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.
When the news broke earlier this week that Facebook had hired D.C. veteran Ted Ullyot as its general counsel, many news outlets (this one included) took it to mean that this was the first time that the young company had hired executive-level internal counsel.
Not so: as reported by Law.com, Facebook's prior general counsel, Rudy Gadre, had left the company in July "to move to Seattle and spend more time with his family." Gadre had actually been at Facebook since 2006.
Regardless of the validity of the ages-old "spend more time with the family" explanation, we now have an update on Gadre's whereabouts: search-and-discover start-up Evri, which is based in Seattle, has hired him as vice president of business operations. He'll be in charge of legal issues, intellectual property, and various marketing and "audience building" tasks.
Prior to working at Facebook, Gadre had spent time at law firms Beacon Law Advisors and Perkins Coie, as well as Amazon.com.
This spring, Evri CEO Neil Roseman, also an Amazon veteran, said his company's aim is to construct a "data graph of the Web." Evri has been funded by Vulcan Capital, the venture firm founded by Paul Allen.
(Credit:
Discovery)
NEW YORK--On Tuesday night, the Discovery Channel hosted a few hundred guests at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium for a preview of When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions, filling the audience up with cocktails called "The Liftoff" (a tequila sunrise in a rocket-like champagne glass) and then packing us all into the planetarium's theater to watch some cool retro space visuals.
The miniseries got its start when Discovery embarked upon a project to archive old NASA footage in a high-definition format as a commemoration of the agency's 50th anniversary. It evolved, following in the footsteps of last year's successful Planet Earth, into an ambitious, high-profile HD miniseries. When We Left Earth is very watchable, especially for space junkies who will dig the never-before-seen clips of astronauts. But it's less visually impressive than its terrestrial predecessor. The problem with turning grainy 1960s-era footage into high-definition is that it's still grainy 1960s-era footage.
That said, in an age when space travel only seems to make headlines when Sir Richard Branson is talking about his lofty plans to jet millionaires around among the satellites, it was pretty cool to peek into an era when NASA wasn't always brought up in the same sentence as "budget cuts." The national enthusiasm over the quest to put humans on the moon is something that we could all learn from when it comes to current scientific challenges--alternative energy, I'm looking at you.
When We Left Earth is a six-part series; Tuesday night's screening featured episode two, about the Gemini missions of the mid-1960s. It was an apt pick for the big screen, because Project Gemini was the first U.S. spaceflight initiative to feature space walks, which are always good eye candy. It was also an upbeat chapter to screen, considering Project Gemini went relatively smoothly and disaster-free, minus a (SPOILER ALERT!) moderate nail-biter when Gemini VI initially failed to launch.
It'll premiere on the evening of June 8. "Liftoff" cocktails aren't included, but you can easily make your own with some orange juice, grenadine, and Cuervo.
Discovery Communications, parent company of the Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet, has made plans to acquire HowStuffWorks, which calls itself "the leading source of credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works."
The news was originally reported in The Wall Street Journal, which named a price of $250 million.
Atlanta-based HowStuffWorks, which was founded in 1998 by North Carolina State University professor Marshall Brain (yes, that's his real name), pulls in about 3.8 million unique U.S. visitors per month, according to ComScore. Instead of issuing a press release to announce the acquisition, the site created a HowStuffWorks article in the "television" category called "The Future of Media is Now," explaining how the popularity of YouTube, video-enabled media players, and high-definition technology have created conditions ideal for such an acquisition.
According to the Wall Street Journal article, Discovery will integrate its own education-based video programming with HowStuffWorks articles and potentially factor HowStuffWorks into future broadcasts.
It's all part of a broader digital strategy for Discovery Communications; earlier this year, the company purchased the widely read environmental blog TreeHugger as a new-media property for its Planet Green network.
A representative for eco-blog TreeHugger has confirmed that the site has been acquired by Discovery Communications, parent company of the Discovery Channel, The Science Channel, Animal Planet, and several other properties. A report of the deal initially surfaced in the New York Post today.
A press release from Discovery and TreeHugger confirmed that the blog will be part of the upcoming Planet Green network, but financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The New York Post had suggested a $10 million price tag.
"TreeHugger.com is a strategic complement to our digital media portfolio, aligning perfectly with Discovery?s corporate values and the Planet Green initiative," Bruce Campbell, Discovery Communications' president of Digital Media, Emerging Networks and Business Development, said in a joint statement. "Bringing TreeHugger.com into the Discovery family gives it the resources to continue doing what it does best: bringing green living to the masses."
TreeHugger founder Graham Hill added, "Discovery Communications, with its global reach and high level of commitment to Planet Green, is launching the most significant effort in green media to date--and we?re excited to be part of it."
The New York Post is reporting that green-centric uberblog TreeHugger may have been purchased by Discovery Communications as a companion blog to its forthcoming new cable network, Planet Green. The new channel is slated for a launch in the first quarter of next year, and has already built up some buzz for its series Eco-Town, created in collaboration with actor and Prius poster boy Leonardo DiCaprio; an already-trendy eco-blog would indeed be a desirable companion for the company.
According to the Post's Peter Lauria, the price tag for TreeHugger was somewhere around $10 million.
The New York-based TreeHugger, which currently occupies the #18 slot on Technorati's ranking of the most popular blogs, claims to have raked in over 1.9 million unique visitors in June. It's no garage operation: the blog has about a dozen staffers on its payroll, and content is contributed by over 40 writers around the world. There's also a smattering of video and podcast content as well as an active community of readers, and TreeHugger has partnered with the likes of the Sundance Channel and Domino magazine on past collaborations.
If the Post article turns out to be true, it won't be too surprising, as Discovery engaged in a very similar strategy when it purchased PetFinder.com as a companion to the Animal Planet network. It'll also be the company's first acquisition under CEO David Zaslav.
We've put out a (paperless) note to TreeHugger for comment.
(Via PSFK)
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