual reality headsets. Drones will then drop deliveries in the backyard or on the front steps.
As fanciful as these innovations may sound, none are hypothetical. All exist, are being tested and could be rolled out in as little as a decade. But is this the sort of shopping experience that customers really want?
Scores of leading retailers and fashion brands increasingly say no. And in an ever-more-volatile and unpredictable shopping environment, where long-term survival is dictated by anticipating and catering to consumers’ desires (often before they themselves even know what they want), the race to find out how and where people will do their spending has started to heat up.
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On Wednesday, for example, Farfetch — the global online marketplace for independent luxury boutiques — held a daylong event at the Design Museum in London. There, in front of 200 fashion industry insiders and partners, José Neves, the founder of Farfetch, unveiled “The Store of the Future,” a suite of new technologies developed by his company to help brands and boutiques bridge the worlds of online and offline.
Nevertheless, in a telephone call last week, Mr. Neves said: “I am a huge believer in physical stores. They are not going to vanish and will stay at the center of the seismic retail revolution that is only just getting started.”
A corresponding report released by Bain & Company this week suggests that he might be right; although 70 percent of high-end purchases are influenced by online interactions, the consultancy maintains that stores will continue to play a critical role, with 75 percent of sales still occurring in a physical location by 2025.
What may change, however, is a store’s primary purpose. Forget e-commerce, or bricks and mortar, or even omnichannel sales; according to Mr. Neves, the new retail era is one anchored in “augmented retail,” a blend of the digital and physical allowing a shopper to shift seamlessly between the two realms.
“Customers don’t wake up and think, I will be online this morning or offline later; we are rarely purely one or the other anymore and tend to jump constantly between two worlds without noticing,” Mr. Neves said. “Harnessing this behavior is a major challenge for retailers and brands and why we are doing this event. It is in our interests to give our partners firsthand access to information about changing behaviors and new technology, so everyone is ‘future-proofed’ as to what might come next.”
Holition is an augmented-reality consultancy and software provider based in London that has worked with some well-known retail brands. Last fall it worked with the British cosmetics company Charlotte Tilbury on a “magic mirror” concept, a virtual makeup selling tool that allows users to try on different looks that are digitally superimposed onto their faces in 40 seconds. They can then send the selection of photos to their email address, ready to be referred to later or shared socially. And they then can buy products, available from glamorous makeup artists milling around nearby.
“Technology is still often a barrier in the retail place, with smartphones, iPads and screens getting in the way of what the consumer wants to see, touch and feel 80 percent of the time,” said Jonathan Chippindale, Holition’s chief executive.
“The holy grail now for retailers is creating digital empathy. No one can really guess what the future will look like. But those who are using technology and data to create bespoke shopping experiences that recognize every person is different, and with different needs, are more likely to come out on top.”
Tom Chapman, a founder of MatchesFashion.com, agreed. It was originally a bricks and mortar boutique; now 95 percent of the British fashion retailer’s sales — which hit 204 million pounds (about $253 million) in 2016 — are online. But Mr. Chapman said boutiques and physical events remained vital “marketing opportunities,” with a more specialized inventory selection and the opportunity for customers to do more than buy merchandise; for example, the MatchesFashion.com “In Residence” series offers talks, film screenings and designer meet-and-greets, along with social media lessons, exercise classes and floristry sessions.
“You need to be accessible to your customer wherever she wants to find you,” Mr. Chapman said, “and we have seen that a sizable proportion want human interaction and access that goes far beyond a credit card transaction.”
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MADDEAUX: Canada finally in fashion?
Canada has long had a branding problem. We’re the land of ice, snow and poutine but few would consider us “cool.”
That label has traditionally been reserved for countries like France, Italy and even our southern neighbours, the United States. However, quietly and slowly, something is changing. Canada is getting the world’s attention and becoming covetable.
Friday night saw the fourth annual Canadian Arts and Fashion Awards (CAFA) hosted at Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York. The night honoured some of our country’s top design talent, including Jenny Bird, Erdem, Beaufille, The Feral and David Dixon. The night has evolved into the de facto Oscars of Canadian fashion. Canadians aren’t exactly known for their giant, flowing ball gowns and avant-garde design, but that’s exactly what was showcased on the red carpet.
Even The New York Times took notice, saying our homegrown industry is “reaching for its spot in the sun.”
