Facebook is going all in on audio. The company announced multiple products on Monday that emphasize voice content over text, images, or video. The products will be released over the next few months and, in some cases, will start with a limited set of people.
Most notably, Facebook is indeed launching a competitor to the buzzy social audio app Clubhouse with a feature called Live Audio Rooms, which will be available this summer. It’ll first roll out to groups and public figures as a test, but it will eventually make its way to Messenger, too, so people can hang out with friends. Users will be able to record their conversations and distribute them, and eventually, people can charge for access to these rooms through either a subscription or one-time fee.
To get people to join, Facebook says it’s introducing an Audio Creator Fund to “support emerging audio creators.” All of these conversations can also be turned into “Soundbites,” a forthcoming feature that allows people to create and share shortform audio clips along with an algorithmic feed to promote them. Think TikTok, but with audio clips.
The Soundbite creation tool will let people put effects on their voices.Image: Facebook
Soundbites will live within the broader News Feed. Users will be able to record them in a separate tool within Facebook, which the company describes as a “sound studio in your pocket.” In a chat with Casey Newton, the author of Platformer and a contributing editor at The Verge, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg equated Soundbites to Reels, Instagram’s TikTok competitor, but for audio.
He also added that he likes audio over video or images because it allows people to multitask and host longer, nuanced conversations.
“The high-level picture here is that we think that audio is, of course, also going to be a first-class medium, and that there are all these different products to build across this whole spectrum,” Zuckerberg said.
Facebook also plans to take on a bigger role in podcasting. The company says it’ll start recommending shows and episodes based on people’s interests and that people can comment on them and recommend them to friends. The company says 170 million people on Facebook are connected to a page that’s linked to a specific podcast, and more than 35 million people are members of fan groups around podcasts.
Facebook wants to support podcasts with direct monetization.Image: Facebook
Zuckerberg says a partnership with Spotify is forthcoming, too, which will bring the company’s player over to Facebook, letting people stream music and podcasts from their News Feed. Zuckerberg emphasized that this feature is for music. But still, Facebook users will be able to share Spotify podcasts and let people listen without having to leave the Facebook world — they just have to link their accounts.
“Our ambition has always been to make Spotify ubiquitous across platforms and devices — bringing music and podcasts to more people — and our new integration with Facebook is another step in these efforts,” a Spotify spokesperson said in a statement. “We look forward to a continued partnership with Facebook, fueling audio discovery around the world.”
Finally, Facebook’s tipping system, Stars, will be coming to Live Audio Rooms as well as for individual creators and public figures.
How serious Facebook is about audio and whether users actually want it over other formats is still unclear. On one hand, the audio industry is hot right now, with most major tech companies wading into the broader podcasting industry. Clubhouse and other audio startups have also made live audio a popular way to interact, and already, multiple big platforms have integrated the format into their apps.
On the other hand, live audio has clearly found its moment during the pandemic, when everyone’s been starved of human interaction and mostly confined to their homes. Podcasting offers edited, on-demand conversations, which people have enjoyed for years, but whether the live formats will survive remains an open question. Facebook has also routinely gone all in on a format, only for it to languish. It went for longform video with IGTV but has since pivoted to a focus on Reels. It launched and subsidized Facebook Live content, which has since mostly fallen by the wayside. The same could happen for audio, but Facebook is clearly using its size to try to make its mark on the industry.
Fitbit has announced its new Luxe fitness tracker that looks like a more fashion-focused take on the Inspire 2. It leaked last week, but Fitbit is making it official with the news that the Luxe is available for preorder starting today, April 19th, for $149.95. This cost includes six months of the Fitbit Premium service, which usually costs $9.99 per month. The service recently launched the new Mindful Method program created by Deepak Chopra that packs in over 30 audio and video sessions on mindfulness and wellness.
A specific release date for the Luxe hasn’t been shared, but the company is aiming for a spring launch, so it shouldn’t be too long of a wait.
The Luxe was designed for “a diverse range of wrist sizes and skin tones for 24/7 wear.” Fitbit says the Luxe is its thinnest touchscreen tracker yet, and the company thinks most people should be able to sleep comfortably with it on. To that end, you won’t need to charge it every night, as Fitbit claims it’ll last up to five days per charge.
The Luxe includes an interchangeable silicone strap with several size adjustments. Other straps will be available at launch, including silicone bands in a few colors for $29.95 each, woven fabric bands for $34.95, leather bands for $49.95, stainless steel mesh bands for $79.95, going all the way up to $99.95 for stainless steel link bracelets from luxury jewelry brand Gorjana. If you just want the Luxe with the Gorjana band, a limited-edition version of the tracker costing $199.95 will include one starting in June.
The Fitbit Luxe in black.Image: Fitbit
The Luxe is angled toward people who want their fitness tracker to be taken for jewelry. The company even went as far as using a metal injection molding process to craft the Luxe’s stainless steel case, which is apparently a traditional technique for jewelry-making.
The Luxe is a buttonless tracker, and inputs are delegated to its color OLED touchscreen. Like its previous smartwatches and trackers, Fitbit’s Luxe will be supported for iOS and Android devices. It’ll also support Google Fast Pair to pair more quickly to Android devices. The Luxe supports connected GPS while paired to your phone, so you’ll need to bring your phone along if you want to track runs or walks. If having built-in GPS is important to you, Fitbit’s Charge 4 includes that and other features like Fitbit Pay and Spotify controls.
Fitbit is using this launch to announce that the Luxe, along with the company’s other heart rate-enabled trackers and watches, support the companion app’s Stress Management Score that assesses your activity level, sleep schedule, and heart rate to help you manage stress. Through the app, the Luxe can track a host of other metrics, like your breathing pattern, your resting and variable heart rate, skin temperature, mood, sleep, and menstrual cycles. Sometime after launch, it’ll be able to record your blood oxygen levels (Sp02).
Reddit unveiled its take on a Clubhouse-like social audio product on Monday, called Reddit Talk. The company is billing Monday’s announcement as a “sneak preview,” and if you want to try it out when it’s ready, you can put yourself on the waitlist.
