Spotify: The future of music?

A recent article on WIRED about Spotify is very interesting. Spotify is a streaming music service has been operating in Europe for a year. It offers around 6 millions tracks, which is pretty impressive, and it will soon be coming to the US.

Similar services (Napster, Emusic et al.) have tried this subscription method providing music, and have been largely unsuccessful. Spotify works by offering a free, ad-supported option, and a premium, 10€/month option.

In the past, the subscription model has not interested me - I don't want to pay for limited access to music, I want to own it. But something about Spotify seems to work and make more sense. Perhaps it is the promise of those 6 million tracks.

Imagine this as a basis for the future of music availability. What is all the released music in the world were available on a service like Spotify. For a minimum fee (not unlike Netflix) you would have access to everything - from Bach, to Sugababes, to Tuvan throat singers. All the music of the world, accessible on your computer via the internet, without all the problems of having enough hard disk space.

You wouldn't have to worry about rights, or ownership issues, because it would all be available remotely. You could create a library of your favourite albums and songs. An über playlist, if you like. You'd access it from your phone, your laptop, and connected device. Whatever you want, whenever you want it.

Of course, to have this for free would be fantastic, but a minimal monthly fee with benefits would be acceptable.

I think this would transform the way we 'use' music in a good way. It's not dissimilar from visiting a friend with a huge music collection, discovering new music, and being able to listen to it whenever you want. THis is surely much better than ripping CDs, downloading torrents, installing into iTunes libraries, copying and backing up to disks, synchronising with iPods and iPhones.

All the music, all the time, whenever, wherever.

That could be the future of music.

Independence Day

While browsing the Twitter trends as the clock ticked to 12:01 AM and July 4th, 2009, I was sadly not surprised to see a plethora of "Happy Independence Day's" interspersed with plentiful nationalist sentiment from my American cohabitants. Not exactly a nation to shy away from nationalism, I was nevertheless a little dismayed to see so many people conflating a celebration of independence with xenophobia, arrogance and ignorance.

I wanted to say something - anything - to point out the innate hypocrisy of a nation celebrating independence and freedom while at the same time carrying out acts of war in other countries around the world in name of said freedom. The recent TV series, Kings - unsurprisingly prematurely cancelled - showed promise in highlighting the contradiction of a nation celebrating freedom yet embroiled in war; its absolute monarchic state - which Independence Day celebrates jettisoning - an ironic metaphor for the presidential state of the USA.

But I couldn't say anything. As much as I wanted to, I felt it would be too cynical of me to rain on America's parade.

Instead, I offer the words of someone far more articulate: Stephen Fry. Here, he summarizes the contradictions and hypocrisies of the land of the free, while at the same time sharing, as I do, an admiration for it's people and their belief in hope.

"So what is quintessentially American? Apple pie or Apple computers? Walmart or Wall Street? Trump Towers or Twin Towers? Jimmi Hendrix or Jimmy Stewart? Opportunity or opportunism? Small town courtesy or small-minded bigotry. Hearty milk and cookies or Harvey Milk and hookers. Blue collars, red necks, white supremacy or black power? The Simpsons or The Waltons, Family values or Family Guy, Holly Golightly or Hollywood, Penn State or the State Pen or Sean Penn, the right to life or the right to electrocute, capitalism or capital crimes, poncey dreams or Ponzi schemes, Nobel prize winners or ignoble price fixers, a country that can land men on the moon and yet has a majority who believe that angels walk amongst us – I suppose we could play this game of opposites for ever for I do not know a single thing that can be said about America whose reverse is not also true. It is a land of opportunity and yet there are more seventeen year old black youths in prison than in college. It is a land of freedom where in many states you can’t buy fireworks or alcohol or cross the street as a pedestrian where you please and where children’s books are banned and educational material suppressed if they do not square with some religious dogma or other. It is a land of church-going traditionalists and a land of freaks and fancies. A nation founded in revolution where radicalism is next to Satanism. A land of industry where indolence has created an epidemic of obesity whose walking examples, or waddling examples I should say, have to be seen to be believed. One country riven by a depth of mutual bipartisan enmity, loathing and distrust that threatens entirely to divide it into two and propel the nation into a new Civil War. However much Britain may be divided along tribal lines, it is as nothing when compared to America. The reciprocated antipathy is intense and seems irreconcilable. Did the election of Obama heal that fissure? Briefly seal it perhaps, but certainly not heal it. A hundred days later it all seems to be opening up again as wide as ever and anyone who watches Fox News will know that as far as President Obama’s political enemies are concerned the honeymoon was over before the garbled vows were out of the bridegroom’s mouth: the United States were soon disunited all over again."

