Spotify: A love song

I have a love song to write. I don't know yet whether it will be a tragic ballad or an exuberant ode to the triumph of happiness. But it's a love song for sure: I have fallen for Spotify, the latest buzzworthy "free music" service. After months of trying to find a great way to find and listen to music online, I believe I have met my match.

No, Spotify technically isn't available in the U.S. just yet, though the U.K.-based company hopes to bring the software stateside by the end of the year. My acceptance of an invite code sent by a generous friend therefore may or may not have been in gross violation of some international laws or statutes or regulations. But that's OK. Spotify, we can have an illicit romance for now.

You see, I needed this in my life. I had been thinking about "music discovery" of late. Last week, at the tail end of a trip in which I had been covering Google's splashy Los Angeles debut of its music search service in partnership with MySpace and Lala, I was sitting in the lobby of the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood, a shameless hipster magnet designed in the manner of tacky Southwest-desert motels and which features a constant soundtrack of semi-edgy music picks from '90s-era Britpop to lo-fi and LCD Soundsystem remixes. As a parade of attractive, Sunset Strip rocker types drifted to the check-in desk, I was sitting next to a cactus, intermittently holding up my iPhone to a speaker, using audio-recognition app Shazam to find out exactly what was playing.

Considering the cooler-than-thou crowd, I probably looked awfully silly. But Shazam has been my preferred method of music discovery because I just haven't found anything else I really like. Queuing up a Pandora station makes for great party music, but I've never been enthralled by its recommendations for me. Music blog aggregator Hype Machine has very well-done charts to track the songs that are getting blogged and tweeted about the most, but they can be a little bit predictable once you've already listened to the latest mashup of Kanye West and MGMT. I use Last.fm, owned by CNET News parent company CBS, to tabulate listening-history charts, but have never found myself hooked by its recommendations or radio stations. (Sorry, bosses.)

Social music and discovery services are a mess, frankly. Some of them have terrible user interfaces, and others are slowly becoming the victim of poorly conceived business models (many of which relied too heavily on advertising strategies that have yet to bear fruit) and ill-fated licensing agreements with the major labels. Still others, in striving to get a leg up on competitors, veered into editorial curation--exclusive album-listening debuts, promotions and tie-ins, and the like. That can make for a whole lot of clutter.

Then along came my Spotify invite, and everything changed. The service makes no attempts on the surface to be an "influencer" in and of itself, instead just offering access to full-length streams of just about any song. That's daunting at first. When you first load up Spotify, you're greeted with basic top-music charts that are notably uninspiring (Black Eyed Peas? Kings of Leon?) and searches don't bring you anything other than, well, what you searched for. Social-networking features like Facebook and Twitter sharing are sparse and well-hidden. If you don't know where to look, it can be a little bit dull.

Instead, the "discovery" process is left up to third parties. Create a playlist on Spotify, and you can assign it an HTML address so that when people click on it (assuming they have Spotify accounts) the playlist will open right up. A popular U.K. music blog called Drowned in Sound has a feature called "Spotifridays," where a selection of popular music from that week is packaged into a Spotify playlist, eliminating the need to click around through various Web browsers and streaming-music embeds. A friend sent me a link to Drowned in Sound's playlist of top songs of the first half of 2009. I was set for the next 7.6 hours.

Then, this happened: My Amazon MP3 bill started escalating as my "shopping cart" filled up with songs from bands I'd never heard of before, like the Veils, Let's Wrestle, and the Big Pink. The no-brainer Spotify platform, and how easy it is for anyone to use it to create playlists and share them in a way that doesn't involve a single wacky embeddable widget, was making me buy music.

But Spotify's long-term prospects are still hazy. Its dual business models, monthly subscriptions (for ad-free accounts and access to its iPhone app) and advertising for free accounts, have historically failed to hold up in the face of the micropayments-based iTunes. CEO Daniel Ek has even acknowledged that profits aren't flooding in yet and accused the labels of inflating licensing fees. The specter of SpiralFrog, another hyped free-music service that went down in flames earlier this year, is still in recent memory.

It's also unclear as to how the Spotify service, currently available in Sweden, Norway, the U.K., Finland, France, and Spain, will fare in the U.S. when it arrives here. Google's new music search feature, which is right now restricted to the States, may give a big advantage to competitors MySpace Music and Lala as search traffic is directed there. There's also the potential money drain: Government regulations over licensing fees last year. Digital music, you could say, is an industry with a lot of emotional baggage.