Based on Reddit’s description and images shared by the company, Reddit Talk appears to look a lot like Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and other social audio products. Talks will “live” within subreddits, according to Reddit.
Reddit’s new Talk feature.Image: Reddit
During the initial tests, only subreddit moderators will be able to initiate a Talk, and Talk hosts will have the ability to invite, mute, and remove speakers. While only mods can kick off Talks in the beginning, anyone on iOS and Android can listen to one.
Reddit Talk mod tools.Image: Reddit
The company says it is “testing ways” for hosts to customize how Talks look with emojis and different background colors, and users will be able to change their avatar, too.
Reddit joins Twitter, Slack, Discord, LinkedIn, and Spotify in announcing a social audio feature. Mashable first broke word that Reddit was working on a social audio feature on April 9th.
South Korean brand HiFi Rose has launched in the UK and Ireland, and you can now pick up two of its products from select stores, supplied by Henley Audio.
Both products are premium networked streamers. The HiFi Rose RS201 E (pictured) is a music streamer, DAC and amplifier in one. Its minimalist design might be a little industrial for some, but it’s a good size to fit on a desk and boasts an 8.8in touchscreen display.
It supports audio up to 32-bit / 384KHz (PCM) and DSD256 (Native DSD), and you can stream digital music from your network or attached devices using the Rose OS Music app. It’s compatible with Apple AirPlay, Roon Ready and Spotify Connect, and comes with integrated apps for Qobuz and Tidal.
It’s MQA certified and has 100 watts of amplification. It connects online using Wi-Fi or Ethernet, or you can stream offline using Bluetooth 4.0. There’s also an HDMI output to connect to a TV. A Bluetooth remote control comes as standard.
This is joined by the RS150 network streamer which shares many features. It’s bigger than its sibling, though, with a 14.9in touchscreen, and benefits from a speedy Hexacore CPU and Mali-T864 GPU. It features an Asahi Kasei VERITA AK4499EQ DAC with support for Velvet Sound technology, and benefits from what HiFi Rose claims is “industry-leading technical measurements for exceptional sonic integrity”.
You can manually adjust the input/output settings to your liking, and it has HDMI-ARC and AES/EBU connections.
The RS201 E costs £1749, and the RS150 £3899. Both are on sale now from your local Henley Audio stockist.
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Apple Music’s payment rate for artists and labels is fundamentally a penny per stream, according to a letter from the company posted on its artist dashboard and first reported by the Wall Street Journal. That payment rate is higher than Spotify, which has a confusing variable rate scheme that basically tops out at a half-penny per stream.
Announcing a penny-per-stream rate is a nice PR win for Apple Music, since it is 1. very simple and 2. Spotify hates talking about its per-stream payments, which the company insists are a misleading figure. Seriously, it just launched an entire website called Loud&Clear last month designed to help artists and fans understand how payments work, and a good chunk of it is devoted to explaining why per-stream rates are not the right thing to focus on. It’s a lot of copy like this:
In the streaming era, fans do not pay per song and services do not pay per stream, so we don’t believe a “per stream rate” is a meaningful number to analyze. Still, we understand that artists find it useful to calculate an effective “per stream” rate or, in other words, a revenue-to-streams ratio — dividing the total size of the royalty pool on Spotify (the numerator) by the total number of music streams on Spotify (the denominator). Both of these numbers are growing incredibly quickly every year.
There are a number of factors that contribute to that ratio looking small, which we understand can seem problematic.
Right. It is important to note that Spotify runs a massive ad-supported music service with very different economics to the paid Spotify Premium tier, while Apple Music only offers a paid service. And Spotify is way bigger, with 345 million total users, of which 155 million are paying Spotify Premium customers. (It’s hard to put good numbers on how big Apple Music is currently; the company’s last public number is “more than 60 million subscribers” from June 2019, and more recent estimates have it at 72 million.)
In any event, Spotify’s argument is that it pays lower variable rates on far more streams, while Apple’s happy to say that it pays a higher, simpler rate on fewer streams. Neither argument really solves the essential economic problem of streaming, which is that most artists can’t make a living on streaming royalties alone, which is why everyone is out there selling NFTs and hoping the concert business comes back in force soon.
“… perhaps the most well-featured all-in-one desktop system you can buy right now,” is what we said of the Ruark R5 when we reviewed it in 2019, and that is no less true today. Now, Ruark has launched a special Signature Edition version that benefits from a performance boost and aesthetic upgrade.
For the Ruark R5 Signature, the signal paths have been revised and the cabling upgraded in an effort to make it sound cleaner than the standard R5. While the R5 comes in a a ‘rich walnut’ wood or light grey lacquer, the Signature model basks in a luxury piano lacquer finish with rose gold metal detailing.
Ruark says that each layer has been carefully built and hand sanded between coats. Once the final coat has been applied, the lacquer was wet sanded with a fine grit abrasive before being hand buffed and polished to a glass-like finish.
(Image credit: Ruark)
Of course, the Signature is just as well equipped as the original, featuring an integrated CD player, Spotify Connect, built-in access to other popular music services such as Amazon Music, Deezer and Tidal, Bluetooth, DLNA streaming and multi-room functionality.
We can also expect a sound that’s as likeably warm and organised (and hopefully clearer) than the R5, whose biggest talent is a lush and coherent midrange.
The Ruark R5 Signature will be available in a limited production run from June, priced £1250 (a not-insignificant premium over the £995 R5).
I was recently working remotely next to my dad, and realized just how many time-saving little Google Sheets shortcuts I take for granted. These aren’t advanced formulas or pivot tables; just simple tricks to save you time if you work with basic organizational spreadsheets. Some of these are old Excel tricks; but some even my Verge colleagues only discovered recently.
Easily rearrange rows and columns by dragging from the row number
If you want to reorder a row, you can do it in one step by first clicking on the row number to highlight the row, then clicking and dragging from the row number to easily slot it wherever you want it.
Reorder rows in Google Sheets by dragging from the row number
Before learning this trick from my partner, who (full disclosure) was a one-time Google Docs product manager, I am embarrassed to admit that I wasted a lot of time reordering things by first inserting a blank row, then dragging the content to that new space, and finally deleting its old row. Don’t do this.
