Tag: spotify
Why the Pirate Bay verdict means sod-all for downloaders
The RIAA, BPI, IFPI, MPAA and a million other acronyms, all greeted the Swedish court’s verdict against the Pirate Bay on Friday with the utmost of glee. I have no doubt that parties were held, and major label record execs probably had an excellent weekend, but there was one little thing in their reactions that interested me.
“There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that.”
Those are the words of John Kennedy, chairman of the IFPI. I’ve picked them out because they illustrate wonderfully why the major record labels in their current state are still absolutely clueless about how filesharing works.
Trying to chop of the head of the file-sharing Hydra is utterly futile. It’s the world’s most massive game of whack-a-mole where it takes years for the copyright owners to swing the hammer and it takes hours for moles to pop up and down.
The pointlessness of the fight is illustrated wonderfully by the Pirate Bay’s statement today that they’re going to appeal. An appeal means that (until it’s complete) the court’s judgement is essentially worthless. It can’t be used as precedent.
That appeal will take several years and thanks to the speed at which innovation occurs in the filesharing community, by the time it’s complete The Pirate Bay will likely be a footnote in history. There’ll be another massive source of copyrighted content. The difference is that it’ll probably be legitimate.
In an interview today, Spotify’s UK head, Jon Mitchell, said that his company isn’t bothered about Last.fm, iTunes or any other download platforms. What it’s really competing against is piracy.
What Spotify knows, that the major labels still haven’t figured out, is that price is only one factor in the war for consumer’s ears. Catalogue, ease of use and speed are also incredibly important. Until Spotify came along, there was nothing that could touch filesharing networks for all four of those factors.
What Spotify did was to attack file-sharing on all four of those fronts. Spotify is free and it has the largest catalogue of any legitimate digital music service, so it’s as close as possible to piracy on that front. It’s also considerably easier for non-techy people to understand than Bittorrentm, which can, frankly, be quite confusing to newbies.
Lastly, it’s far quicker to start up Spotify, search and hit play than it is to go to The Pirate Bay, get the torrent, then hope there’s people seeding it, then wait for people to download before finally being able to play tracks. Consumers want software that just gets out of their way and lets them do what they want to do. File-sharing most certainly isn’t that.
The moment that a company comes along doing the same thing for TV shows and movies, piracy figures for those types of content will drop massively. The iPlayer is a great start, but it needs content from every network, every producer and every country.
What will eventually defeat piracy is a shift in people’s habits to access over ownership. If you can get content whenever you want, in whatever format you want, then you don’t need a copy sitting on your hard drive. That makes it much easier to deliver advertising along with the content, so greater revenues are possible for companies offering streaming.
It’ll require a mindset change among consumers, and a roll-out of mobile access to services that trust the user with a decent-size cache for use when out of signal range, but all of those are definitely within reach of the average consumer before a Pirate Bay appeal could ever be concluded.
The Pirate Bay verdict means nothing for record companies because the site stays up. It means nothing for the Pirate Bay’s administrators, because they’re appealing the verdict and so they’ll be stuck in legal limbo for years.
Lastly, it doesn’t mean anything for the general public, the downloaders, because they’re all slowly moving to services that offer access, rather than ownership. Companies that help facilitate that change will be the ones that I’ll be betting on in the next few years.
Spotify API "not much use to anyone", say developers
Developers aren’t too impressed with the much-trumpeted release of Spotify’s API. The blog post announcing the availability of the API, and the news article on Slashdot on the subject, are both peppered with comments about how limited the API actually is.
In fact, right now there’s only one thing you can do with it. Make a Spotify program that’ll let Premium subscribers listen on IA-32 Linux. That’s it. No websites, no mobile clients, no set-top boxes, or games consoles. Nothing. Certainly no making money off your application, even though you have to pay for a premium account to get an application key in the first place.
Now, to be fair to Spotify, they’ve said that they’ll expand things over time as they get used to running an API. But in its current state, the API is pretty much useless to 99.9% of people who want to do something with it. That’s a shame.
Libspotify (via Pansentient)
Gadget Show Live 2009 – DAB and Wi-Fi radio
Ok, so a couple of months ago I was muttering about the possible death of consumer electronics citing companies going under, gadgets getting commodotised and innovation being lavished on apps and widgets rather than hardware. Well after today I am…
Digging in Spotify's cache – can you get MP3s out of it?