Generally, when there are glaring roadblocks in a new relationship, it's a red flag that you shouldn't get too attached. But this is one where I'm willing to fight to keep it alive. I hear there's a chance I'll be shut out of Spotify entirely in a few weeks unless I tweak my IP address somehow to fool the service into thinking I'm in one of its approved countries. Or unless I cough up the money for a premium subscription.

And I'd consider that. Money can't buy me love, but it could buy me Spotify. And right now they're sort of one and the same.

[mudixon]

Spotify sounds interesting, but I've heard the visual and audio ads are distracting (especially for tracks that go together (classical movements, live tracks, etc.). It might compliment my being able to listen to an entire song before wanting to buy it through iTunes or Amazon though, so that's okay. However, I'm not crazy about Spotify using my computer to store and stream music to others.

[robinkent]

Yesterday I had my first real experience with Spotify. I live in New York, but this week I'm staying with a friend in London. I liked it, I liked it a lot. Unfortunately with it's current business model I doubt it will survive once the investors money dries up. From a consumer standpoint it's great, with the one exception being the annoying radio commercials which pop up unexpectedly between plays every 10 to 20 minutes. I accept this happens when listening to radio stations, but when I want to listen to an album I don't want an ad interrupting my listening experience.

Having been involved with a number of "free" music ventures I fear for the long term success of Spotify. Getting the balance right between too many ads and not enough to pay the bills is part art, part science, with a huge smattering of luck. Right now they don't have enough radio commercials, or banner ads to generate significant revenue to satisfy the demands of the labels and the publishers. If they are able to increase the frequency of commercials the consumer experience will suffer. Today the gaps between radio commercials are long, but the more successful they become the shorter the gap will be and the more annoying for the consumer.

I could enjoy an ad free experience if I took out a subscription, but why should I when free music is available almost everywhere. A subscription service should offer value beyond the monthly fee. Until a service figures that out (supported by the music industry) subscription services will never amount to much.

Also it should be noted that the advertising industry isn't holding its breath waiting for the arrival of another "free" music site, they already have plenty of places to reach young consumers. Spotify or any other new model is going to have to deliver an outstanding experience and generate a huge fan base if they hope to secure real blue chip ad dollars. I truly wish Spotify the very best of luck as the music business needs to grow and change if it is to survive. These type of services should be supported, dare I say be treated as partners not just short term cash cows.

Full disclosure. My company Rebel Digital is an adviser to Qtrax. Regardless of this relationship, what I have said is the view of a genuine music fan.

Robin.

[wRosso]

Very insightful, Robin. I hope that Qtrax can make it work. I know they've worked very hard on it. They have a lot of negative press and expectations to overcome, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. I listened to the press conference and I was a bit disappointed in the overall presentation- just because it was the first message out from Qtrax in a long while, yet it was not very enthusiastic or exciting. I'm sure people are tired and worn, but you guys really need to make a splash with this thing! Good luck.

[Ozgorilla]

Qtrax was supposed to launch here in Australia today, but its now midnight and it doesn't seem to have.

[stubbyns]

I downloaded Spotify, installed it and used it for a day soon after it came out and forgot all about it soon after :(

[BtmnHatesRbn]

Meanwhile, in the real world, a bunch of people use LimeWire and torrent files for piracy, while some other people buy at iTunes, Real, or Amazon, etc. and then even more just listen to whatever 42 songs the radio stations want to repeat into the dirt, and then, at the end of day, nobody cares. Now, Spotify needs to get ads on MTV and the network Prime Time shows, sporting events, etc.

[knowles2]

Why would they pay for adds when they are getting free reviews on virtually every news site out there every couple of weeks.

They better off grow there site organically, an spending invester cash in actually developing the services an new revenues streams an upgrading those servers an paying the bills.
Spending money on advertising, I do see it as essential for them to signed a deal with google ASAP an before they launch in the US, an may be they could be partners for google to launch there services in the Europe.

[MilesColtrane]

how do you spell "g-u-s-h" :) Spotify delivers on it's promise of simple, fast, free for "everyone loves music" ..... let's hope it comes to the USA soon and the US content owners see a path to profit thru this simple and elegant bit of code.

[pet22000]

I pay the monthly fee to rid myself of the commercials and I dont see what would be the problem if they get proper record company backing. In Sweden the support is decent and I can find most of what I want in their database.. But as I understand it the US record companies are not quite as understanding and they prefer to spit their customers in the face instead of trying to sell their products.
Quick and simple access to the music you want is the key to fighting piracy, not going after potential customers by way of lawsuits..

But thats just my opinion of course.

