Comments on: Why my love for Spotify goes deeper than just a great service.

By: Dave Nattriss

Dave Nattriss — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 15:01:20 +0000

I don’t have much more to add, but did just find this about how you can already hack Spotify (if you have a premium account) to keep the music for good:

http://www.techdigest.tv/2009/04/since_spotify_a.html

By: Jack

Jack — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 11:05:01 +0000

I agree with Hermione on this matter. I can see that last.fm and Spotify offers different kinds of services, but I find Spotify a bit more ajusted to the “new web” than last.fm. As Hermione pointed put, simplicity is king on the Internet nowadays, especially when people more than ever before use their internet-connected computers as their sole media entertainment system.

The clean interface of Hulu, the simplicity of Spotify and the immediacy of Twitter do very well in the ever growing complexity of the Internet, I think. Myriads of people have myriads of options and choices every time they go on the Internet. Yet, people tend to return to a handful of services like Facebook,Blogger,Redtube, Youtube, Skype, Twitter, amazon, ebay. Roughly one site/service per need it seems.

Spotify could be the “one stop shop” for listening for music online. Last.fm serves a number of needs, and offers a lot of functions but I´m not sure if it really rules any territory. They may be the king of listening statistics and music recommendation but those features takes commitment from users over considerable amounts of time in order to be really useful. The future value of last.fm relies on the willingness of users continuing that commitment. And there are signs that people , especially since last.fm introduced the monthly fee for for international radio users, are not as willing to commit as they perhaps once were.

But I my main concern with last.fm is the slightly confusing interface, the fact that the site is really slow at times (at least in Sweden) and their lack of skills in communicating with their users. I don´t see change in last.fm. I don´t see where the company is heading and I see a growing number of people voicing their frustration over this.

I like last.fm (and the people behind it seems to be really smart and passionate about music and programming) and I scrobble everything I listen to. But as a company and service they are to passive in dealing with their shortcomings for me to have full confidence in their survival and continuing quality of service.

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 08:52:25 +0000

Not quite sure why some people get so worked up over this sort of thing.

The way I see it, Spotify is for people who know what they want to listen to, Last.fm is for people who want to discover music they might like, in a community. And there are plenty of other services offering similar things.

I like spotify because of its clean desktop interface, it gives me access to lots of free music, its more accessible than last fm and doesn’t have the community features which I don’t really have time for. Its great!

But people can use whatever they like, why get all worked up about one or they other, in this case they both offer excellent free services that aim to do different things

By: Dave Nattriss

Dave Nattriss — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:25:26 +0000

And anyone interested in more debate on this stuff should check out this pre-Spotify podcast:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/audio/2008/sep/30/tech.weekly.podcast

By: Dave Nattriss

Dave Nattriss — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 23:27:12 +0000

Hmm, I suspect over half of the 200 million ‘active’ Facebook users don’t make full use of most of its features, including most of our mums and dads – they simply have to log in once a month to be counted in the stat. Only about a third of my Facebook friends (which are a mix of a minority of techies and a majority of regular folks from my past and present) use it in any kind of ‘active’ way – if I go to the profile pages of any of the others, their wall feeds are virtually empty or only have content that is months old.

One problem for Spotify is going to be that, for now, you have to download and install the client. If you could do everything via a web interface (just like you can with Twitter.com vs. using a desktop/mobile app like TweetDeck, for instance), that would improve ease of use for most people – a lot of people only have ‘net access at work where they can’t necessarily install software on their machines.

But yes, you are completely right that an initial level of simplicity is vital for success. I hear ya

By: hermione

hermione — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 23:07:45 +0000

It doesn’t matter what i originally said- The conversation has moved on from there – I was replying to your previous point about Spotify not doing something new.

The internals of Facebook are like the insides of a Swiss clock and that’s what make it work so well…outside sleek and simple inside, like clockwork.

Mums and Dads wouldn’t be joining Facebook if it was complicated to use as most would not understand how it works.

As there is more and more information out there and more services thrown at people, it will be the ones like Spotify/Facebook -less complex externally- which will win users.

People are looking for the simple option in a tangle of web complexity.

By: Dave Nattriss

Dave Nattriss — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 22:47:33 +0000

Arguably Facebook has done a lot more than just making social networking simple – it’s a whole social utility with a 2-year old API that’s made it the highest valued web application in the world… but I get your point, Spotify is, at this stage, very clean and simple to use. That wasn’t really what you said in your original post though.

P.S. Here’s the URL for your favourite’s playlist: http://open.spotify.com/user/hermione/playlist/7r9yzc1fZ5N5PA1MZ5hEN3 – it’s a long’un!

By: hermione

hermione — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 22:35:52 +0000

It’s not a question of doing something new, it’s a question of doing something well that people enjoy using.
Social networking sites have been around long before Facebook- but what Facebook did well was pull the best features from other sites and made it simpler to use.
As you say Napster have been offering streaming music for a long time and services like Last Fm do a similar thing- but Last Fm have a limit on the number of times you can play your favourite tacks (especially if they are popular) and other small annoying things.

Spotify, like Twitter, is incredibly simple to use. It’s things like it’s drag and drop feature and being able to share playlists with minimum clicks of a mouse which make it so loveable.

By: Dave Nattriss

Dave Nattriss — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 22:03:14 +0000

By the way, I think this story: http://www.musicweek.com/story.asp?storycode=1037410 hasn’t really been picked up on much in the digital world yet (perhaps because Music Week’s news is subscription only). I have a subscription to MW, and the jist is that the UK music industry’s OCC (Official Charts Company) will have the world’s first chart for ad-supported music services, such as Spotify, we7.com and last.fm, sometime in the second half of this year – we7 are already on board and they will need the others too to make it fair. This will be separate to its existing Official Subscription Plays Chart, for paid services like Napster, which will be published on the OCC’s site (http://www.theofficialcharts.com) by the end of April.

It’s interesting to see how already on last.fm’s own chart, listed in Music Week, Kings Of Leon’s ‘Sex On Fire’ has been No. 1 for the past 6 months, far longer than on the regular singles chart (physical and digital sales). Whether that’s made them any money at all though is not at all clear.

By: Oisin Lunny

Oisin Lunny — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 22:01:09 +0000

Loving Spotify to bits… a Spotmix would indeed be cool..

There was an interesting article many years ago about how, followng the explosion in the sale of CE equipment for home musicians, and cheap online distribution, the most important function in music would be that of the arbiters of taste (eg the rise of Superstar DJs).

We have Spotify on all day at our office, but filters such as Share My Playlist (http://tr.im/iDJK) and the Spotify playlists at The Quietus (http://tr.im/iDJo) are pretty much essential.

As regards the old vs new business models of retail vs feels-like-free, Gerd Leonard provides some essential thoughts (http://tr.im/iDKU) as does this article about the end of newspapers (http://tr.im/iCaM).

For publishing Mixtapes the best, by a long shot, is Mixcloud – in closed beta but PM me for an invite code.

Have fun in Amsterdam

Oisin