Since Spotify arrived on the digital music scene last October, people have been flabbergasted by how fast it works. How could it possibly be able to search and index millions of files and then deliver you the music stream quicker than searching your own MP3 collection? The answer is three-fold. A peer-to-peer infrastructure, fantastic coding, and a massive cache.
The cache is the most interesting bit. By default, the program uses up to 10% of your hard drive for storing the music that it downloads. You can have a poke around in it by going to C:UsersUSERNAMEAppDataLocalSpotifyStorage on Vista, or the equivalent directory for other operating systems.
The files residing within are the music that plays when you double-click a track name in the software. Stuff you play gets saved to this directory, so that when you play it in the future, there’s a local copy and it can find it faster. So can you pull out the tracks in a usable form to copy to your MP3 player?
The short answer is yes. The slightly longer answer is yes, with a lot of difficulty and if you don’t mind breaking the law. For most people, it’ll be beyond them – you’ll need to use source code provided by dodgy open-source client Despotify, and you’ll need to have a Premium account – because Despotify doesn’t work with free ones.
In reality, it’s not worth the bother. You’ll eventually end up with a 160kbps OGG file. That’s fine for streaming but when you convert it to MP3 to put on your MP3 player you’ll lose even more quality. Even if you’re not an audiophile you’ll be able to hear the difference.
Simply put, if you’re intent on breaking the law then in reality it’s much easier to go to The Pirate Bay and get the tracks you want there. But why bother? As actually-quite-useful piss-take website Spotibay illustates, if people have fast access to music in a user-friendly way, then they won’t bother with piracy.
Where that argument falls down is mobile access – even though Spotify’s rolling out the mobile clients, what happens when you go out of coverage, on the tube or in rural areas?Then you’re screwed, right? Well, if hints on the company’s support forum are followed-through, then maybe not.
A post on the support forum requesting that the company provide cache-only playback for offline conditions met with a surprisingly positive response with the company, stating:
“An offline play mode is a feature we’re looking at implementing at some point in the future. I think any feature we develop would likely have the option for the user to decide what is available for offline play.”
If that functionality is extended to mobile, and there seems no reason to believe that it wouldn’t be, then that could have massive positive implications for mobile clients – pick the albums that you want while in a Wi-Fi area and then while on the tube or even when you just have a 3G connection you can still enjoy music, as well as streaming when available.
MP3 pricing war erupts between Apple and Amazon
Today, Apple finally implements the variable pricing that has been promised since label renegotiations in January, but the company must be seething a little that Amazon grabbed all the headlines yesterday with an offer featuring chart-topping MP3s for just 30p.
The deal, featuring artists like Lady Gaga, Kings of Leon, Coldplay and La Roux, will tempt yet more consumers over to Amazon’s DRM-free, easy-to-understand platform from the bloated iTunes ecosystem.
But the funny thing here is that we’re not really talking about music fans. We’re talking about mums and dads, people who buy the occasional track but don’t really keep up with much new music or go to gigs.
The kind of people who buy albums in Tesco, not independent record shops. They’re the people that the record labels successfully marketed CDs to in the 90s, but who are now switching to casual gaming and television since music is so omnipresent in everyday life. They simply don’t need to buy it any more.
Amazon’s strategy seems two-fold. Firstly it wants to steal customers off iTunes – that much is clear by the timing of yesterday’s announcement. It also wants to grow the digital download market, though, by marketing MP3s at people buying CDs, books and DVDs from the site.
Ultimately the whole thing is futile, though, as the general public follows the early adopters from ownership of MP3s to access to vast streaming libraries. Already, pretty much everyone who’s interested in listening to music on their computer has tried Spotify.
Personally speaking, my music listening within the last couple of years has already shifted entirely from my MP3 collection to Spotify and Last.fm. The only time I go back is to listen to obscurer stuff that Spotify doesn’t have, and even then I sometimes don’t bother – I just listen to something Spotify *does* have.
At Christmas, I showed Spotify to my Dad. I’ve never seen him so enthralled by a bit of software – he spent a solid four hours playing with it. Whenever I show it to people are resolutely not early adopters they’re amazed by it too.
That’s why I’m so sure that the pricing war doesn’t matter. As soon as the general public properly discovers Spotify, and when Spotify sorts out its mobile clients, then they won’t need Amazon, iTunes or anyone else. They’ll be converts to “access”, and they won’t go back.
OPINION: Don't forget about Facebook
With the tech world all a-twitter about, er… Twitter, and having little sexy accidents when talking about Spotify, it’s sometimes easy to forget about Facebook. In reality, Facebook is only a couple of years older than both Twitter and Spotify, and there’s still people out there who say things like “I don’t get all this Facebook malarky”.