Start a new Google Sheet by typing “sheets.new” into your browser
Google owns the top-level domain “.new,” so this also works for docs.new, slides.new, cal.new, etc. They started letting other websites use the domain in 2019; so Spotify has playlist.new, Medium has story.new, etc.
Quickly resize columns to fit the content by double clicking between the column headers
This is as easy as it sounds — if you want your column width to automatically resize to the shortest or longest entry, just double click in between the column headers. This also works in Excel.
Resize columns in Google Sheets by double clicking between the column headers
Paste something with clear formatting with Command + Shift + v on Mac or Ctrl + Shift + v on PC
I pull data about The Verge from a lot of different sources, which all have their own fonts and styling, so this trick comes in handy. By using Command + Shift + v instead of Command + v on Mac or Ctrl + Shift + v instead of Ctrl + v on PC, you can strip the old font and font sizes as you paste and insert clear text.
Paste with clear formatting in Google Sheets using Command + Shift + v
You can also paste plain values by double clicking into a cell before you paste, but that’s a little more cumbersome. To clear formatting from multiple cells at once, first highlight them and then use Command + on Macor Ctrl + on PC. There are a ton more keyboard shortcuts like this, which Google catalogs here.
Add multiple hyperlinks to one cell
This one’s more of a PSA — for a long time, you could only hyperlink entire cells. My colleague Jay Peters recently discovered that this is no longer the case; you can now add as many links as your heart desires. Just click into the cell and highlight the word or phrase you want to hyperlink before adding your links.
Hyperlink multiple words in on Google Sheets cell
If you have other favorite Google Sheet tricks you want to share, leave a comment! And because I used my parents and sibling’s cats for my sample data set, here is my cat Olivia striking one of her signature poses.
Blink’s cheap wireless cameras have seen better days.Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge
Blink, the Kickstarter success bought by Amazon in 2017, has long been synonymous with inexpensive battery-powered home video cameras that don’t require a monthly contract for cloud recordings. Open-source projects like Homebridge, Home Assistant, and HOOBS have made the cameras even more extensible by allowing Blink’s temperature and motion sensors to work with smart home platforms like HomeKit and act as triggers for various automations. This combination of price and functionality led many smart home enthusiasts to buy Blink cameras in bulk for whole-home monitoring, especially those who don’t want to be beholden to a corporate overlord (and its requisite subscription fees). But instead of embracing its most passionate fans, Amazon has turned against them, threatening to terminate Blink accounts while challenging the very concept of ownership.
To set the stage, I recently set up a Raspberry Pi running Homebridge with the goal of creating a single iPhone dashboard to tie my smart home together. I started automating my home about 12 years ago, long before you could buy into complete ecosystems from Amazon, Google, and Apple. Now it’s a devil’s brew of Z-Wave and Zigbee devices, some controllable with Siri, some with Alexa, and a few with Google Assistant. It’s held together with a smattering of IFTTT recipes and four disparate hubs from Ikea, Aqara, Philips Hue, and Vera. It works, kind of, but requires several different apps, many interfaces, and lots of patience, especially from my family.
Homebridge turns this Blink XT outdoor camera into a temperature and motion trigger for other automations in Apple’s Home app.
Over most of a weekend, I was able to configure Homebridge to link every one of my 50+ smart devices to HomeKit and each other in the Apple Home app. This allowed me to create rules that were previously impossible, like using the Blink XT camera’s motion sensor in my garden to trigger a Z-Wave siren and Hue lightbulbs at night. Nerdvana unlocked!
My sense of delight and intense pride lasted exactly one week before my Blink cameras suddenly went dead. The reason was delivered in an email from Amazon the next morning:
“My name is Tori and I am with the Blink team. While doing a routine server audit, your account was flagged and subsequently disabled due to unsupported scripts or apps running on your system. The only automation that is permitted for use with the Blink system is through Alexa and/or IFTTT. Please disable these scripts or apps and reach back out to me so that I can re-enable your account.”
After a brief WTF exchange whereby I explained that Alexa and / or IFTTT are wholly inferior to the capabilities of Homebridge, Tori helpfully directed me to the exact paragraph of the Blink Terms of Service that I had violated. Terms which, admittedly, I was now reading for the first time (emphasis mine):
“We may terminate the Agreement or restrict, suspend, or terminate your use of Blink Services at our discretion without notice at any time, including if we determine that your use violates the Agreement, is improper, substantially exceeds or differs from normal use by other users, or otherwise involves fraud or misuse of Blink Services or harms our interests or those of another user of Blink Services. If your use of Blink Services is restricted, suspended, or terminated, you may be unable to access your video clips and you will not receive any refund or any other compensation. In case of termination, Blink may immediately revoke your access to Blink Services without refund.”
It turns out that Amazon’s crackdown on Blink automators has been a known issue in the community for at least a year. My question is: why does Amazon bother?
My Homebridge integration may well be in violation of Blink’s terms and conditions, even if the terms seem unduly restrictive. But why is Amazon, owner of those massive AWS server farms that earned nearly $50 billion in 2020, resorting to such draconian measures in response to my meager deployment of five Blink cameras? I could see a crackdown on large-scale corporate installations hammering away at the Blink API, but why me and other small-time enthusiasts?
According to Colin Bendell, developer of the Blink camera plugin for Homebridge, there are at most 4,000 homes using open-source plugins like his. “Even if we round up to 10,000 users, I think this is probably small potatoes for Amazon,” says Bendell, who should know. Not only did he reverse engineer the Blink app to mimic its behavior, but the O’Reilly author and self-proclaimed IoT hobbyist is also the director of performance engineering at Shopify.
Blink could easily look the other way for small home deployments like mine without waving its rights. It says so right in the T&Cs it sent me:
“Blink’s failure to insist upon or enforce your strict compliance with this Agreement will not constitute a waiver of any of its rights.”
But that’d be a cop out. Really, Amazon should be embracing Blink hobbyists. Homebridge is, after all, a project that extends Apple HomeKit to work with a wide variety of uncertified devices including cameras and doorbells from Amazon-owned Ring. And study after study have concluded that Apple device owners love to spend money. Surely this is a community Amazon should encourage, not vilify.
