alex.mullr.net/blog

I find it really interesting hearing people’s thoughts on copyright, legality and entitlement.

To summarise a conversation I had recently: It’s a good thing Last.fm pays artists; people like artists, and music, and want them to stick around (shocking!). Last.fm isn’t fluid enough at the moment, and is losing possible users to (loosely defined) piracy because of it. And it’s not obvious that Last.fm is any more legal than Limewire.

The reason this is being dragged up now is because I received an invitation for Spotify from Ernesto this evening. The complaints I’ve heard about Last.fm are that playing a song sometimes takes too long and it simply doesn’t have the catalog required to keep people interested. Spotify, it seems, solves these problems. After doing a couple of searches with people much more into shit popular music than I am, it passes the catalog test. It also passes the speed test, with songs playing instantly - if you put this in front of someone, I’m not sure it would be immediately apparent that it’s an online service.

The best news? At the end of last month, Spotify announced that they support scrobbling to Last.fm directly from the preferences of their application. The two services can play brilliantly together. Whilst I won’t be paying the £10 a month for Spotify’s premium service (hell, the adverts aren’t even intrusive or often), the UK-based scrobbling site should be glad to hear that they won’t be losing the £1.50 I pay them per month, either.

Comments

By adam2z on 12 January 2009 at 05:12:

I tried to trackback, but to no avail.

I did some testing of spotify and its selection.