Let’s start with the numbers. Facebook recently hit 175 million active users – if it were a country it’d be the 6th most populous in the world, between Brazil and Pakistan. More than 3 billion minutes are spent on the site every day – enough time to watch the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy 4.3 million times. Or read “War and Peace” 35,000 times.
Don’t forget that Facebook popularized the app store concept way before Apple, too. Sure, most Facebook apps are a load of old rubbish and their integration was an unmitigated disaster for the user experience (hence why they’ve mostly disappeared) but most iPhone apps are crap too. Seriously, how long does iFart sit on your phone before you delete it?
Despite being blamed for wanton destruction, Facebook even saves lives! News reached us this morning of a kid who was saved from a suicide attempt by a friend over Facebook chat. The power of having all you friends at your fingertips can stop people from doing silly things, and can rescue them when they do silly things.
So don’t forget about Facebook. Businesses – If you’re developing an Android app, stop and think – why not port this to Facebook, too? If you’re thinking of starting an ad campaign on Twitter or Spotify, remember Facebook’s userbase and think about using Facebook’s powerful ad tools to reach its bazillions of users. It’s not old hat.
The rest of you – go check in on your Facebook friends. Maybe you haven’t seen them since primary school, but that doesn’t mean you have nothing in common – on the contrary, you might have more than ever in common. Go poke that girl you ‘fancied’ when you were 13. She might even poke you back. The rest of the world is a little slower than you, mister early-adopter. Don’t forget about them.
Here’s a handy link. Click it, and spend half an hour remembering the web two years ago. You might even like it more: Facebook.
Spotify launching API
This is the big news that followers of Spotify have been waiting for for a little while. The revolutionary music service is launching an API “sometime this week”. It’ll give developers access to the raw workings behind the software, including its streaming facilities.
I don’t need to tell you that this is *fantastic* news. Freeing up the vast catalogue that Spotify has built up will energize developers and you’re going to suddenly see the service appearing everywhere – from phones to set-top-boxes and games consoles, but also on the web. The mobile aspect will be most interesting – anyone will be able to build their own mobile client for the service for any platform – BlackBerry, Symbian, iPhone, Android – whatever.
Also revealed by Spotify – 40,000 new users sign up each day, and users are spending on average 70 minutes listening to the service every day! That’s three lots of ads served to every user every day. Not bad!
When the API is out, we’ll scan the nascent developers scene and bring you the best of the user-built applications.
(via Guardian)
Spotify is three years old, hints at future plans
Our favourite digital music service, Spotify, is three years old today. That seems like a lot, considering we’ve only been able to use it in the UK since October, but in that short time it’s already completely changed the way I listen to music on my PC, and made me listen to a much wider range of bands too.
To celebrate the anniversary, as well as the 40th birthday of founder Martin Lorentzon, the company has put up a blog post that talks (in somewhat vague terms) about the future direction and plans for the company.
There’s a lot of hints in the blog post about mobile devices – something that the company hasn’t been keeping very secret. Intriguingly, though, the company also mentions set-top boxes, IM, and social networks as future directions for expansion.
Spotify mentions, too, the possibilities of enhanced social features and pre-release content for premium users – something that could drive greater takeup of the subscription service. That gets interesting in the comments section – with several people saying that if the fee was halved, then they’d pay it. I wonder if they’d get twice the takeup if they chopped the price in half.
The most exciting bit, though? The closing sentence of the post – “We plan to have more detailed information for you in the next few weeks, stay tuned”. If I were a betting man, I’d put money on that being the iPhone application that we revealed in February, a leaked video demo of which is posted below.
Spotify Blog
Top five dream digital music partnerships
This morning, Spotify and 7digital announced a ‘strategic partnership’ that’ll let Spotify users click straight through to buying MP3s on 7digital. Although I’ve awarded both of them an official Tech Digest badge of awesomeness in the past, the tie-up isn’t much more than the sum of its parts. Let’s have a look at five other dream partnerships that could really rock the world of digital music.
Pink Floyd and Guitar Hero
Once, not long ago, that would have read “The Beatles”, but the Fab Four’s estates have now given the thumbs up to Beatles Rock Band, so the net has to be cast a little wider. There are still a few digital standouts – most notably Pink Floyd but also Led Zeppelin – that haven’t worked very much with the Guitar Hero or Rock Band developers.