At the risk of saying too much (please don’t shut me down, Amazon!), why is it that my two Ring cameras aren’t raising any red flags during “server audits”? I certainly check them more frequently as one is my doorbell. Perhaps it’s because I already pay a monthly subscription to Amazon for Ring and pay nothing to Blink. (Although sadly, even that early benefit has come to an end. As of March 18th, Amazon requires owners of newer Blink cameras to pay a subscription fee to unlock every feature.)
When I reached out to Amazon with the questions I raise above, and asked if enthusiast initiatives like Homebridge would be officially (or unofficially, wink) supported, I was given this boilerplate response:
“Blink customers can control their cameras through the Blink Home Monitor app, and customize their experience using the If This Then That (IFTTT) service. We are always looking for ways to improve the customer experience, including supporting select third-party integrations for our devices.”
Gee, thanks.
One of Blink’s biggest advantages has come to an end.Image: Blink
We kid ourselves about ownership all the time. I say I own my house, but, in fact, the bank owns more of it than I do. I listen to mymusic on Spotify, but those Premium playlists I’ve so carefully curated for years will be plucked from my phone just as soon as payments lapse. But somehow, Blink cameras were supposed to be different. They were for people drawn to Blink on the strength of that “no monthly contract” pitch. These were devices you were supposed to own without limitations or tithes.
How things have changed.
In 2017, Blink stood alone in the field; today there’s Wyze, Eufy, TP-Link / Kasa, Imou, and Ezviz to name just a few of the companies making inexpensive wired and wireless cameras for every smart home ecosystem, including Amazon’s, often with better features and value.
I’ve been a smart home evangelist for more than a decade, doling out advice to friends, often solicited, often not. Blink used to be an easy pitch: cheap and dead simple to install for normies, and highly extensible if you’re willing to put in the effort. But Amazon’s heavy-handed enforcement of T&Cs alongside the introduction of subscription fees have negated any advantage Blink once held over its camera competitors. While Blink sales will undoubtedly benefit from Amazon’s promotion machine, longtime Blink enthusiasts like myself will be taking their allegiances elsewhere.
Spotify started installing its Car Thing music player into the cars of some Spotify Premium customers a couple of years ago. The aim? To find out more about their listening habits. And now, Spotify has given the device a limited release in the US.
Only Spotify Premium subscribers in the US are eligible, and they have to be invited before they can buy. If you’re selected, you only have to pay for shipping, not to cover the cost of the device itself. Spotify is basically giving it away.
Car Thing lets you play Spotify in your car without taking out your phone. You can speak to control it using voice search – just say “Hey Spotify” followed by your request and it’ll do the rest. There’s also a physical dial that allows you to scroll through menus and select items, or you can use the touchscreen.
There are physical buttons on-hand, too: four presets that you can program to bring up whatever you wish, be it the news, a podcast, radio station or playlist.
Just as it did when it first went public with the Car Thing, Spotify is keen to stress it isn’t getting into the music hardware business.
“Our focus remains on becoming the world’s number one audio platform – not on creating hardware – but we developed Car Thing because we saw a need from our users, many of whom were missing out on a seamless and personalized in-car listening experience,” the firm wrote in a blog post.
“No matter the year or model of your vehicle, we feel everyone should have a superior listening experience.”
So, it looks like we’re unlikely to see Car Thing arrive in other territories around the world any time soon, but it’s hopefully a sign of more interesting things to come in the world of in-car streaming.
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Spotify has begun rolling out an updated version of its desktop app and web player, according to The Verge. The green streaming giant hopes it will offer users a more cohesive and intuitive experience, equivalent to its mobile apps.
In addition to a refreshed design, Premium subscribers will now be able to directly download music and podcasts for offline listening by hitting the download button instead of convolutedly adding tracks to a playlist first. The update will make it much easier to manage and curate their library.
(Image credit: Spotify)
The new and improved version also includes tweaks to improve playlist management. All desktop users will have the ability to write descriptions, upload images and drag and drop tracks into existing playlists. Listeners can also edit their Queue and view Recently Played songs while searching within playlists has been simplified courtesy of an integrated search function.
The new redesign for the Spotify app on desktop and web is starting to become available to all Mac, PC and browser users worldwide.
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Bang and Olufsen’s latest connected speaker is the Emerge. Its thin form-factor should blend right in to most bookshelves, and that’s no accident. In a press release announcing the speaker, the company says its design was “inspired by the compact form factor of a book” with side panels that wrap around like a cover, and a logo on the front that’s meant to evoke a title printed on the spine.
It’s a nice contrast from some of Bang and Olufsen’s previous speakers, which have had huge, hulking form-factors that are hard to imagine in any normal home. Instead, the Emerge takes a similar approach to Ikea’s Symfonisk speakers, which have pulled double duty as lamps or shelving to help them blend in with the rest of your furniture.
Get it? Like a title on a book spine?Image: Bang & Olufsen
B&O says the Emerge speaker’s small form-factor shouldn’t make it a slouch in the sound quality department, however. “The vision for Beosound Emerge was to create the slimmest speaker possible that could still deliver full range, ultra-wide sound despite its size through its revolutionary driver configuration,” says the company’s head of product management Christoffer Poulsen. Internally there’s a triple-driver configuration consisting of a 4-inch woofer, a 1.45-inch mid-range, and a 0.6-inch tweeter.
In terms of connectivity, the Emerge supports all the standards you’d expect out of a modern connected speaker. There’s Spotify Connect support, Bluetooth 5.0, Airplay 2, and Chromecast streaming, as well as a built-in microphone with Google Assistant support. Physical connections include a line-in/optical jack, Ethernet, and a USB-C port for power. And yes, you can pair two Emerge’s together to create a stereo pair.
B&O says the speaker uses the same replaceable connectivity module that appeared in its recent Beosound Level, which will allow it to receive “new performance updates and features for years to come.” Eventually this module can be replaced if it gets outdated, B&O says.
The Bang and Olufsen Emerge is available in select European markets starting today, and will release globally this autumn. Pricing starts at £539 / €599 9around $717) for the black model, while the gold model which has an oak wood cover costs slightly more at £669 / €749 (around $879).