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Canadian fashion isn’t just parkas and Toronto-themed baseball caps. It’s being worn by the likes of Kate Middleton and Lady Gaga and reaching top editors at Paris Fashion Week and Milan Fashion Week. The made-in-Canada black tie looks crafted by labels like Greta Constantine, Stephan Caras, Mikael D, Narces and Mikhael Kale at CAFA were worthy of the pages of Vogue. Canadian fashion has arrived. It’s elegant, it’s original and it’s finally stepping into the international spotlight.
It’s not just our fashion scene that’s had a branding problem. Canadian food hasn’t done much better over the years. I was surprised to find on a recent trip to Dubai that Canada was the new cool kid in town. Toronto restaurants Weslodge and Byblos both have outposts there and are some of the hottest seats in town. Craig Wong, who owns Patois and Jackpot Chicken Rice locally, runs Ting Irie – Dubai’s first modern Jamaican restaurant. Reggae legend Beenie Man launched his new album there this month. There’s even an uber swanky Tim Hortons.
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Dubai also has a burgeoning, vibrant food truck scene.
One of the leaders of the pack is TruckersDXB, a roaming food truck jam featuring everything from shrimp tacos to pasta cooked in a giant parmesan wheel. The man behind it all is a Canadian from Montreal.
In a city as forward-facing and competitive as Dubai, having Canadian influence on the scene is no small feat. Our cool status there is a true testament to how far our image has come over the last couple years.
I’m writing this column from Washington, D.C., where just about every Uber driver, bartender and political aide I run into has unsolicited high praise for Canada. They envy our diversity. They have crushes on Justin Trudeau. They’re planning vacations to Toronto and Montreal, citing them as bucket-list destinations.
As Canadians, we have a tendency to underestimate ourselves. We’re selfdeprecating to a fault. Sometimes this makes us look modest and sweet, but it also leads to a risk-averse culture that fails to shoot for the stars.
Based on our recent success, we need to keep aiming high and wear the Canadian label proudly.
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Source:
http://www.torontosun.com/2017/04/11/maddeaux-canada-finally-in-fashion-2
The New Meaning of Fast Fashion
How fast is fast enough when it comes to clothes and gratification? How much do you really need that dress or bag or platform sandal?
I’ve been wondering this since last week, when Farfetch.com announced that it would now be delivering Gucci in 90 minutes in 10 major cities around the world. A customer can “place an order and almost before they have hung up the phone, somebody is knocking on their door with a beautiful bag!” the founder José Neves said with great fanfare when I called to ask about it.
I don’t often hear Simon & Garfunkel tunes playing in the back of my mind (unless I am in a Parisian subway and yet another busker is singing “The Boxer”), but now I can’t get the opening line of “The 59th Street Bridge Song” out of my head. “Slow down, you move too fast.” Yadda yadda yadda.
Farfetch, Net-a-Porter, Matchesfashion.com and other higher-end retail sites have been offering same-day service in world capitals and vacation destinations for a while now (and Matchesfashion offers 90-minute delivery in London), but the Gucci deal takes it to a whole new level. And while it is, for now, more of a niche offering than a rule, it’s easy to imagine it snowballing to other brands and platforms, as the Great Race for Retail Domination (and Survival) heats up, online and off.
“Faster fulfillment” is the mantra of the moment, a response by companies to what has been called the culture of impatience. But I can’t help wondering if at least when it comes to designer fashion — the clothes that define a particular moment in time and often filter down to shape the styles of every day — it’s solving a problem that doesn’t exist. And maybe creating a new one.
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I understand that we live in a world where, as Mr. Neves pointed out, no one waits for cabs or groceries or tables in restaurants, where information is immediate and pictures go viral. I understand that the millennials and Gen Y-ers are (theoretically) the IWWIWWIWI generations — the “I want what I want when I want it” folks. Conventional wisdom goes that if retailers miss that moment of wanting, they miss the sale. I recognize that defying this seems like the classic behavior of a Luddite. But along the way we have lost some perspective.
“Why should we lose face with Amazon?” Mr. Neves said when we were talking. But another question might be: Why should we assume Amazon controls this particular playing field? It may be time to call, well, time on this game of one-upmanship.
A handbag is not a bottle of milk for a baby. It’s not a staple. And it’s not necessarily a good idea to create a situation in which it is equated to one. It may not be sustainable, in any sense of the word.
