Music
 | Three bundling free Spotify Premium music service with phones Mobile network 3 are bundling a 24-month premium subscription to Spotify, offering unlimited music on desktop & mobile, with some of their tariffs.
3 have begun bundling a free 24-month Spotify Premium subscription (worth £10/month) to customers taking out an “Internet Texter 900” tariff with selected phones. This means 3 customers will have access to 7.6million tracks on demand, advertising-free, on both their computer and mobile phone. In this article, we find out what Spotify is about and the range of handsets which offer it. What is Spotify? Spotify is a music streaming application for your PC and for your mobile (with subscription). It’s a new way of obtaining and listening to music. Instead of the traditional “pay per song” model where you would buy tracks from iTunes, Amazon or your local record store, Spotify is a “pay per month” subscription model. Users pay a flat fee of £10/month for access to the Spotify music library – currently 7.6million tracks from 550,000 different artists. All tracks are available “on demand” and with a decent internet connection, you shouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a track physically stored on your computer/phone and a track in the Spotify catalogue. |
| Free music streaming service Spotify now available without invite The free music streaming service Spotify is now available without an invite, but it’s limited to 20 hours listening per month.
We’ve covered Spotify before on Ken’s Tech Tips – it’s a music streaming library with millions of tracks available on-demand for listening. It’s a new way of consuming music: instead of buying CDs or MP3s, you simply stream songs from the internet. The service is advertising-supported; with adverts inserted every few tracks (which means very rarely when you’re listening to an epic 26 minute track such as Tubular Bells; a lot more often when you’re listening to 3 minute pop music tracks). Until now, the service has been available in the UK but it has been invite-only. Many analysts have suggested that this is because Spotify have struggled to make a profit and were trying to push people towards the £9.99/month ad-free “Spotify Premium” service. Spotify have just released a new “Spotify Open” service which doesn’t require an invite. The bugbear is that you’re limited to 20 hours listening per month – certainly nowhere near enough to use it as a replacement for iTunes/the radio/etc. |
| We7 – Free browser-based music streaming alternative to Spotify
we7 is a free browser-based music streaming website. It’s not as well known as rival Spotify which has had a lot of press lately and has also been integrated into mobile network 3′s latest offering. But with 2.5 million UK users (compared to Spotify’s 2.7million), we7 looks like it could potentially be a challenger to Spotify. Whilst Spotify is invite-only, we7 doesn’t require an invite, doesn’t require you to register and doesn’t require you to download any programmes on your computer. All you need is a web browser to stream the high quality 192kbps music. | |
| 3 launches Spotify music phone and tariff
Mobile network 3 is to offer a Spotify tariff from next month. The tariff will offer customers a HTC Hero Android smartphone with a bundled subscription to the Spotify Premium music streaming service. The tariff will make 6 million tracks available to customers to stream at any time, without adverts. How much does it cost? You will need to buy the HTC Hero phone for £99 and then pay £35 a month (24 month contract). This brings the total cost of ownership to £939 over the 24 months (equivalent to £39.13 per month). |
| Discover new music with Spotify & Twitter real-time search Free music streaming service Spotify (previously covered) recently implemented a “Post to Twitter” feature. It’s a great way to share your favourite tracks with your friends. And now: using the new tool I’ve developed called Twittify (Twitter + Spotify), it’s a great way to discover new music too.
How does it work? It uses Twitter’s real-time search to retrieve information about what people are listening to. You can search by Twitter user, artist, etc. It then uses Spotify to play that track.
The result: You discover new music and songs that other people are currently listening to around the world. How do I update the track list? Twittify does this automatically once a minute – you don’t need to do anything at all. How do I share music? In Spotify, right-click on a song and click “Share to > Twitter”. How was it built? Javascript which interfaces with Twitter Search and the Spotify Application. Is this new? In May, I posted a proof of concept. This new version looks better and integrates with Spotify’s new “Share to Twitter” feature. Try it out… Go to the Twittify webpage. Got questions or comments? Please drop us a message in the blog comments below – I’d love to hear from you. |
| Music streaming to be incorporated into Top 40?
The BBC report that music bosses are considering incorporating music streaming into the Top 40. That would mean listening statistics from Spotify, Deezer and other top music streaming sites would be considered in calculating the most popular songs.