Spotify’s desktop app refresh seems to be rolling out to users, and it brings with it a very handy feature: album downloads. The app has supported downloading playlists to your computer for quite a while. The update should make it easier to keep your library managed if you want to keep the music going even when you’re offline. It is worth noting that this feature is limited to Premium subscribers — according to Spotify’s documentation, free users are only able to download podcasts.
Downloading an album works similarly to downloading a playlist: just navigate to the album’s page and press the download button. It should then be available the next time you go into Offline mode. This should make it easier to manage your offline library if you’re the type of person who’s very particular about what you want to listen to. (For example, I had a carefully curated playlist called “Downloads” that I would dump songs and albums into as a workaround to not being able to save individual things for offline listening.)
Now I can download individual albums and set my Downloads playlist free.
The update also features tweaks to the look of the desktop and web player, as well as how playlist management works. It appears to be currently rolling out — some Verge staff got it yesterday, others today. So if you’re not seeing it, just hang tight. You should see a screen letting you know that you’ve got the update.
No matter what you do during your waking hours — work at home or outside of it; commute in a car, a train, or by walking from your bedroom to your living room; or spend your days watching the kids or job hunting — you’re probably spending at least some of that time listening to music. But where do you find that music? And if you already have a site you go to regularly, would you like to try something new?
There is a wealth of streaming music services now available to anyone who wants to listen and experiment. Some offer both free and paid subscription versions. Others are completely free.
We asked the staff of The Verge to tell us about their favorite music streaming services. Some listen to major outlets such as Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube Music, while others have discovered lesser-known but interesting venues.
Here’s what they recommend.
Radio Dismuke
Image: Earl 1900s Music Preservation
For some reason, my partner and I have become addicted to the popular music of the early 20th century, mostly the 1920s and ’30s. Over the past few years, we’ve become happily familiar with the sounds of Cliff Edwards, Bessie Smith, Ruth Etting, Annette Hanshaw, Paul Whiteman, Cab Calloway, and Ethel Waters. (Here she is, in one of her sadly few motion picture appearances, singing “Birmingham Bertha.”) So we spend a lot of time listening to Radio Dismuke, a little-known streaming service sponsored by Early 1900s Music Preservation, which gives us a constant diet of pop and jazz from the early part of the last century. —Barbara Krasnoff
Soma fm
Soma fm started life as an actual micropower radio station in San Francisco in 1999 but flipped over to the internet in 2000. It has been one of my go-to audio sources ever since. The site has tons of different genre stations. While working, I bounce between Groove Salad (ambient / downtempo), Secret Agent (think classic Bond meets modern sensibilities), and Drone Zone (very chill). In the early 2000s, Indie Pop Rocks was my secret weapon for finding new bands my friends didn’t know yet. When the holidays come around, Soma’s holiday stations will make your party twice as festive and half as corny. There are apps for it on all platforms, but if you’re using TuneIn for terrestrial radio, Soma’s stations are listed there, too. It’s all free, but if you use it a lot, find a way to chip in a bit — after more than 20 years of streaming, Soma deserves it. —Dieter Bohn
YouTube Music
Most of my time on YouTube isn’t spent watching videos; it’s listening to music. YouTube Music is everything I wanted out of Google Play Music, plus some. Its catalog of music is incomparable, mostly thanks to users who upload music that otherwise isn’t available on streaming services. It has recent hits and full albums if you want to use it like, say, Spotify, but it’s my destination for listening to uploads of older music or obscure tunes, live performances, and compilations of video game soundtracks. (For some reason, I know the Ghost Trick original soundtrack by heart, yet I haven’t played much of the game.) I’m always a little concerned that my favorite playlist or an upload of a hard-to-find album will be delisted, but perhaps it’s that rush that keeps me listening to it more often than any other music streaming service these days. —Cameron Faulkner
8tracks
I’ll confess that I don’t listen to 8tracks regularly these days, but using it is a predictable way to trigger a burst of nostalgia. The streaming service launched in 2008, and it lets users upload playlists of at least eight songs (aka 8 tracks). You can search through playlists based on their tags (which could include artists, genre, or “mood”), but you can’t see the list of songs ahead of time. They’re revealed as you listen. You also only get three skips per playlist per hour. The forced discovery helped me find songs and artists I never would have listened to. 8tracks shut down in December 2019 but was brought back to life by a new startup called BackBeat last April. All of the playlists I made in high school are still intact, but they are very embarrassing — so I’m keeping that username a secret. —Nicole Wetsman
KEXP
Image: KEXP
KEXP, a public radio station based in Seattle, is my favorite radio station in the world. It primarily plays alternative and indie rock, but there are also weekly blocks with completely different genres like blues, Latin music, songs entirely by Pacific Northwest-based artists, and my wife and I especially enjoy reggae on Saturday mornings. We regularly stream the station to our kitchen speaker while eating dinner or doing chores. The music selection is consistently excellent, and it’s also a regular reminder of the city where we met and fell in love. —Jay Peters
Aux Live
As The Verge’s resident Post Malone fan, I recently discovered Aux Live when a recording of his performance at PostyFest in 2019 was featured. My first intention was to only keep the subscription long enough to watch that one concert, but I ended up really enjoying the service. Aux Live is a music-focused service with a range of live concerts and documentaries across an expansive range of genres and legendary artists. It works both in-browser and via app. It costs $4.99 a month, but that feels reasonable given the vast number of artists featured in the service. —Kaitlin Hatton
Qobuz
Image: Qobuz
After purchasing a portable DAC to listen to higher-resolution music on my phone, I was looking for a place where I can actually listen to higher-resolution music. I found Qobuz, which allows you to stream songs with up to a 192kHz sampling rate and 24-bit depth. You’re also able to buy hi-res songs or albums and download them from the Qobuz store without having to subscribe to the service. Revisiting some of my favorite albums that I listened to during my iPod days gave me a newfound appreciation for those recordings, and I ended up paying closer attention to the way they were mixed and mastered. —Andru Marino
Spotify