Other holdouts – Metallica, Tool and AC/DC have reneged on their digital hesitancy to get more heftily involved with the series. Tool provided artwork and several songs to Guitar Hero: World Tour, and Metallica are producing their own version of the game.
Top of my list, though, is Pink Floyd. As a massive fan of The Division Bell, I can’t think of anything more awesome than twiddling my way through “Coming Back to Life”. Blasting through ‘Money’ on bass in 7/4 time.
Major labels and Bittorrent
This might be a bit of a contentious one, and it’s probably the least likely of the lot, but it’s also the one that could prove the most fruitful. The major labels have the content cracked – the one thing people don’t say about them is that they have bad taste in bands – and Bittorrent is one of the most efficient distribution systems that there is.
If a major label set up a subscription-based Bittorrent tracker, where for £5 or a month or equivalent people were free to download and share playlists of as much as they like of that label’s content, then there’d be umpteen different benefits for the label.
Firstly, people in the community would emerge as tastemakers, who’d be great for the label working out which acts can sink or swim. Secondly, they’d not have to worry about distribution at all – the more popular an act, the faster everyone’s downloads would be. Lastly, they could easily track the relative popularity of different bands and allocate the revenues accordingly.
Audiosurf and Mobile Phones
Last year, I met with a senior staff member at Namco Mobile over my allegations that ‘mobile games are almost always awful’ – a view that I generally still hold. We had a good chat, and respectfully differed on a few things. But then I told him that he should convert Audiosurf to mobile.
He looked confused – ‘what’s Audiosurf?’. I explained that it’s a game where you load in whatever MP3s you like, and then it generates a track for you based on that song, where fast bits slope downhill, slow bits slope uphill and obstructions appear in time with the beat. You then race along the course, picking up blocks and lining them up in a grid.
It’s basically a bit like iTunes playing Tetris at WipEout. It’s absolutely perfect for mobile – short games, low graphics requirements, and global high scores uploaded via internet connections. Plus that compulsive ‘must beat the high score’ factor that’s seen me listen to far more Girls Aloud songs than anyone ever should.
If you want to see what I’m on about, then the game costs just £6, and there’s a free demo available too. Go check it out, and then think of how cool that’d be to play on the bus.
Ninjam and Freesound
Thanks to @filiphnizdo for the tip on this one, because I wasn’t aware of the awesome-looking Ninjam until this afternoon. It’s crazy collaboration software that lets musicians jam with each other.
Think that’ll result in a latency mess? You’d be right, except that it delays the playback of your tracks to other musicians until the end of a bar. You’re playing along, therefore, with what the other musicians were playing during the last bar. As a result, it doesn’t work so well for pop music, but works brilliantly for more ‘jam’-y genres like jazz and post-rock.
Freesound, on the other hand, is a database of samples with creative commons licenses that anyone can use. A tie-up between the two, therefore, would be fantastic for the creation of sample-laden, gently evolving tracks – a bit like Lemon Jelly or Boards of Canada. It’s got to be moddable into the software, right?
Spotify and Last.fm
But I’ve saved my absolute favourite for last. A tie-up between Spotify and Last.fm, with the former supplying music and the latter supplying the social network and recommendations functionality, would be the best thing since sliced bread.
Spotify knows this, and founder Daniel Ek has publicly stated that he’d love to license Last.fm’s recommendations engine. Last.fm’s weakness is that it doesn’t do much in the way of full-track on-demand streaming. Spotify’s is that it doesn’t do radio very well. Surely, a match made in heaven.
Will we ever see it? Despite Spotify’s advances, Last.fm has been a little tight-lipped on the subject. Part of that is that it’s got its own problems to deal with at the moment. Part of that might also be that it thinks it can replicate Spotify’s functionality itself without their help. Whether that’s true or not, Spotify has the buzz right now – and Last.fm doesn’t. You can’t disregard that factor.
Your turn
What would be your dream matchup? Drop us an email – [email protected] – and tell us, and we’ll showcase the best of your suggestions in a future post.
Spotify and 7Digital buddy up
Digital music upstart-of-the-moment Spotify has added yet another revenue stream to its growing collection – users are now able to right-click tracks to buy them via 7Digital.
Currently, the click just takes you to the relevant 7Digital page for the album. In the future, however, the companies hope to allow one-click downloads in Spotify itself, as well as functionality to buy entire playlists.
This move should further silence the doubters who claim that Spotify has no business model. On the contrary, this is now a third solid way of monetising their business, after ads and premium subscriptions. I do doubt a little how much people will use the functionality, though.
