Spotify not too good to be true anymore

Apparently I’ve been using Spotfiy for over two years. Funny, it seems longer than that. It was the perfect music service for me, unlimited music of my choosing on my PC, which is where I listen to music most of the time, with the only minor downside being some adverts that play occasionally between tracks. But it looks like it won’t be quite so perfect anymore. Free users can only listen to a track a total of five times and total listening time will be limited to 10 hours a month.

As a frequent user of Spotify I can see why they are doing this. First, it’s obvious that advertising revenue is not what they were hoping for, most of the ads are still for Spotify itself. Second, using it has had a perhaps not unexpected effect on my music buying behaviour. First example, U2 put their last album up on Spotify before its official release. I had a listen and realised it was rubbish, so as a marketing exercise I doubt it was a huge success. Second example/s, quite a few new releases are put onto Spotify Premium upon release. On a couple of occasions I’ve then purchased the album before it’s become available on the free version (Elbow, Arcade Fire if you’re wondering). I’m guessing this isn’t what Spotify wanted me to do, they were presumably hoping I’d pony up the Premium version. And then when those albums did become available on the free version (generally only a few weeks after release) I was hit with a mild feeling of regret for spending money that I didn’t really need to and deciding to think twice before making another purchase. Again, probably not what the music industry sponsors of Spotify were hoping for.

So now I’ve got a choice, sign up for a tenner a month and continue on as I am at the moment or spend that tenner on a CD every month. I guess the music industry don’t care too much which way that ten quid gets to them, so it’s purely a personal dilemma. But the people who can’t or won’t spend a tenner (teenagers, students mostly I guess) will probably rediscover the skill of searching for pirated albums on Google. The music industry is still caught between a rock and a hard place.  

Spotify – the future of music?

I’ve just discovered Spotify (via Tim Anderson) and so far I’m thoroughly impressed. Previous implementations of this kind of thing (last.fm, Pandora) have restricted your choices of what you can listen to, making them feel more like listening to a radio station than listening to your own music collection. But Spotify lets you choose exactly what you want to listen to from its database. It doesn’t have every song by every artist, like most online music sources there’s no Beatles (obviously Jacko doesn’t need the extra cash, which doesn’t quite match with what I’d heard), some of my obscure musical preferences are missing (no Godspeed You Black Emperor) and even the artists they do have aren’t generally complete. But that’s a minor quibble, there’s a still a huge range of music available.

Streaming is super quick and the ads are currently pretty infrequent and unobtrusive. The bandwidth requirements seem pretty minimal too, I could happily work in a Remote Desktop session whilst listening and I didn’t notice any dropouts.

So is this the future of music listening? I certainly hope so. The big question is whether their business model works. Will the ads cover costs? Will the music companies suddenly get cold feet like they did with Pandora in the UK? Will their servers continue to be so snappy when they become super popular? If the ads become too frequent or in your face, listening might become painful. OK, you can get rid of the ads by paying $9.99 a month but if I was to pay for any online music service I’d want to have the physical bits (with no DRM) so I’d be sure I can still listen to them if the company folded.

The only thing I’d really like to see is the integration of the online stuff with my own music library. So if I want to listen to my own ripped music I can from the same player, rather than having to jump out to iTunes. But in the mean time, I’ve got a lot of new (to me) music to listen to.

Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip "Thou Shalt always Kill"

I just love this. It’s funny, has a great beat and what a beard!

Noel Gallagher pushed off stage

I have a theory why the North West has produced more than its fair share of great popular music over the past few years (The Beatles, Joy Division, New Order, The Smiths, Happy Mondays, British Sea Power (although Brighton try to claim them as their own), Elbow, The Fall, The Stone Roses to name but a few). It's the weather. Rain, rain and more rain. People are forced to stay in quite a lot and do something. So a lot of them decide to try their hand at music and some of them succeed. But I would never include Oasis on that list. Although their initial material was catchy, it never really reached the emotional heights that great pop music does. And their output afterwards has been absolutely awful. To be fair, "Wonderwall" could have been a beautiful song had it not been for the vocals of Liam.

Anyway, I'd pretty much forgotten about Oasis, but apparently they are still chugging along with their Beatles parodies. And now we have this wonderful video of Noel being pushed off stage by somebody. Although that's slightly humorous, the bit I love is self-styled tough guy Liam. First he tries to get away from the stage invader, then when the guy has been held down by two or three security guys, he suddenly remembers how hard he really is and walks across to "have a go" at him. I think it really shows how much of a show the whole tough guy image is...

Radiohead - Ceremony

One of my favourite bands* covering one of my favourite songs, what's not to like?

And if you like it, download it with KeepVid (this is mostly a reminder for myself, I'm sure you already know about this website since you're probably much more web savvy than me)

* If you've read one of my previous posts, you may think I don't like them anymore, but their last album has mostly restored my faith. As has this cover.

