Tag: spotify
Fizy – super-quick streaming of songs and music videos
Are you a big fan of Spotify, but you’d like it to be more… illegal? Fizy is for you. It’s a super-quick website that’ll let you search for songs and music videos. I’m not kidding about super-quick, we’re talking ‘faster than searching your MP3 folder’ quick, on par with the aforementioned Spotify.
That’s not the only similarity. It’s got a very clean interface with minimal features and you can easily share tracks with other people. It claims to have more than 75 billion MP3s in its index, and you can expand or remove any videos involved.
Very impressive, and very useful for ‘do you know that song?’ moments. Not exactly a media player, though, as there’s no playlist functionality. I quite like that, though. That’s what I’ve got Spotify for.
Fizy (via @mychemtoilet)
Image courtesy of Lifehacker.
Spotify provide the soundtrack for 2009's Earth Hour
Want to go greener than the Spotify logo, but missing some symbolism to give your choice meaning? Well, join Spotify and the WWF (the panda people, not the wrestlers) for Earth Hour.
And what is Earth Hour exactly? Well, it’s the WWF’s message to world leaders that people are serious about climate change by encouraging millions of people to turn off their lights at the same time for 60 minutes – on Saturday 28th March at 8:30pm. Spotify’s involvement? An hour long playlist of darkness themed songs to keep spirits up while you keep tripping over bits of cabling.
Nokify – why Spotify and Nokia should team up
Scandinavia is a cold place. The nights are long, the winters are snowy, and the coasts are fjordy. To stave off the cold, they run their computers all night long, and as a result the populations of the Nordic countries have become rather adept programmers and designers.
They make brilliant stuff, like the Pirate Bay, Ericsson phones, and a smörgåsbord of other exciting inventions, including Nokia and Spotify. In my post this morning about Nokia’s new music phones, I questioned why the two companies hadn’t made friends yet.
After all – Spotify has definite mobile ambitions and is in the process of pumping out an iPhone app. Nokia, on the other hand, dearly want to do more with music, but their Comes with Music service is an awful DRM-encumbred experience. Spotify has brilliant software, but no hardware. Nokia has incredible handsets, but a crappy software experience.
So why not combine? Ditch Comes with Music, which must be a buttload of hassle for Nokia to operate, and get Spotify to do exactly the same thing, but better. Build a year’s subscription into the handset price, and everyone’s happy. Nokia gets a fantastic music service that it doesn’t have to run, Spotify gets a tonne of new happy users, and the phone-buyer gets unlimited streaming music for free.
What could go wrong? Well, that depends on how Spotify implements its mobile experience compared to the desktop software. A constant 3G connection is unlikely, so there’s going to need to be some on-device storage of tracks, even if it’s heavily encrypted.
From what we know of Spotify’s iPhone application, it appears that you’ll be able to cache entire playlists – which would be fantastic. When the device can get a 3G connection, it will, but most of the time you’ll probably want to be playing off the internal memory – for reasons of battery life if nothing else.
A Spotify S60 application is coming, there’s no doubt about that, but with Nokia’s resources, expertise and cash behind the startup, something really exciting could happen that could really be a deal-breaker for someone choosing between a Sony Ericsson, Samsung or Nokia handset.
Best of all, it could finally drop the axe on the aging iPod, providing a fantastic, integrated on-the-go music listening experience with a catalogue in the cloud. I can’t think of anything better.
Spotify and Nokia
Nokia pumps out three new music phones, and comments on the N97, Spotify and Comes with Music
Nokia seems to have decided that music is where it wants to be. The Finnish handset-maker has announced three new handsets today – the 5730 XpressMusic, the 5330 XpressMusic, and the 5030 – which doesn’t have an XpressMusic suffix, but does have an XpressRadio one.
The handsets range from budget to high-end. Starting at the bottom, the 5030 XpressRadio is a candybar with a built-in FM radio antenna, not the internet radio that Nokia’s been pushing to date. It’s very cheap, at just €40 before contracts come into play. Budget-tastic. It’ll be available in Q2.
Then there’s the 5330 XpressMusic, which has a different design to many Nokia handsets. More square. It’s a slider, and it has a 3.5mm headphone jack, 24 hours of listening time battery life, and some sort of crazy light thing going on. If you have any idea what that’s about, then free free to comment. Unfortunately, the 5330 won’t be running S60 – just the cut-down S40 version. It’ll cost €184 before taxes or contracts get involved. It’ll be available in Q3 2009.