Saturday is Earth Day, and in the run-up to the annual reminder of what climate change has wrought, fashion has been as active as always: Kering teamed up with Plug and Play and Fashion for Good, and the Council of Fashion Designers of America has joined forces with Lexus, both to support new businesses focused on responsible supply-chain innovation. But while the industry often equates greenness with materials and manufacturing and also tends to attribute landfill problems to fast fashion of the cheap and disposable kind, it should think about high-end consumption, too.
Because in treating investment fashion — which is to say fashion that takes time to create and consumers to understand (and often, desire) — as a commodity, you risk changing how people think about it, and value it, in an essential way. It is true that no one is forcing consumers to opt for the fastest delivery (you can have your jacket in two days if you want, or even a full week), but the sheer fact that the option exists makes the decision seem, somehow, less of a commitment.
Besides, just because consumers say they want something — and according to Mr. Neves, timely delivery is the No. 1 criterion for online shopping in every consumer survey Farfetch has done — doesn’t mean it’s a crucial determinant of their behavior.
Just consider the recent, somewhat abortive, move to change the fashion show schedule to the “see now, buy now” model. The rationale behind the change was almost exactly the same as the one behind super-speedy delivery: Everyone has a truncated attention span because of Instagram, and if you don’t get a product to customers as soon as they feel desire for it, you miss your window.
Yet after only a season, two out of the four main brands experimenting with the idea — Tom Ford and Thakoon — gave it up (Ralph Lauren and Burberry remain exponents). The reason given was that the market wasn’t ready, but had there been a huge and extended spike in demand, the market would presumably have accommodated itself.
Indeed, when it comes to investment fashion, as opposed to what we formerly called fast fashion (which perhaps now will have to be rechristened “quick turnover fashion” or some such), there is value in having to wait, which should not be dismissed.
By conflating investment fashion with, effectively, groceries, you undermine its claims of specialness, effort and creative muscle — all the criteria on which it is built and which justify, in many ways, its price. You link it to the idea of disposability (which, let’s face it, is the definition of what was normally called fast fashion, a sector in which it is often cheaper to buy a new shirt, say, than to clean the one you already own). If investment suggests value over time, reducing the time reduces the value. Put another way: There is a downside to rushing to fulfill the wants of today; it suggests they may not be the wants of tomorrow.
It is happening already: The high-end resale market is booming, with online designer consignment stores like Vestiaire, the RealReal and ThredUP experiencing enormous growth. According to ThredUP’s 2017 fashion resale report (done in conjunction with GlobalData), the fashion resale market is currently worth $18 billion and is expected to grow to $33 billion by 2021, and the average American woman does not wear 60 percent of the pieces in her closet.
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April 19, 2017
“Don’t Depend too much on Anyone in this World”
Unacknowledged – An Expose of the Greatest Secret In Human History
Apple Will Soon Join Facebook in the AR Online Platform Video War
At the moment augmented reality is still a clunky, phone-in-front-of-your-face experience, but today Facebook promised to transform that experience when it announced a new AR platform. And you can be sure that quite a few folks at Apple were watching with great interest the live stream of the F8 developers conference in San Jose, California, where the new platform was introduced with plenty of striking visual aids.
Onstage at the conference, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and some of his top aides energetically kicked off what is sure to be a new platform war—one that will soon be joined by Apple and plenty of other competitors.
“This space will get crowded though, and I expect both Apple and Google to also bring these functionalities to their camera apps and offer developers the chance to build AR experiences on their platforms as well,” Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin told Fast Company in an email.
Facebook made a strategic decision to be the first tech giant to launch an AR platform when the hardware and technology is still in its nascent stage. In Facebook’s version of AR, a user will hold their phone in front of their face and watch as all kinds of moving imagery and information is superimposed over the picture of the real world seen by the camera. Yep, kinda like Pokémon Go.
Facebook said it will provide developers with precise location, object recognition, and 3D effects tools they need to start building their own custom AR experiences. That could mean anything from AR games to a retailer placing a data card over a product in front of the camera.
“Facebook is smart to give developers the tools to build AR experiences and give those tools to a wider developer community,” Bajarin says. “They are approaching this as a true platform play, which is smart.”
It seems likely that Apple will have to weigh in with its own AR platform sooner or later—I’m guessing sooner. Two media outlets have already reported that Apple is working on prototypes of some kind of AR glasses. This is unsurprising; the company has likely been working on glasses for a couple of years. The press reports say the company already has “hundreds” of engineers working on its own AR effort.