How record companies can save themselves

I got a lovely book for Christmas, "Factory Records - The Complete Graphic Album", which shows off the artwork for most of the albums and singles that came out on the Factory label along with other artwork used in ads etc. It got me thinking about why people are not buying music from record labels much anymore, instead choosing to download it free over the internet. Of course, one reason for this is the price but I think there's more to it than that. People have always taped music from friends but they still bought it as well.

But look at that Factory artwork again, some of it was superb (and some of it wasn't...). But buying a Factory record wasn't just about music, it generally came in a beautiful package as well. In the days of vinyl, there were little messages in the run-out groove (it wasn't just Factory that did this of course). Being 12" wide meant the artwork could be much more complex. So record companies should go back to vinyl? No, though they could certainly think about it. But the point is that when I bought music in those days I felt a connection with the artist or record company because it felt more than "product", it was sometimes a work of art.

Now if I pop down to a music shop most of the racks seem to be populated with CDs that look like they had absolutely no thought put into their production. Plastic case, crap photo of the artist, no design aesthetic. Why not download it for free? What do I gain by paying a tenner?

But it doesn't have to be this way. I just bought the boxed deluxe edition of U2's "The Joshua Tree". OK, I know, self-important and pretentious, but I do think it was a great album so I'll overlook the earnestness. For just over twice the price of a normal CD, I got 2 CDs (the album and a CD of rarities), a DVD (live concert, documentary and videos), a book and some postcards. All in beautiful packaging. I snapped it up without a second thought. Presumably Island are making money out of this, so why can't other recorded music come like this? Give people a reason for buying your music and they may well be persuaded.

Control DVD

Imagine trying to convince your other half to go and see a film about a late 70s post-punk band from Macclesfield whose lead singer killed himself. Oh, and it's in black and white. I didn't even make the effort, so I waited for the DVD and bought that instead.

I grew up with New Order but Joy Division had always been that other band that transformed into New Order. It's only over the last few years that I've grown to appreciate their music more.

So, onto the film. We all know how it ends (and if you don't, you really should read more, like the start of this blog entry) so there's no surprise there. But given the myth that's grown up around Joy Division and more specifically Ian Curtis, it's perhaps surprising that he's portrayed as a mostly normal bloke, who just had serious problems coping with his increasing fame, epilepsy, fatherhood and his own infidelity. Fact is I think anybody would have trouble coping with all of that. He's also shown as not treating his wife particularly well either so rather than a troubled genius, he comes across as a pretty normal flawed human.

It pays to watch it at least a couple of times. When I watched it the first time I was constantly waiting for him to have a fit or to attempt suicide, rather than actually watch the film. And the film is worth watching since it's beautifully filmed (as you'd expect from Anton Corbijn) and pretty entertaining to boot.

I think the reason we are so drawn to musicians who die young is the thought of what they might have achieved had they lived and for Ian Curtis it's particularly true. For me their three greatest songs are 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', 'Atmosphere' and 'Ceremony', all written pretty close to his death and all sounding pretty damn good even now. So just as they were approaching greatness, he died. But saying that, the fact he died when he did may just add to the beauty in those songs...

Then again, if he had continued on, we almost certainly know how the story would have ended. Joy Division may have produced some more great songs and albums and become as big as U2 (as Peter Hook thinks), but at some point they'd have got old and crap, just like New Order did. So though his death must have been painful for his family and friends, perhaps it was best for us music fans.  

Who is Edward Phillips?

Over the last few weeks I've noticed a strange thing in iTunes. Occasionally a shared music library will pop up called 'Edward Phillips's Library'. I'm even able to connect to it and listen to music. It's great, he has over 11000 tracks, not all to my taste but still something else to listen to. I did wonder where this new source of music was coming from and tonight I figured it out. I had a look at my router's web interface and noticed a few unknown computers listed in the DHCP active IP table, in fact four computers (although I suspect they aren't all connected right now).

ever since I figured out what was causing our wireless issues I've switched back to an insecure wireless network and I've never bothered to filter out MAC addresses this time around. So it looks like people are taking advantage of the fact. Am I bothered? Not really. I've not noticed any particular performance problems and it seems like my generosity has been repaid by having access to some different music.

On another note, I wonder what the music industry makes of all this? I'm guessing they don't want people sharing out their music collections to all and sundry, we should be good consumers and buy all the CDs instead. But then it's Apple doing this and they make plenty of money for the music industry with their DRM downloads. So perhaps they'll turn a blind eye?