Then, at the top of the range is the 5730 XpressMusic which comes in black/red, black/grey, grey/blue and black/pink. It’s got both a numeric keypad and a slide-out QWERTY, which shrinks the screen down a little, but it’s the only phone of the three to be running S60.
Specs-wise, the 5730 has got Wi-Fi, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a 3.2-megapixel camera, HSDPA, and GPS. You can also access your media from the home screen, which will be handy for those who want easier access to their content on the go. It’ll cost €280, and will be available in Q3 2009.
The phones were announced with a webchat this morning, and as part of that chat, the Nokia team also answered a few random questions from the audience. Here’s a few interesting tidbits that they came out with.
Firstly, when asked about the N97, Product Manager for Music Solutions, Steven Stewart, said the handset is “like sex in your hand”(!). The device hasn’t been announced as a Comes with Music device, but Stewart said it would be “perfect for getting unlimited free music downloads”, which sounds like a hint to me.
The inevitable question about Spotify was asked – Nokia responded: “Yes, the music team is aware of most all types of music services and devices. Spotify is one of many interesting new services. Social Music is an important part of the music experience which our teams are busy as beavers working on!”. Given Spotify’s now-officially-announcedmobile ambitions, a tie-in could be very powerful.
Discussing Apple and competition, Stewart said: “Nokia is doing many exciting things with music that apple is not. Nokia has a large range of devices for most every taste, style, and use. Nokia also has a subscription model for unlimited free music that users keep even AFTER the membership ends. But we do look at ALL of the competitive intelligence to make sure we are developing music experiences that consumers want.”.
Lastly, with regards to Comes with Music, the service will shortly be announced in Italy, Sweden, and Mexico. There are no current plans to unbundle the service from handsets, so that it’ll be usable with any device. I suspect that’s because, like Apple, Nokia wants to carefully control the ecosystem and not have to deal with supporting other manufacturer’s handsets.
The DRM on the service is “a requirement of the labels and publishers at this point”, says Stewart. “Nokia Music team is looking for the best experiences for Music Lovers. Getting DRM free music is one of the things which we are in discussions with the labels and publishers about.”
Nokia 5730, 5330 and 5030.
Spotify confirms mobile ambitions, and outlines roadmap
PaidContent UK has a great interview with Daniel Ek, the CEO of the so-good-it-makes-us-weep music streaming service Spotify. It’s very wide-ranging, but the most interesting bits cover Spotify’s plans for the future.
Ek discusses whether Spotify is viable as ad-funded alone – saying: “We launched probably at the worst possible time in 70 years for advertising.” He points out, though, that the service has A-list brands involved and average listening times per user are “over an hour per user per day”.
The other option is funding the service by pushing the site’s premium offering. Although Ek acknowledges that the vast majority of users aren’t paying, he says: “Rest assured, we haven’t really started doing the kind of features that we think will really drive adoption of becoming a paid user.”
What might those features be? Ek discusses user-created radio stations, exclusive interviews and cross-platform interoperability. On that last note, he’s talking about mobile service – the area where Spotify could finally drop the axe on the iPod.
But, like Apple, he wants to do it right: “The success of Spotify is based on its simplicity – we won’t do another mobile thing where it works (only) so-so – we’re going to do it where it’s simple, easy and just works.” He also promises plenty of upgrades for the desktop client in the meantime.
There’s more discussion of Spotify’s plans for launching in the States and Ek’s take on the Pirate Bay court case in the interview – go check it out. Then come back here and let us know in the comments what features would make you pay for a Premium subscription.
Spotify gets hacked
Revolutionary digital music streaming service Spotify has revealed a serious security breach that affected its servers before December 19th last year. The company thought that it had managed to fix it before any damage was done, but last week Spotify found out that “a group” of some sort had managed to gain access to information necessary to guess passwords.
Although security breaches are par for the course at most internet startups, so far Spotify had managed to avoid them. It’s almost a rite of passage for new companies. The company is recommending that anyone who hasn’t changed their password since December 19th to change it immediately, and is emailing all its users to that effect.
Official Spotify Blog
Spotify signs up a quarter of a million UK users, and 800,000 a million users worldwide
Ad-supported streaming music service Spotify has managed to recruit a quarter of a million UK users to its excellent music service. It’s a nice milestone for the service which is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in digital music for a long time.
But Spotify isn’t resting on its laurels. On its official blog, the company is inviting users to hassle their favourite bands and labels to join the service. They recommend hunting down a band’s label, cross-referencing it with their uber-list of labels they have deals with, and if it doesn’t match, then asking them to email [email protected].