Okay, fine — I’ll be the boring member of staff who recommends Spotify. Yes, other streaming services might offer better audio quality or curation, but Spotify has a nice user interface and compatibility with almost every piece of streaming hardware on the market, and that’s really all my basic music tastes require. And soon, with Spotify HiFi launching later this year, audio quality will receive a big boost. It helps that I’ve been using Spotify for close to a decade at this point, so it has near-limitless data on me to create custom playlists tailored to my tastes. Its daily mixes are far from perfect, but they’re good enough that I regularly use them when I can’t be bothered to pick a specific band to listen to. —Jon Porter
Apple Music
Photo: Apple
I use Apple Music for a very specific reason: because it lets me listen to music that’s not on Apple Music. Let me explain. A solid 10–15 percent of the music I listen to isn’t on Spotify or any streaming service. Whether it’s something I made or one of my friends made, a rip from a long-forgotten song posted to YouTube or SoundCloud, an album that’s too copyright-infringement-astic to be allowed on streaming services, or just music that’s on Bandcamp but not streaming services, I still want to have a good way of syncing all of the music I like across devices — and Apple Music does a great job of that. I just drag something into the application formerly known as iTunes, and in a few moments, it shows up on my iPhone, syncs to my iPod, and can even be played through my HomePods. I’d write more about how much I love this one aspect of Apple Music, but honestly, I’m starting to sound like an annoying hipster, even to myself. —Mitchell Clark
Live Music Archive
Did you know you can listen to over 200,000 concerts in lossless audio quality for free? And I really do mean free. The Live Music Archive, part of the Internet Archive, hosts an enormous vault of live performances from a wide range of artists who’ve given their blessing to have concerts traded among fans. Yes, there’s a ton of material from the Grateful Dead and jam bands in there, but the LMA also contains hundreds of recordings from acts like the Drive-By Truckers, John Mayer, Elliott Smith, Smashing Pumpkins, and more. Every so often, I’ll start digging through the archive and land on a gem I hadn’t heard before. Most are audience-recorded shows, as commercial releases (understandably) aren’t allowed.
Now, the Internet Archive isn’t exactly known for intuitive navigation, and the Live Music Archive site can be very kludgy to use. Thankfully, there are apps like this one for iPhone or this for Android that serve as easier-to-browse portals for everything inside the Live Music Archive, complete with features like offline downloads. —Chris Welch
Spotify’s first gadget has landed. Car Thing, a Spotify-only, voice-controlled device for the car, is launching today in limited quantities to invited users. It’s a dedicated, Bluetooth-connected device for controlling Spotify without the need for a phone screen, which seems to be meant for people who drive older cars without built-in infotainment systems or phone connections.
Before getting to the device details, let’s focus on the basics. Car Thing is only being released as a “limited product launch,” so you can’t buy one outright. Instead, you can sign up for the waitlist and hope Spotify reaches out. It’s only available for US customers, and you have to subscribe to Spotify Premium to qualify. Another thing to know: if you’re chosen to try Car Thing, the device is free, but you have to pay for shipping. Spotify declined to comment on how many units it’d be giving away. The company’s also billing the gadget as an “exploration,” so it’s unclear how serious the team is about the product and its future.
The device is shockingly small and lightweight. It has a thin profile and features two prominent buttons on the front, a small one that serves as a back button and a larger knob that lets you interact with whatever’s on-screen. There’s no speaker, so it’s easiest to think of the device as, essentially, a Spotify remote. Yes, you could use your actual phone to play Spotify content, but instead, Spotify is betting that you’ll want voice controls and a dedicated interface to control your audio.
Photo by Ashley Carman / The Verge
I’ve tested Car Thing for a couple days and found the voice controls to be easy to use and relatively intuitive. I drive a 2009 Honda Fit and already keep my phone mounted to the dash for navigation, so I ended up mounting the Car Thing on my vent. This meant I had two bright screens facing me throughout my drive. (I do have a screen built into my car, which you’ll see in photos, but I don’t use it for anything because I prefer Google Maps.)
The voice controls mostly worked — for some reason it only got tripped up on a Kid Cudi request — but I grew frustrated with the steps it took to control music. When a song that I didn’t like played, it took longer to say, “Hey Spotify, skip” than it would have to just tap the skip button on my phone. I generally felt like I could more efficiently navigate Spotify just by using my phone at stop lights. The device does shine, however, when you ask the voice assistant to start a playlist, and it registered those commands easily.
As for the hardware itself, Car Thing pairs with a phone over Bluetooth. It needs this phone for a data connection, so yes, users will require a decent amount of data to stream. In a press briefing, Spotify noted that right now, there’s no way for users to pull only from their downloaded content, although that functionality could come in the future. Depending on a car’s connectivity, users can either rely on an auxiliary cable for sound or keep their phone paired to their car’s Bluetooth to play audio content over the speakers. The Car Thing doesn’t have a speaker itself, and it’s basically controlling the Spotify app on your phone. It’s a strange setup.
The device comes with a 12V adapter into which you’ll plug the provided USB-A to USB-C cable. Car Thing does not include a rechargeable battery and needs to be plugged in at all times. The device also ships with three different mounts: a vent mount, a dashboard mount, and a CD player mount. You can clip a magnetic attachment to these mounts, which then lets you take the Car Thing off easily. (Also worth noting is that the dash mount doesn’t come with a suction cup and instead requires that you stick it to your dash with 3M adhesive backing.)
Spotify
Once mounted, you can interact with Car Thing in three ways: through your voice using a “Hey Spotify” command, through its tactile buttons and knob, or through its touchscreen. It also features four preset buttons on the top of the device, which you can set to specific content.
Now that I have a Car Thing, can I see it being a success? I guess it depends on how comfortable people are with a Spotify-owned microphone in their cars and whether they think the device offers a more meaningful experience than their built-in infotainment systems. Because my car is older, it did provide a hands-free interface for music while also adding another screen to my setup. But I also feel uneasy about a Spotify microphone being within earshot of all my conversations. (The device does feature a digital setting to turn the microphone off, probably to address concerns like mine, but still.) Spotify’s voice privacy page says it only records and stores what users say after its “Hey Spotify” wake phrase is spoken, but I still don’t love the idea of an always-listening microphone near me. The privacy page mostly details the company’s interactive voice ads, which I have yet to come across.