It’s a change which would totally shake up the charts. At present, songs are considered for the charts at the point of sale. By considering music streaming, songs are considered at the point of use. It’s an important distinction. Take Pink Floyd – chances are not many people are buying Pink Floyd music at the moment: there are no new singles or albums being released. Yet, many people are listening to Pink Floyd at the moment. By shifting the focus from point of sale to point of use, there would be a huge change in the charts, benefiting popular artists who produce timeless music.
According to Martin Talbot, managing director of the Official Charts company, “Knowing what a stream is worth compared to a purchase of a download, for instance, is very difficult to identify at the moment, but that’s obviously going to be the next step,”. This is going to be a big problem. Whatever weighting is assigned to streaming, it is going to be possible for people to manipulate the charts by incessantly streaming the same song. I remember when downloads were added to the chart: there was a big campaign to try and get The Wurzels into the charts. It never happened in the end: it took too many people to part with 99p for the prank to have worked. However, it’s not hard to convince a million people to stream a song from Spotify when it’s free. In fact, post a link to a song on Twitter and most people wouldn’t even know what the song is until after it loads. A Twitter meme can easily influence the charts. The good news for consumers is that this is likely to increase the number of songs available for streaming. At present, there are big gaps in the catalogues of Spotify, Deezer, and other music streaming sites. Once streaming becomes part of the chart, I believe music companies will be much happier to open their catalogues to these sites. Because otherwise their competitors would have a huge advantage in the charts. | |
| Spotify offers free streaming music; how does it compare to Deezer?
About a year ago, I introduced Deezer to readers of this blog – one of the websites which pioneered the whole model of free streamed music – music which was advertising supported. Paul Ricard of Deezer summed up the streaming business model very concisely in an interview with this blog:
I listed Deezer as the number one website to listen to free music. But how have things changed in the year since? Is Deezer still top dog for streaming music? One challenger comes in the form of Spotify. Unlike Deezer, you need to download a separate programme – you can’t tune in with just your web browser. The programme is obviously designed to resemble iTunes as closely as possible – it’s neat, fast and just works. Although it is annoying having to download an additional programme, it does allow Spotify to achieve things that Deezer can’t do with a browser-based website: for example multimedia keyboard support, Last.fm scrobbling and a spotify: protocol which allows you to directly link your friends to songs you like. The sound quality on Spotify is fantastic. It sounds better than Deezer and the songs load more quickly too. But it does come at the cost of additional bandwidth. Spotify uses peer-to-peer technology. When your computer is on and Spotify is open, your computer is being used to share and distribute music to other Spotify users. If you’re on a capped internet package, that could get costly. From my own observations, it uploads at approx 1kbps so it probably won’t clog up the tubes though.
Spotify’s library contains 6 million tracks (3 million tracks for UK listeners). It’s a pretty decent library but there are some significant omissions such as Pink Floyd. There are songs available on Deezer but not available on Spotify; and vice versa. Advertising. Spotify includes periodic audio adverts between songs as well as banner adverts within the programme. You wouldn’t think the audio adverts were any worse than listening to the radio – but they are. At least on the radio you have a variety of adverts. Grown men have been driven to insanity by hearing a message from “Jonathan from Spotify” several dozen times each working day. Again, and again. And again. Spotify also have technology that forces you to listen to the adverts. Don’t try muting your speakers or turning the volume down – it won’t work. Deezer features banner adverts on it’s website. They’re not intrusive at all – they won’t bother you when you’ve just got music on in the background. Overall, Spotify is a very decent offering. It’s got a fairly good selection of music in a good quality and the programme is more pleasant to use than Deezer. But there are some significant downsides – the main one being repetitive adverts. Don’t let me understate just how much of a downside that is – advertising I can deal with, but not the same adverts every 10 minutes. The P2P nature of the programme is also controversial – both the BBC and Channel 4 have moved from P2P to browser for their video-on-demand offerings. It seems somehow strange to move from a browser-based offering in Deezer to a P2P-based offering in Spotify. I’m personally still using Deezer as my primary on-demand music service, with Spotify as a backup for the songs which aren’t available in the Deezer library. Your own milage may vary. Let us know what you think. |
| Introducing Twittify – a Twitter & Spotify mash-up to share music in real time
Music has always been a social activity. People go to concerts to listen to music together and there was a day when teenagers would gather together just to listen to new tracks on the turntable! With people now spending listening to the majority of music at their computer, this doesn’t really happen very much any more. Twittify (requires Spotify) is an experiment to try and bring this shared music listening experience back to the computer. As the name suggests, it’s a web 2.0 style “mashup” which combines microblogging service Twitter and music listening service Spotify. Twittify allows you to “follow” music in real time. It checks Twitter once a minute for a new song posted to the tag (e.g. #mgmt) or user (e.g. @khloplay) that you’re following. If it finds a new song, it’ll play the song in Spotify for you and everybody else who is simultaneously following that tag/user. When might Twittify be useful?
