Alex Muller

Spotify’s recent announcement was an interesting one to read; I assume (correctly or not) that they wouldn’t make this change unless it was the only reason they could stay in business, and that the advertising just wasn’t supporting them as much as they hoped it would.

Yesterday was the 1st May, so their new restrictions came into force for all existing customers. They presented this screen to free users:

Which is why it was very, very interesting to wake up this morning and see this on Facebook:

Aside from the huge sense of entitlement towards being able to get stuff for free, this is odd because Spotify have managed to get students to pay for something online. For those who may not understand the gravity of that statement, the phrase “blood from a stone” comes to mind. University students—at least in the UK—are not particularly accustomed to handing out money all over the place, especially in the form of regular, monthly payments.

Spotify is the only business I can think of that has had phenomenal success and gained millions of users by providing a free service, and moved entirely to a paid model. And they’ve set the price so low that affording it isn’t an issue for a large number of young people.

There’s been a slew of new businesses setting up with no way to make money to be seen (Twitter, of course, is the best known offender). But Spotify have apparently cracked it. They’ve made something that people rely on so much that, once it was taken away, a load of people felt the need to pay.

Searching Facebook and Twitter for mentions of Spotify yields a lot of posts about unlimited/premium sign-ups:

Spotify, what a load of crap! Guess I am forced into having to buy the premium version just to keep it :@

has caved and actually paid for spotify…dark days…

Same, I did it last night…

@Richard28Wood Bloody spotify.. I might buy it at some point. How’s revision going?

Just upgraded to Spotify unlimited, byebye adverts and time-limits, byebye £5 a month.

Might bite the bullet and pay Spotify Unlimited

There’s a lot of anger out there from people who feel like Spotify owe them something, but I’d nevertheless love to see a graph of free/paid conversions for today. I don’t think they’ve done too badly.

On the train back to York from Last.fm’s Hack Day last year, Alice introduced me to pixel art (her post on Guess Who is a great example of this style). At the time, I remember making some comment about how she’d effectively ruined my degree because making pictures of people from dots of colour would be my life from then on. To be honest, it never really caught on with me – I think I’m just naturally crap at drawing people.

However, that’s all just changed. I found a thread on a music site entitled "MS Paint Your Favorite Album", encouraging users to recreate the front covers of iconic or important albums (to them) using the standard Paint included with Windows.

If you’ve got thirty minutes or an hour spare, it’s a really great way to spend some time. I wanted something simple to start with, and I think this turned out pretty well.

So, give it a go: Microsoft Paint if you’re on Windows, the open source Paintbrush if you’re on a Mac. No layers, no fancy text tools, no nothing. Brush, line tool, eraser… and get to it, without forgetting to post the results somewhere.

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

[03/01 00:56:51] limewire has free music
[03/01 00:57:05] limewire’s illegal
[03/01 00:57:37] last fm is doing exactly the same as limewire so technically it should b too
[03/01 00:57:54] except that they pay the artists… :)
[03/01 00:58:32] theres 1 positve

To summarise the conversation: 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.