Broadly, I’d assume people with modern infotainment systems likely won’t need or want a Spotify-only Bluetooth remote, whereas people like me, whose cars are older, might end up wanting to stick with whatever system they’ve already figured out. One thing that Spotify might accomplish with Car Thing, however, is getting users who default to the radio to switch to Spotify instead. It’s clearly making a play for the space with its Your Daily Drive playlist, which updates daily with music and spoken word content, as well as its push into podcasts. I default to the radio often because it’s the easiest thing to put on. Car Thing, if I keep it in my car, would admittedly change that and give Spotify more of my listening time, and that’s likely all Spotify wants.
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What makes a smartwatch “smart”? Is it the ability to show you notifications from your phone? What about the ability to track your physical activity and wellness, such as step counts, workouts, and sleep? How about providing you information about your day, such as the weather and upcoming calendar events? Or perhaps it’s the inclusion of a voice assistant on your wrist that you can ask to do things without having to use your phone?
Those are the questions I’ve been asking over the past week-plus as I’ve been testing the new OnePlus Watch, a $159 smartwatch and the first wearable from the smartphone company. The OnePlus Watch has all the looks of a modern smartwatch, but as I’ve learned wearing it on my wrist day and night, it doesn’t have all the smarts.
The OnePlus Watch is not like a Wear OS smartwatch, such as those made by Fossil, Motorola, or Mobvoi. Nor is it like a Samsung Galaxy Watch or an Apple Watch. All of those have software platforms that integrate with other apps and services, so you can download apps or watchfaces to the watch itself, just like you might with a phone. That makes them very extensible and customizable — you can easily make the watch look unique and do the things you need it to.
The OnePlus Watch, on the other hand (or wrist?), runs its own proprietary software, based on a real-time operating system. This software is very quick and power efficient, but it is not extensible — there’s no app store or third-party watchfaces to download on the OnePlus Watch. It’s similar to the software on the budget smartwatches you can get on Amazon; if you’ve ever used an Amazfit, Umidigi, or Wyze watch, you’ve used a real-time operating system. The OnePlus Watch is not very different from those in this respect.
This choice of platform affords the OnePlus Watch its greatest strength, long battery life, and also its greatest weakness: it just doesn’t do all that much compared to other smartwatches you can buy.
The OnePlus Watch looks like many other smartwatches, but most especially the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active.
OnePlus Watch software
The OnePlus Watch pairs with and is controlled by the OnePlus Health app for Android — there’s no iPhone compatibility at all. But you don’t need to own a OnePlus phone, it works with basically any modern Android device. I tested it on both OnePlus and Samsung smartphones and the experience was the same.
The app is where you can see what health and fitness metrics the watch has recorded, adjust which apps send notifications on your wrist, and view the available watchfaces. OnePlus has about 50 watchfaces so far, with some offering limited customizability in the form of selectable shortcuts or widgets, such as a weather widget, date, or shortcut to a built-in app like the timer. You can choose up to 14 faces to store on the watch and switch between them without using your phone. The company says it plans on adding more in the future, but as I mentioned earlier, there are no options for third-party watchfaces or third-party app widgets like you get with Samsung, Wear OS, or Apple smartwatches.
The watchfaces themselves are what you’d expect: there is the assortment of analog and digital styles to choose from, with some showing more information about your activity than others. I’m not a big fan of the analog options, so I settled on a digital face. Unfortunately, there’s a bug where digital watchfaces on the OnePlus Watch are stuck in 24-hour time and can’t show 12-hour time. The company tells me it is aware of this bug, and it is slated to be fixed “this month.”
The OnePlus Watch’s interface mimics Wear OS and is easy to navigate.
The watch interface has a familiar layout: swipe down for settings, swipe up to see notifications, press the side button to see your apps. You can swipe right from the watchface to access basic widgets for music control, weather, and activity tracking, similar to Wear OS or a Samsung watch. The design of the interface all looks mostly fine, and there thankfully aren’t any stutters or lags when navigating it.
I do have a few gripes with how notifications are handled. You can’t clear notifications by just swiping them away, like you can with every other smartwatch. Instead, you have to tap into each one and then press clear or scroll to the bottom to clear them all. It’s a clumsy and fiddly process. The OnePlus Watch doesn’t always sync with the notifications I’ve cleared on my phone, either, and occasionally notifications for the same messages would get duplicated, forcing me to see the same alerts more than once.
You can’t do much with those notifications, either. There are no actions you can take other than clearing them from your wrist. OnePlus supports canned message replies in just five apps: WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, Discord, and Facebook Messenger. Notably and frustratingly, that list doesn’t include standard SMS messages. On top of that, there are only four basic replies to choose from: “OK”; “Be right there!”; “In a meeting, contact you later”; and “I’m driving, contact you later.” I frequently use a smartwatch to triage notifications, delete incoming emails, or reply to messages when I’m away from my desk, but I can’t do most of those things with the OnePlus Watch.
The OnePlus Watch comes with a basic set of apps: weather, timer, stopwatch, alarm, workout, sleep tracking, etc. Oddly, it doesn’t have a calculator or a calendar app, so I can’t easily see my next meeting or appointment, something I do a lot with other smartwatches. There’s no way to get your next appointment on your watchface, either. And since there isn’t an app store, I can’t add any apps to that list.
You can forget about streaming music from Spotify or playing podcasts through your favorite app — the only thing you can do with the OnePlus Watch is control what’s playing on your phone or transfer MP3 files from your phone to the watch’s 4GB of storage. Want to track your runs with Strava or MapMyFitness instead of OnePlus’ app? Sorry, no dice. If you want to control smart home devices from your wrist, the OnePlus Watch is entirely useless unless you have a OnePlus TV, where you can use it as a remote. The OnePlus TV is only available in India.
The OnePlus Watch also lacks a voice assistant. I can’t ask it to start a timer when I’m in the kitchen and my hands are dirty, I can’t ask it to turn the lights off or open my garage door, and I can’t dictate a reply to an incoming message. How well voice assistants work varies greatly between smartwatches (Siri on the Apple Watch, pretty good! Bixby on a Samsung watch, less so), but OnePlus isn’t even trying here and I’ve missed having one available.