What are you missing that you want to hear on the service? Go hunt them down, and then tell us in the comments below.
(via NMA)
The Revolution Will Be Streaming
This is my 1,000th post on Tech Digest. My first was about Robopong, and I have no idea what my last will be about, but this one’s about the economics of free music, which is a subject that I’ve touched on many times while writing here. It’s about how a free download turned me into a massive fan of a band.
Yesterday, personalized streaming radio site Last.fm announced on Twitter, that its free downloads page was back. It’s a page, which can be found here, that lists a bunch of tracks that bands have decided to give away, for promotional purposes. According to the old thinking prevalent among record companies, a download = a lost sale. In this case, a download led me to a whole lot more than that.
The download in question is a song called, wonderfully, “The Revolution Will Be Streaming“, a nod to Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 classic “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised“. It’s by an American post-rock band that I hadn’t previously heard of called Saxon Shore.
My eye was caught by the title, and I downloaded it on the off-chance I’d like it. I did like it, a lot, and after a few listens, I headed over to Amazon. The band’s got a few tracks available on the download store, but the album featuring “The Revolution Will Be Streaming”, “The Exquisite Death of Saxon Shore” wasn’t. So I bought the CD instead. On import.
Because the album has to be sent over from the states, I’m looking at a couple of weeks before I can listen to the damn thing. So I checked Spotify. The band isn’t there, sadly. I realized that when it does arrive, all I’m going to do is rip it to high-bitrate MP3 and put in on my Zune, so my next step was to head right over to the Pirate Bay and see if I could find it.
Turns out that the site doesn’t (at the time of searching, anyway). Luckily I’ve got other sources, so I grabbed it from another tracker and this morning on the bus on the way into the office, a bizarre and unexpected diversion around the back roads of King’s Cross was made all the more lovely by Saxon Shore’s wonderful album.
The band doesn’t seem to be touring at the moment, but when they show up in London, I’ll definitely be there and I’m fully intending to drag down as many of my post-rock-friendly friends as I can. I might well buy a t-shirt, and when I’ve fully digested this album, if I’m still loving it then there’s a good chance I’ll buy some of the older ones.
Now, I’m not pretending that there’s millions of people doing what I did above. Nor am I pretending that this would work just as well if every band in the world started giving away tracks. But if Saxon Shore hadn’t given away that song, then they wouldn’t have gained me as a fan. That’s why free music works, why music blogs are the best way to find new bands, and why free music isn’t the devaluing of art that some claim it is.
I welcome your comments and thoughts on the above, but before you do, go listen to the track in question. You can stream it from Last.fm here. The revolution will indeed be streaming, it would appear.
VIDEO: Spotify iPhone application in action
Digital Buzzard’s managed to get hold of a video of a Spotify iPhone application in action. We’ve been aware of the iPhone app being in development for a while, as well as an S60 app, and presumably an Android one, but we haven’t seen it running before now.
As you can imagine, it looks fantastic. It promises to give you access to over-the-air streaming of Spotify’s entire music library, as well as playlist access. Best of all, you’ll be able to cache playlists while in Wi-Fi areas so that you’ll be able to play them back when you’re on the go. Initially it’ll only be available to Premium users (presumably because it’s tricky to work out how to serve ads in cached mode).
But the big question here is “will Apple let them do it?”. This service completely replaces everything that the iTunes store does on the device, offering on-demand access to songs. We’ve seen what happens when companies try to improve existing iPhone functionality.
That said, Last.fm exists happily on the device. The difference might be that the Last.fm application won’t let you listen to tracks on-demand, just offers you various radio stations based on your listening habits. It won’t cache songs, either.
Proper streaming mobile music is the holy grail for a lot of people. Already I barely listen to my MP3 collection on my PC any more, relying almost totally on Spotify. If I could get it on my mobile phone, too, reliably, then my Zune might end up totally retired.
(via Digital Buzzard)
Spotify is wonderful, but it has five problems
It’s no secret that I love, adore, and worship Spotify. It’s far and away my favourite piece of software that’s emerged over the last year. The reason I love it so much is its simplicity, and the way it does nearly everything exactly right. You can see exactly why I love it from my original writeup here.
Yesterday, Spotify removed its invitation-only status in the UK. It’s been possible to sign up without an invite, via a bit of URL trickery, for a little while, but now it’s open to anyone. Go get your sisters, brothers, parents and neighbors signed up – they’ll love it. However, Spotify, for all its awesomeness, isn’t quite perfect. Here’s five reasons why.
