Samsung pulling its music and books apps

As Spotify celebrates hitting the 10 million paying subscriber milestone, Samsung is reaching the end of its music streaming venture. And, from July 1, Samsung's Music Hub will cease to be.

As Spotify celebrates hitting the 10 million paying subscriber milestone, Samsung is reaching the end of its music streaming venture. And, from July 1, Samsung's Music Hub will cease to be.

The company is already advising users that they will need to download all music purchases made from the app and use up any vouchers for it if they don't want to lose any of their tracks when the music-streaming service stops.

Samsung Music Hub was an ambitious attempt by Samsung to break into the digital music sales and streaming market with its own app and one aimed exclusively at Samsung device owners.

However, the service, which has only been live since May 2012, was clearly not engaging enough, despite the offer of a catalogue of 19 million songs and 100GB of cloud storage for a monthly fee of $10. Users could even stream (but not store) songs for free.

As well as shuttering Samsung Music, July 1 will also see the demise of Samsung's eBooks feature. From that date, users will no longer be able to buy and download books from Samsung hub and the feature will instead be rolled into an Amazon Kindle for Samsung app.

The end of in-house music streaming and eBook apps might just be the start. On May 14, Philip Berne, Samsung's Marketing Manager for Technical Media, revealed on Twitter that the whole of the Samsung Hub digital entertainment store (i.e., books, music, videos and Samsung apps) is also facing closure.