Ken's Tech Tips » Music

Three bundling free Spotify Premium music service with phones

Ken — Fri, 28 May 2010 15:45:06 +0000

Mobile network 3 are bundling a 24-month premium subscription to Spotify, offering unlimited music on desktop & mobile, with some of their tariffs.

photo: marfis75

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.

What’s the music library like?

It’s pretty good. I use it as a full replacement to a music library on my PC. Spotify seem to often get albums on the day of release (sometimes even before!). However, there are a few notable artists which don’t make their music available on Spotify such as Pink Floyd and the Beatles. That said, it’s been a long time since I’ve had to buy an album.

Can I use Spotify Free on my mobile?

photo: crsan

Although there is a free version of Spotify, it is advertising-funded, limited to 20 hours a month and only for use on a computer. If you want Spotify on your mobile, there’s is no choice but to sign up for Spotify Premium.

How much is it?

Usually, Spotify Premium costs £10/month. However, 3 are bundling 24-months “Spotify Premium” with certain phones on the “Internet Texter 900″ tariffs which starts from £26/month with 900 minutes, unlimited texts and 500MB internet. A 2 month subscription is also being bundled with cheaper tariffs. To get the most out of Spotify, we recommend the 24 month Spotify Premium on the “Internet Texter 900″ tariff.

What phones and tariffs is it available on?

In total, there are currently 14 phones on 3 which offer Spotify Premium. The cheapest is the Nokia E63 which is £26/month. I personally recommend the HTC Desire – particularly because you also get free GPS navigation. And it’s an awesome phone.

The full list of phones and tariffs follow:

	HTC Desire Graphite Internet Texter 900 – 900 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet Highly recommended Android smartphone with free GPS navigation	£33/mo.
	HTC Hero Internet Texter 900 – 900 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet	£32/mo.
	Nokia 5230 Black Internet Texter 900 – 900 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet	£28/mo.
	Nokia 5230 White Internet Texter 900 – 900 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet	£28/mo.
	Nokia E63 Black Internet Texter 900 – 900 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet Cheapest tariff with 24-month Spotify Premium	£26/mo.
	Nokia E71 Grey Internet Texter 900 – 900 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet	£31/mo.
	Nokia N86 Internet Texter 900 – 900 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet	£35/mo.
	Nokia X6 Black Internet Texter 900 – 900 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet	£30/mo.
	Samsung Galaxy Portal Black Internet Texter 900 – 900 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet	£28/mo.
	Samsung Galaxy Portal White Internet Texter 900 – 900 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet	£28/mo.
	Sony Ericsson Satio Internet Texter 900 – 900 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet	£38/mo.
	Sony Ericsson Vivaz Silver Internet Texter 900 – 900 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet	£33/mo.
	Sony Ericsson X10 Black Internet Texter 900 – 900 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited internet	£33/mo.

How do I get Spotify Premium?

If you want to get it as part of a 3 contract, go to the Three website. Note that only certain phones will offer Spotify Premium so double-check before placing an order!

If you want to subscribe to Spotify Premium separately without a 3 contract, you can do so through the Spotify website.

Free music streaming service Spotify now available without invite

Ken — Sun, 23 May 2010 15:48:09 +0000

The free music streaming service Spotify is now available without an invite, but it’s limited to 20 hours listening per month.

photo: Gabyu

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.

How do I get Spotify Open?

How do I listen for more than 20 hours per month?

You can either try and get an invitation code for Spotify Free (which has no listening limit) or you’ll have to fork out for the £4.99/month “Spotify Unlimited“. Spotify invites are very, very hard to come by and we suspect they will be even more so in the future as “Spotify Open” becomes the main offering for new customers. Of course, Spotify are hoping that the limited service will encourage users to subscribe to “Spotify Unlimited”.

What about Spotify Mobile?

photo: Johan Larsson

That’s only available in the £9.99/month Spotify Premium deal. Spotify Premium allows ad-free, offline and mobile listening. Three bundle Spotify Premium subscriptions with some of their mobile tariffs. For example, the HTC Desire £33/month tariff includes 24 months of Spotify Premium (worth £240). As well as that, you’ll get 900 minutes, unlimited texts, 500MB internet, unlimited Skype and Windows Live Messenger. Not a bad deal at all.

A word of warning about P2P technology…

It’s worth noting that Spotify use P2P technology: whilst you’re listening to music, your computer will also distribute that track to other users. If you’ve got a capped connection you could find that Spotify helps to push you over your cap. Also, your network administrator might not like you using P2P programmes such as Spotify. I’ve found that Spotify uploads as much as 2GB per day on my connection (I have 100mbps upload) if I leave it on all day. Oxford University has banned Spotify for this reason. Don’t make your network administrator angry!

We7 – Free browser-based music streaming alternative to Spotify

Ken — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:25:35 +0000

photo: wakalani

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.

How does it compare to Spotify?