[pjk449]

Lala.com, lala.com, lala.com. There's a lot to fall in love with here. No ads, legal, full streams. It's like owning your own music store. My life has been enriched with the discovery of so much great music. And yes, I am now buying more music than I have since I was a teen.

You listen over the Internet. I stream the music to my living room, and using the airpfoil app, I stream to my iPhone. And when I really love something, I buy the MP3. It saves a lot of the mistakes made from buying songs that I'd only 20 seconds of on iTunes.

[karpenterskids]

Whattt?

I think your post here may have just rocked my entire world.

I'm signing up for an account, and doing a search for some of the more obscure Christian bands that I listen to.
And they have them!

I love the layout. It has everything I enjoyed about playlist.com, but with a better selection, from what I've seen so far.

[radiowaves]

I find Best Buy's Napster a better value than Lala.com. $5.00 / month gets you 5 DRM-free MP3s plus all-you-can-eat streaming of just about everything you can think of. None of this "play once and then spend about $1 for every album". That said, Lala's interface wins hands down.

[jonsmith987]

Has no one hear of Grooveshark?

[badasscat]

Wait, so this is basically just a way to share playlists?

[davidalexporter]

Caroline,

Given that you seek music discovery, you might try 8tracks, which is an internet radio network (like Pandora, so pays about one-fifth the royalty tab of Spotify and imeem) but is based on handcrafted curation (like Spotify's playlist component), all in a clean, focused interface.

You can also follow people whose taste you like, just as you would on Twitter or Tumblr, so you can develop a ready set of go-to "DJs" through which to find new music. Eliot (Wired) covered us in a playlisting roundup last week: http://bit.ly/zIGSF.

As the founder, I'm of course biased, but check it if you get a chance.

[Heathie89]

I live in the U.S. and I've been using Spotify for about a year now. There are a few ways to access Spotify in the U.S.

[karpenterskids]

Proxies?

[MusicChirp]

TechCrunch reported on how to do this:
Invite yourself from anywhere:
1) go to http://www.daveproxy.co.uk/
2) enter the following URL: https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/
3) Create your account, for UK postcode ? check http://www.postcodesearch.org.uk/

It?s likely that the proxy server will be banned shortly, but there are countless others in the non-banned countries. The important thing is to visit this URL(https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/) from that proxy server. And I recommend you do it now, before the hole is plugged.

Credit given to: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/03/how-to-try-spotify-immediately-no-matter-where-you-live/

[Heathie89]

Proxies?

Obviously it's not that difficult to figure out!

1. Go to this link: http://unblocker.biz
2. Add this link in the field shown on the page you just opened: https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started
3. Register as an UK residence, you can e.g. use this postal code: SW1A 2AB
4. Create the account and proceed. You can now download Spotify from this link: http://www.spotify.com/download

Make sure to log in every 13 days with a proxy from an appropriate country which could be from Sweden, UK, Finland, Norway, Spain, or France.

[bnwrd]

There's no one right way to discover music, and I find that my source of the most interesting new music changes a lot. Maybe it's changes in my mood matching different services, or just the way the hype cycle of new bands just comes in waves. Regardless, there are periods when something heavily curated like Spotify Playlists works very well, and other times the algorithm-heavy Last.FM method will throw up some absolute gems through its radio feature.

It's worth noting that most of these services play well together, too. Spotify and Hype Machine both have native support to scrobble songs to your Last.FM library, so a month of listening to curated Drowned in Sound Spotify lists will feed your Last.FM generated recommendations for the month after. (Also, for Pandora users, Pandora.FM (http://pandorafm.real-ity.com) is a mash-up that adds scrobbling. Aaand there's a Universal Scrobbler Firefox extension that will scrobble music you listen to on MySpace pages to Last.FM (http://lastfmstats.livefrombmore.com/universalscrobbler/).)

Switching between sources of music throws up the most interesting new things. Spending too long on one system or algorithm inevitably grows stale. Just switching interfaces makes a difference to the bands you find.

My currently favoured method is using Last.FM, rather than listening to the Recommended Radio for my own account, picking on friends whose music I've been enjoying elsewhere, and playing their recommendation station instead. That has thrown up some really interesting tracks that wouldn't have come up any other way.

No one service can ?win? at recommending music. It's too personal, too variable. A world where they all feed into each other a bit and embrace their differences, that might just work.

[will_powell]

Daniel Ek gave a presentation to the oxford entrepreneurs about his passions and Spotify. http://www.oxfordentrepreneurs.co.uk/media/videos/video-daniel-ek-founder-of-spotify-talks-at-oe/