Lastly, even though the OnePlus Watch has an NFC radio, it does not support mobile payments. You can’t tap your wrist to pay for something like you can with an Apple Watch, Samsung watch, or Wear OS smartwatch.
The OnePlus Watch’s fitness tracking features hit the standard beats.Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
OnePlus Watch fitness tracking
The fitness tracking features are quite basic. It will track your steps throughout the day; the watch will nudge you to get up and move when you’ve been sitting for too long; you can choose between 14 different workouts for the watch to track; and if you wear the OnePlus Watch to bed, it will make an attempt to track your sleep.
I’m not a gym rat, but I did wear the OnePlus Watch on my left wrist with a Fitbit Inspire HR on my right wrist throughout this review and the OnePlus counted thousands fewer steps than the Fitbit every day. None of these devices are perfect with their step tracking, but that kind of discrepancy is going to make tracking a longer-distance run or other intense workout inaccurate or just plain hard to do. I asked a few other reviewers I know who are also testing the OnePlus Watch and each one has had the same issues with inaccurate step counting. OnePlus says a bug fix for GPS optimization and to add more workout modes will be available sometime in mid-April.
While the OnePlus Watch frequently undercounted my steps, it overestimated how much I slept each night.
Sleep tracking, oddly enough, has the opposite problem. The OnePlus Watch consistently overestimates how long I slept each night compared to the Fitbit and Google’s Nest Hub. A bug has also prevented the Watch from syncing its sleep data with the OnePlus Health app, even though other activity synced over fine. The company says this bug should also be fixed sometime this month.
As mentioned earlier, you can’t use other fitness apps on the OnePlus Watch. The OnePlus Health app provides syncing with the Google Fit platform, so it’s possible you could cobble together a syncing solution between other apps using Fit as glue, but I did not test this. In general, the OnePlus Watch’s fitness tracking is fine for basic activity trends, but any fitness enthusiasts will want something more capable and reliable.
The OnePlus Watch only comes in one size: a large 46mm face.
OnePlus Watch hardware and design
In terms of design, the OnePlus Watch is generic-looking — it reminds me a lot of Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Active line. It’s got a round face, there are two buttons on the side, and the body is made of polished stainless steel, which is nice to see at this price point. It comes in silver, black, or a gold-colored special edition — I’ve got the black model and it’s a little boring to look at. Either way, the hardware is solid and put together well — it’s not creaky or plasticky, and there are no rough edges to worry about.
OnePlus is only offering the watch in one size, 46mm, and frankly, it’s big. It’s bigger than I like watches to be on my wrist, and if you have smaller wrists than me you’re not going to have a fun time with this. On the plus side, it’s not the thickest smartwatch I’ve ever worn. Just one size band comes in the box — OnePlus says that customers who need a shorter band will be able to get one by contacting customer service.
The touchscreen is a 1.39-inch 454 x 454 OLED that’s easy to see both indoors and out. It’s colorful, like you’d expect an OLED to be, but there’s no always-on display option, which nearly every other smartwatch has now. That makes it that much more annoying to check the time, though the wrist turn gesture does work well to wake it up.
On the underside are the sensors for heart rate and blood oxygen. As usual, you should not use these sensors for medical purposes — and blood oxygen monitors on even the best smartwatches notoriously struggle with giving accurate readings. Inside the watch are the accelerometers and gyroscopes necessary to track your activity and workouts, plus GPS and Bluetooth radios. There’s no Wi-Fi or LTE here — if you leave your phone behind, you’re going to miss notifications and alerts until the watch is back in Bluetooth range of your phone.
Also missing from the OnePlus Watch are any rotating bezels or crowns — the only way to interact with it is to tap and swipe on the screen itself or push the buttons on the side.
Even though it doesn’t have a voice assistant, the OnePlus Watch does have a microphone and speaker, so you can answer calls from your wrist via Bluetooth. It worked fine in my tests; callers said I sounded clear to them, but the speaker on the watch is a bit crackly at full volume. It works in a pinch.
The OnePlus Watch has exceptional battery life and charges very quickly on its included charger.
The best thing about the OnePlus Watch is its battery life. OnePlus claims up to 14 days of usage between charges — it lasted about 10 days for me, wearing it day and night. Charging the watch is also quick and easy: just 20 minutes on the charger adds half a charge, which translates to literal days of usage. No Apple, Samsung, or Wear OS watch can last this long or charge this quickly.
But at the same time, the OnePlus Watch has such great battery life because, frankly, it just does less than those other smartwatches. The best comparison I can make is that the OnePlus Watch is a fitness tracker in a smartwatch body, which would be an acceptable premise if it were a better fitness tracker.
There are about 50 different watchfaces to choose from for the OnePlus Watch.
The OnePlus Watch may look like a lot of other smartwatches, but I can’t say it compares well to them. It’s limited in features, only comes in one size, and as I’ve gone over, there are several bugs with it that make it feel like an unfinished product. Aside from its long battery life, the OnePlus Watch’s bestselling point is its low price, which is half that of a Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 and over $100 less than the comparably sized Galaxy Watch Active 2. But if you’re looking for a smartwatch for your Android phone, it’s not that hard to find Wear OS models on sale, often for less than the cost of the OnePlus Watch.
For me, a good smartwatch is a lot like a personal assistant on my wrist. It tells me the time, when my next calendar appointment is, what the weather is like, and how active I’ve been throughout the day. I can quickly ask it to set a timer when I’m making a cup of tea or use it to reply to a message from my spouse when I’m running an errand. It also lets me customize its appearance and capabilities through third-party apps, watchfaces, or both. For others, it’s a way to track workouts and keep on top of their personal health.
In that framing, the OnePlus Watch isn’t really a smartwatch and based on my experience, it isn’t a great fitness tracker either. Instead, it’s just a clever watch, and it can be useful if your expectations of it are low. But if a smartwatch is going to take up real estate on my wrist, it has to be more useful than the OnePlus Watch.
Photography by Dan Seifert / The Verge
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