Try it out
Try it out at the Twittify webpage. Send a tweet to the @khloplay account which includes the Spotify URI of a song (right click a song in Spotify to get the Spotify URI). e.g. @khloplay spotify:track:6Z14gdQNMJenVFA4eqpS6M time to pretend by #mgmt – fav song Limitations
Please remember that this is a very rough and ready “proof of concept”! Got thoughts? Send a tweet to @khlo or leave a comment here. | |
| Microsoft Songsmith makes a song from your vocals
Ever fancied writing a song but could never play an instrument? Microsoft Research have released a programme called Songsmith. Songsmith records you singing into a computer microphone and automatically generates a musical melody to accompany it. This is how Microsoft are marketing it:
It’s a 98MB download. The free trial is fully-functional and lasts for six hours of use (measured as 6 hours whilst the program is running and active; not minimised). After that, it’s either 29 dollars or 29 euros to buy it. What a cool programme! Via Long Zheng. | |
| Listening to music on your mobile phone With the credit crunch, we’re all trying to find ways to save money. Over the next few weeks, I hope to deliver a selection of credit crunch busting tips for the technology enthusiast.
In this series of posts, I will talk about how you can get yourself the best features of the Apple iPhone 3G without having to buy an iPhone 3G – a phone which is as well known for its high price as its speed and style.
To recap, I have had a Sony Ericsson k750i for over two years which I’ve now “transformed” into a smartphone to access the internet, listen to music, organise my schedule and to stay in touch via e-mail. The Convergence of Mobile and Music For many years, there has been a convergence between mobile phones and portable music devices. Mobiles have gained all kinds of new multimedia features as operators have tried to cash in on our demand for entertainment on the move. Mobile phones have certainly come a long way since polyphonic ringtones – most modern mobile phones feature a MP3 player of some kind.
Portable music players such as the Apple iPod have been moving in the opposite direction. We started with Sony Walkmans and Creative MuVos which just played music. A modern music player will allow you to watch videos and play games and even access the internet. The big mystery for technology enthusiasts is why we now need both a mobile phone and a portable music player. The Apple iPhone is probably heralded as the best example of convergence between music and mobile and proves that one device can do both. No longer will any of us need to fit a music player in our left pocket, a mobile phone in our right and then struggle to find somewhere else for our keys. Your Mobile Plays Music Pretty Well The problem with the k750i is that it is limited to just 34MB of internal memory. For music, that’s pretty shoddy: you could just about fit one album on there if you squeezed the bitrate down. Luckily the k750i, and most modern phones, will allow you to expand the amount of memory by purchasing additional cards. And good news: memory is dirt cheap. a 4GB Memory Stick Duo for Sony Ericsson mobiles costs just £13. That’ll get you 1,000 songs. For a direct comparison, an iPod Nano 8GB costs close to £100. The equivalent amount of memory costs £30 as a memory stick duo or under £13 as a Micro SD card. Obviously, check the type of memory which your phone takes. The Memory Sticks tend to be pretty expensive compared to micro SD, but are still a lot cheaper than buying a music player with the same capacity.
Where can I get music in the MP3 format? The Amazon MP3 store gets my recommendation for purchasing music in the MP3 format. Albums are available from £3 and individual songs from 59p. With albums costing £8.99 and individual songs at 79p at iTunes, there are huge cost savings from downloading your music from Amazon MP3. As an additional benefit, your music isn’t encumbered by Apple’s DRM. Oh, and you get music at 256kbps – double the bitrate of iTunes. Not bad at all. Conclusions
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