It’s taken ten years, and a last leg up by way of an acquisition of a competitor, but Rhapsody says that it has finally reached one million subscribers for its music services in the U.S.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek took the stage at Spotify’s first-ever press conference to expand the music streaming service’s Facebook integration to a wider world of social networks and devices, arguing that sharing is the only thing that can save the music industry and stop piracy.

Best Buy is one of the biggest and most influential retailers of mobile phones and other gadgets in the U.S.—impacting pricing for other retailers and influencing what products people buy—but it has stumbled in its effort to take that formula and repeat it elsewhere. Carphone Warehouse, the UK retailer that…

Rhapsody yesterday announced the acquisition of long-term rival Napster from U.S. retailer Best Buy.  Rhapsody will retire the Napster brand and migrate the customer base over to its own service, with Best Buy gaining a minority stake in Rhapsody. It is a somewhat poignant end to one of digital music’s…

Even without the added pressure of a very inexpensive Kindle Fire tablet from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), the tablet market is bound to see some more contenders fall by the wayside joining HP (NYSE: HPQ) and its TouchPad. And so it came as little surprise today to see a report that…

Our look at some of the big stories today in mobile: reports of RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) looking at investing in India; Best Buy starts up its WiMax service with Clearwire; (NSDQ: CLWR) and another advance in MasterCard’s NFC initiative.

Looks like Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is looking to cast its retail net ever wider in the hunt for new Kindle users: the e-reading device is now being sold in the UK by Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy UK, an extension of a retailing deal the two companies started in the…

With speculation building up that both Google and Apple are getting ready to launch cloud-based music services, Motorola (NYSE: MOT) is making sure that it has its hat in the ring, too. The mobile company’s investment arm, Motorola Mobility Ventures, has taken a strategic stake in cloud-media service Catch Media,…

So INQ and HTC are revving up to release the first “Facebook phones”? Not exactly, but it’s a crucial step for Facebook in testing the waters for an even deeper plunge into mobile.

Is this another example of a retailer looking to catch attention in the holiday shopping rush, or a quick response to early sales indicators? Only days after Carphone Warehouse started to advertise the Nexus S, which it is selling exclusively in the UK, the device is already getting discounted. First…

Naysayers continue expressing suspicion Spotify will launch in the U.S.. But Spotify’s not alone in discovering the challenge of an overseas launch. Here’s a newsflash for the sceptics: the list of U.S. services which haven’t found their way out of America is also long…

Spotify has given itself one more, small reason why people might subscribe to Spotify Premium - a hook in to Sonos’ wireless music systems around the home.

Playboy Enterprises (NYSE: PLA) is forming a new video game label this year as part of a wider digital strategy to make its brand more mainstream, Paul H. Lee, the company’s managing director for new digital ventures, told paidContent. The company hasn’t decided on a name yet, but it already…

Paul Brown, who is leaving as partnerships SVP at Spotify, is becoming chief operating officer for Mendeley, a start-up often described as a Last.fm for research papers, say MediaWeek and TechCrunch, and Brown confirmed to paidContent:UK.

Spotify’s partnerships SVP Paul Brown is leaving after 18 months with the music startup, saying his exit’s on good terms. “I wasn’t looking to leave. But this was an opportunity that came along and which I had to take,” Brown tells MusicWeek.

Despite trying for over a year, Spotify has been beaten to U.S. launch by Rdio, the comparable online music start-up backed by Atomico Ventures’ Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who earlier in their careers founded Skype and Kazaa.

Spotify has been offering pay-TV operators a set top box version of the music service for some time now. But so far it only has the deal inked with triple-play telco TeliaSonera back in October. That service is launching today on the TeliaSonera TV service in Sweden and Finland, Spotify…

Spotify is slashing the cost of its advert-free music streaming in Europe, in a bid to win more paying customers besides just mobile users. It comes in two new tariffs Spotify’s introducing… —Spotify Unlimited: £4.99pm/ for no-ads music, but no mobile access, no offline or MP3 play and no higher-bitrate…