The Next Step for Pacemaker

It was recently announced that third-party DJ applications will no longer have access to music via Spotify. This decision will affect Pacemaker but we’re working on bringing music directly to the app via our own licenses, making the Pacemaker experience better than ever.

Pacemaker was the first DJ app to partner with Spotify when we launched Pacemaker for iPad back in February 2014. Since then we put millions of tracks at the fingertips of users, removing another big barrier and making it possible for more people to experience the joys of djing – creating hundreds of thousands of DJ mixes in the process.

Spotify has been a great partner and we’re saddened by the news, but we of course respect their business decision.

For a long time we’ve been looking at how to bring the Pacemaker experience to more users, and it’s now clear that the only viable way forward is by licensing music directly into Pacemaker. We haven’t started music licensing before now as it is a daunting task for even the most well versed and something that needs absolute commitment, but we’ve now been given the perfect reason to do so!

We’re working on licensing a deep catalogue based on the tracks that are used in Pacemaker mixtapes. This will ensure that the majority of the hundreds of thousands of mixtapes in Pacemaker that our users have invested so much time and energy into will continue to work. There will be a few tracks missing occasionally, but should this happen, our AI will step in and mix the neighbouring tracks together, smoothing the experience. And we’re going to continue our licensing efforts, filling the gaps.

When crafting new mixtapes or listening to existing ones, no music streaming service will be required. Instead everybody will be able to listen to or create mixes based on the millions of tracks that we’re licensing, as long as they’re either a Pacemaker+ subscriber or using a free trial.

If you’re a Spotify user, you’ll still be able to sync your playlists to Pacemaker so that you can easily mix with the music you love. For Apple Music users, we plan to add support for you too, matching your playlists to our catalogue – with the possibility for us to add more services after launch.

We’re still working on the finer details so stay tuned for more information.

Jonas Norberg
CEO and Co-founder of Pacemaker