User interface: Spotify feels much nicer and more pleasant to use – but you do need to download a separate program for it. we7 does an OK job for a web-based interface and has the benefit that you can use it when you’re not sitting at your normal computer.
Advertising: we7 places a short jingle between every song. It’s pretty annoying but the adverts are a lot shorter than those on Spotify. Personally, I prefer to have longer and fewer adverts like on Spotify. If you just want to sample music, it won’t bother you. If you want to listen to music on we7 on a daily basis, it’ might drive you up the wall.
Catalogue: we7 says it has 3.6million tracks; Spotify has probably in the region of 3million. There are certainly gaps in the Spotify catalogue such as Pink Floyd which you can listen to on we7.
Music quality: we7 streams in 192kbps – higher than 128kbps which is the standard rate for Spotify. Personally I can’t tell the difference.
P2P: Spotify is a P2P application and can sometimes consume a lot of bandwidth (in fact I recently found out Spotify was uploading ~700MB per day on average!). we7 music is just streamed from their web servers so uses less bandwidth.

When would I use we7?

One benefit of we7 is that it doesn’t require you to register and download a programme. That’s fantastic when you’re away from your normal computer – just type we7.com into your browser and you’re ready to go.

3 launches Spotify music phone and tariff

Ken — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:33:26 +0000

photo: e-magic

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).

In return you’ll get a monthly allowance of:

Unlimited Spotify Premium (usually £9.99/month) on your mobile and your PC
750 minutes
Free 3-to-3 and Skype calls
Unlimited texts
Unlimited data, email

Is the phone any good?

photo: Iain Farrell

The HTC Hero has won the T3 magazine ‘Phone of the Year’ award and has had pretty good reviews. I’ve not heard any bad things about it anyway. And as it’s an Android phone, there are lots of applications available for it.

The key specs are:

5 Mega Pixel touch screen handset
3.2” TFT LCD capacitive touch screen, 320 x480
HSDPA, AGPS, 3.5mm connection
512 MB Internal memory, supports up to 8GB SD Card
Slim tablet 112 x 56.2x 14.35mm, 135g
Stereo Bluetooth
Android OS

How else can I get Spotify for mobile?

Android offer a Spotify mobile application for the iPhone and Android. You’ll need to subscribe to Spotify Premium to use it though (£9.99 a month). Three are essentially bundling an Android phone with Spotify Premium in this tariff.

What are the alternatives?

Nokia offer ‘Comes with Music’ phones. ‘Comes with Music’ phones bundle 12 months of free music downloads with the phone. The tracks can still be played after the 12 months expires.

Orange PAYG customers can switch to the Orange Monkey tariff which offers free music streaming when you top up £10 per month.

Discover new music with Spotify & Twitter real-time search

Ken — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 18:01:15 +0000

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.

photo: marfis75

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?

Ken — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 13:18:02 +0000

photo: Pear Biter

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.

The Official UK Charts Company said it was “bound to” include streaming and subscription services at some point, but not for at least another year.

Because listeners do not pay per track – if at all – those plays would be likely to carry less weight than normal sales.

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.

photo: James Jordan

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?

Ken — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:11:53 +0000

photo: Jon Åslund

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:

“free of charge and legally, all kinds of music, from rock to hip-hop, jazz, electro and world music… While at the same time, artists and rights owners receive a share of advertising revenue”

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.

photo: marfis75

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

Ken — Sat, 23 May 2009 14:47:45 +0000

photo: pokpok313

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?

You’re chatting to your friends about music in a chatroom/instant messenger. You’ve discovered some new songs which you want to share with your friend. Using Twittify, you can both enjoy listening to these tracks together. Using Twitter, you can both tweet songs with the same tag (e.g. #CarlAndDan). If you both use Twittify to “follow” #CarlAndDan and you’ll both hear these songs played on your computer.
Find out what other Twitter listeners are listening to on Spotify. For example by following #muse, you can see what other Muse fans are listening to.
You’re playing music at a party but you want to let your guests control the music that’s being played from their mobile phone. Run Twittify on your sound system and ask your guests to tweet a Spotify song to your Twitter account.

Try it out

photo: marfis75

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

Twittify can only check Twitter once a minute due to Twitter API limits. Hence there could be a gap of up to one minute between the song being sent to Twitter and it being played.
Twitter search doesn’t work perfectly all the time. Sometimes it doesn’t update straight away; sometimes not at all. I don’t know if this is a issue with Twitter or Twittify.
The interface of sending a spotify URI isn’t the most intuitive. Unfortunately Spotify doesn’t provide an API to turn an artist and track name into a Spotify URI so this information needs to be added elsewhere in the tweet for now.

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

Ken — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:51:11 +0000

photo: ValetheKid

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:

Ever sing in the car? Maybe in the shower? You know who you are. Admit it, you like to sing, and you like music. Ever thought of writing your own music? Most people never get a chance to try… but we want to give everyone a piece of the songwriting experience, so we’ve developed Songsmith, an application that lets you create a complete song just by singing!

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

Ken — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 22:50:04 +0000

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.

photo: William Hook

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.

Fast and convenient internet access, on the move
Music player (this post)
Personal organiser features (calendar, to do list, etc.)
Access to my email (Gmail and Microsoft Exchange) account on the go
Google Maps on the go

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.

photo: e-magic

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.

photo: marfis75

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

It is more than likely that your current mobile phone will play MP3s
You may need to increase the amount of memory on your device by purchasing extra memory, but memory is very cheap these days
You can save a lot more money by avoiding iTunes and downloading your music from Amazon MP3. You also benefit from better quality music, unencumbered by DRM