Apple isn’t known for being first in emerging technologies, preferring to hang back and drop in when it knows it can deliver a product or service better than everybody else. Entering the market with a cool-looking and high-functioning set of AR glasses would be one way to outshine the competing platforms. But Apple may not be able to wait until the core technologies needed for such glasses become available at mass market levels.
In the near term, Apple might begin adding new camera technology to the iPhone that can support AR apps, both its own and those from third-party developers. Fast Company previously reported that Apple will source 3D camera technology from Lumentum for its 10th anniversary iPhone 8, which will likely be announced this fall.
Facebook’s AR announcement today may end up serving as the ideal opening act for Apple, says Technalysis Research president Bob O’Donnell. Facebook’s experience in its current form is built to work with the camera on the user’s phone, he says. “So Facebook announces a 2D Snapchat-like experience with photo filters and calls it AR.” Facebook will have introduced the AR concept to a mass audience with an experience that Apple can best by leveraging a true 3D camera in the next iPhone (or, possibly, with the dual cameras in the iPhone 7 Plus), says O’Donnell.
Zuckerberg may also have lowered expectations around AR—which, after all the overly hyped Magic Leap coverage, has led many people to anticipate a headset-wearable experience. “So when Apple announces an AR experience that works on the phone instead of an AR headset, it won’t be as much of a disappointment,” O’Donnell says.
Creative Strategies’ Bajarin believes that Facebook and Google are more capable than Apple at delivering cloud-based augmented reality content from the cloud, which could be a big advantage. He also believes Facebook and Google have the edge in the machine learning needed to help identify objects and people in the real world, a key function in AR apps. And let’s not forget Microsoft, which arguably has more experience in the space than anyone, after having developed the first major AR headset with the HoloLens.
Apple’s advantage lies in its ability to control far more of the hardware and software stack underpinning the AR experience—the apps, the phone, and the OS. Apple may begin building AR features deep in iOS, so that it could begin to “augment” lots of different aspects of the phone experience, like Siri does. By building AR into the OS, Apple might enable a richer experience that’s optimized for the iPhone.
It’s even possible that Apple could begin talking about its AR strategy as soon as its upcoming developer conference, WWDC, in June. Since Apple likely wants to speak to developers en masse and in person about what could become a major new platform, it may choose to at least start the conversation, as opposed to waiting until next year’s conference.
If it does, it will likely lay out a wade-into-the-water approach that will look something like what Facebook announced today. That is, the AR experience will be seen through the display of an iPhone, not through a face wearable. But that might be just the thing to get developers and consumers used to the concept, without getting too exotic with the hardware.
Whatever the shape of the product, Apple will try to make a grand entrance into the AR market. It won’t be first in, so it will have to infuse the technology with simplicity, style, and a wow factor that turns consumers on and makes the competing platforms seem inferior.
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Amazon Fire TV Launches in India
Amazon has launched its Fire TV stick in India, making it the fifth country where the device becomes available after the U.S., U.K., Germany and Japan.
The Amazon Fire TV stick comes preloaded with apps, including Amazon Prime Video and rival OTT platforms, such as Netflix, Fox India’s Star network-owned Hotstar, Viacom18’s Voot and Indian film major Eros International’s ErosNow, among others. The device also offers access to YouTube, various gaming apps and more.
Fire TV made its U.S. debut in 2014. The Fire TV stick with remote, which allows users to put apps such as Prime Video and Netflix on TV sets, is priced at about $62 (3,999 rupees) compared with $39 in the U.S.
The higher price is due to various extra content offerings, such as six months of advertising-free music from Indian music streamer Gaana, a free ErosNow membership running for three months and one month of ad-free streaming from Voot and Voot Kids. Also included in the bundle is 100 gigabytes of free data for three months from Indian internet service provider Airtel Broadband.
The launch announcement was made Wednesday at a press conference in New Delhi that featured such Amazon executives as Prime Video India director and country head Nitesh Kripalani and Amazon Fire TV vp Marc Whitten.
“Fire TV Stick offers access to a vast selection of movies and TV shows, popular apps and features designed specifically for customers in India, including powerful voice search for Amazon Video titles in Hindi and English,” said Whitten. “Fire TV Stick also offers data monitoring and other features to help customers in India get the most from their data plan and stream more content using less bandwidth.”
Meanwhile, Amazon continues to bolster its India content offerings with the launch of animated series Baahubali: The Lost Legends, based on the epic Baahubali film franchise. Last year’s Baahubali: The Beginning was a box-office hit that reached an estimated $100 million worldwide. The sequel, Baahubali: The Conclusion, is being released April 28. Amazon Prime Video in India has also enhanced its Hollywood lineup with Suicide Squad.