Currently listening to Purple Rain by Prince from the album Purple Rain

Radiohead's pay as much you like strategy

I had every intention of buying the new Radiohead album from their website. After all, they've done exactly what I've asked for. It's DRM-free and the price is reasonable (since it's whatever I consider to be reasonable*). But I had some problems. First the site constantly timed out when I tried to connect yesterday (which I guess is a good sign since it suggests they are getting a good number of hits). When I did manage to connect and I registered, I was asked for my mobile number, which was a required field. Er, I don't have a mobile. And if I did, why do I need to give the number to you?

Unsurprisingly, the album is pretty easy to find from illegitimate sources and there are no hoops to jump through to get it from those sources. So if I wasn't fussed about a bit of copyright infringement, that's what I'd probably do.

It's clear the music industry and Radiohead are still missing the point about downloading music. Price isn't the key issue, although it's important (iTunes' pricing is completely screwed, I might as well buy the CD). Downloading has to be as easy, if not easier than the illegal alternatives.

*Since I've been disappointed with every Radiohead album released in the last ten years but have kept buying them in the hope they would repeat the brilliance of 'OK Computer', a reasonable price for me would probably not be very high.

Increment by increment

Popular music lyrics don't often use the word "increment" so I was pleased to hear British Sea Power use it on their first album. In fact they use quite a few unusual words and phrases. But "increment" has stuck in my head because it's such an important word to me.

Take programming for instance. Joel Spolsky calls development "The Game of Inches", but personally I prefer to think of it as a game of millimetres. It's probably partly due to my metric background but also inches suggests you might spot you've made progress after a day, whereas often I'll only recognise some progress has been made on a development project after weeks or months. Perhaps I'm just a slower programmer...

The fact is you can't make a lot of headway in a day. Which is probably why agile development has become popular. I'm not sure about parts of agile development but the idea of taking baby steps to get to where you want to be seems like a pretty damn good idea and I've done it myself for years.

Big designs have lots of problems. It's impossible to keep the details of a massive project in your head. Then things change part way through, or the design wasn't as well thought out as you initially thought. Then your boss tells you we need to release something next week... So it goes on.

The Random Pub Finder started as a craply designed site with hardly any content. Six years later, after hundreds of tiny steps, I'm now quite proud of it.

The FreeFlow Administrator started as a simple project to solve a particular problem I had. A year or so later and it's a fully fledged application that beats the Metastorm provided tools in pretty much every respect.

The commonality between these two projects is that both started small and have had working functionality from the start and at all the intermediate steps. Perhaps it's agile but I prefer to think of it as incremental. Agile brings to mind scrum meetings and pair programming. Perhaps they help but they aren't the important bit as far as I'm concerned.

Which makes me wonder why you'd want to develop stuff any other way. Most projects I've seen with huge design documents actually fall into an incremental development lifecycle as they progress anyway, so why not start out that way?

Has my fire really gone out?

So Paul Weller asked in 1993, to which the obvious answer was "In short yes. The Jam were pretty good, The Style Council had their moments (although sometimes in an unintentionally laugh out loud way) but your solo career has been pretty unspectacular". Just like the vast majority of musicians, Weller started suffering from Musician's Dementia when he hit the age of 30. Rather than produce anything worth listening to, they start to make sad facsimiles of their older material or they try and branch out into new genres and tend to look ridiculous.

So it is also true of IT? Do programmers in their 30s suffer from Programmer's Dementia? Have I got it? Would I even recognise it if I did have it? Am I just producing a sad facsimile of what I was doing in my 20s? Have I lost the ability to pick up new skills? Is there a good reason why coders over 30 are viewed with suspicion?

Or is this just the start of my mid-life crisis? Surely 10 years too soon.

Pompous rock star is hypocrite shocker

This is old news but apparently Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay and a man known for mouthing off incessantly about environmental issues, owns a BMW X5. This Chelsea Tractor will be doing approximately 15mpg as he drives near his central London home. Nice one!

Cunts are still running the world

Jarvis Cocker is back with a new ditty that won't be getting much airplay I guess. Not a great song but I can't help agreeing with the sentiment.

Arctic Monkeys are the best band in the world apparently

So if CD sales are anything to go by, Arctic Monkeys are a brilliant new band. I've listened to their album and it's not bad and I'm sure if I was ten years younger I'd probably think it was superb, because it's loud and in-yer-face. But the quality of the music isn't what really interests me. Here's a band that got started by letting people download their music from their website and are now have the fastest selling debut album of all time, on a tiny indie label. There are so many lessons for the big music labels here. Like, perhaps this new-fangled internet thing might actually be a useful marketing tool, rather than just full of evil-doers trying to rip off your music. And perhaps if you were actually doing your job of looking for new talent instead of suing your customers and infecting their computers with rootkits, you might have actually noticed this band and signed them. And considering internet pirating is "killing music", 360,000 copies of a CD sold in a week isn't bad going. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.