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Source:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/amazon-fire-tv-launches-india-995409
Amazon has patented an automated on-demand clothing factory
Standard operating procedure in the apparel industry goes like this: Make clothes, and then sell them. It can take weeks, if not months, to manufacture clothes, so that step has to come first. It can be a costly upfront investment, and items that don’t sell get discounted, eating into margins.
But Amazon, the ecommerce giant steadily growing into the largest apparel seller in the US, has another idea. Recode reports that the company, which has been building out its own apparel lines, has been granted a patent for an on-demand apparel-manufacturing system that would let it make clothes only once orders have been placed.
The system, which the company submitted its patent application for in December 2015, is founded on data and automation. A “computing device” would collect orders and organize them according to how they could be most efficiently produced. They could be grouped by geographic location, for instance, or by the type of fabric required, or by the assembly processes involved.
As Amazon explains it in the patent, “By aggregating orders from various geographic locations and coordinating apparel assembly processes on a large scale, the networked environment provides new ways to increase efficiency in apparel manufacturing.”
Based on the orders, an automated system at an Amazon facility would produce the clothes. A textile printer would create the various fabrics needed. The fabrics would then be automatically fed over to a textile cutter, which would cut out pattern pieces from the sheets of fabric to be assembled into the finished garments.
Cameras would monitor the process, and an “image analyzer” could spot if anything went wrong, such as the textiles bunching, stretching, or being cut incorrectly. The system would adjust itself to correct the issue, signal an attendant for assistance, or flag the panel as a misprint to be discarded. Eventually the finished products would be checked for quality, packed, and shipped.
It’s unclear whether Amazon is actively working on building the system, or if it’s intended to fulfill wholesale orders placed by businesses or individual customer orders. Amazon did not immediately reply to a request for comment, but it normally doesn’t discuss future plans.
If Amazon is able to get on-demand manufacturing up and running, it could be a powerful weapon in its bid to become an apparel powerhouse. Quick, agile supply chains have allowed fast-fashion labels such as Zara, and even speedier upstarts, to outperform their competition. They allow brands to respond quickly to changes in the market, and limit the amount of inventory that may not sell at full price.
On-demand manufacturing takes those advantages to a new level. And now Amazon, which is already winning at retail with its hyper-efficient Prime service, may be trying to make it a reality.
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Amazon has patented an automated on-demand clothing factory
Spotify’s half-priced student pricing expands worldwide
Hot on the heels of Pandora’s public launch of its on-demand streaming service, Pandora Premium, rival Spotify is looking to make its service more appealing to younger users by rolling out discounted student pricing to more countries around the world. The company announced today that its roughly half-priced version of its Premium service is now available to students who qualify in 33 new countries, in addition to the U.S., U.K., and Germany where student pricing is already offered.
The new countries where student pricing is now available includes: Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Latvia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, and Turkey.
In the war for subscribers, offering a lower price point can encourage sign-ups – and this is especially true among the younger demographic, a target market for these new streaming services and the users most likely to struggle to afford access.
On Spotify Premium’s student plan, users have the same benefits as a regular paid subscriber, including ad-free listening, access to Spotify’s catalog of over 30 million songs, offline listening, and more.
Students will have to verify their active enrollment in a university in order to take advantage of the lower price. Spotify is working with authentication and verification software provider SheerID to assist with this aspect of its student program. (Apple Music, by comparison, does something similar – but works with third-party UNiDAYS for verification.)
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Like Apple Music’s discount, which drops the $9.99/month service down to $4.99/month, Spotify’s student discount is also a half-priced offering. In the U.S., it costs the same as Apple Music, and that same discount rate will apply in the new countries, as well.
With the additional markets, Spotify’s student discount is available in a total of 36 countries worldwide, which the company notes makes it the biggest music streaming student offer in the world by geographical reach. Apple Music, however, isn’t that far behind – its student offer expanded to more countries in November, including major markets like Canada, Japan, France and China, which brought its total supported markets to 32 at the time.
The two companies are fierce competitors, with Spotify having recently hit 50 million paying customers, and Apple Music having grown to 20 million subscribers as of December. And with Pandora Premium entering the market, the competition looks to be heating up even further.
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Spotify’s half-priced student pricing expands worldwide