http://www.stephenfry.com/blog/2009/07/04/america’s-place-in-the-world/

Time Capsules

Nice article over at iLounge on the frustrating limitations of Time Capsule. I have to agree - I've often wondered why Apple doesn't really develop it's hardware to fully cater for modern usage. The create something with great potential that somehow doesn't quite manage to exploit it's own abilities.

Why, for example, can't I have multiple users accessing an iTunes library via wifi on the Time Capsule? Why aren't the iPhone's iTunes and Remote apps integrated into one single app? Why can't I listen to my iTunes library from my iPhone without having to use a third party's app? Why can't the time capsule we used as an AirTunes server if the basic Airport Express can? The top of the range hardware should have all the functionality of the cheaper hardware.

It's weird. It's as if some of the departments at Apple don't use the hardware they create.

Vaclav Havel and the Superbowl

I make notes for articles using MarsEdit. Usually I make a few notes about what I intend to write about as a reminder.

Occasionally, I don't.

I have absolutely no clue what witty and clever comments I intended to make by combining the Superbowl and former Czech President and poet Vaclav Havel into the same post.

If anyone has any ideas I'd be happy to hear them!

Cancel, I Tell You!

I love OS X. I love Macs in general. I think Apple rock. I don't feel locked into anything with Apple, I feel free, creatively inspired, and happy to work at my MacBook every day. OS X is a brilliant example of an operating system that doesn't get in the way of what you want to do.

But one thing annoys me, and it has done so for years.

Canceling. Aborting. Stopping. Whatever you want to call it, whenever you want to do it, it should happen instantly.

But it doesn't. Take a wifi file tranfser. Click on the 'X' cancel button, and wait. And wait. And wait.

Try to cancel anything while the OS is doing something, and it more often than not takes minutes to get around to stopping. Cancel should mean stop. Right now. Immediately. Stop doing that thing.

And still the OS trundles on, thinking about it just a little longer.

Hopefully this will be addressed in Snow Leopard (along with proper caching of Safari sites, so clicking 'back' doesn't require a reload of the whole goddamned page!!!).

Bing

The audacity and greed of multi-million dollar corporations never ceases to amaze me.

Microsoft recently launched Bing - an attempt to regain control of the search engine marketplace from Google. Don't they realize that this simply isn't going to work? The web doesn't work like that.

Take Jaiku and Twitter, or Vimeo and YouTube. You can't compete with an already established behemoth. You can offer a better quality service (which Vimeo did, but Bing doesn't), but the major force in that area will simply adapt and include whatever new service you provide. Hence YouTube's rapid introduction of HD.

Bing touts itself as an alternative to Google. But 'Google' has entered the English Dictionaries as a verb! Bing is not going to achieve that. For a start, it looks too corporate (it is, after all, a Microsoft enterprise). It has that corporate/Microsoft mix of bad design and over use of blue. Plus, it has a dominant picture of a stingray. Why?

I can imagine the idea is to suggest that you are about to delve into the unknown waters, to reveal the mysteries of the internet's deepest chasms.

Well, sorry, it's a search engine. And Google does the job well enough, while at the same time integrating a zillion other services. I'm no proponent of global domination for Google (which sometimes seems to be their aim), but really - do we need another search engine? Even one with a picture of a stingray?

The Nokia Communicator

When will Nokia realise that making corny product placements in 'cool' films doesn't strengthen their image, it harms it.

In J.J. Abrams über cool reboot of Star Trek, for a brief but all-too-visible moment, young Kirk gets a call on his in-car Nokia communicator. This is an interesting product placement which seems to backfire.

The car in question is an antique. It's a 50's throwback, fitted with a few high-tech gizmos such as the Nokia device. But this is a film set in the future, and the car is from the past, we can only assume that the communicator is intended to appear somehow retro.

This appears to send out somewhat conflicting messages. It represents Nokia as a company which is unsure of it's position. It tries to establish Nokia as a brand that people will still rely upon in the future, but at the same time it represents itself as a thing of the past.

Ironically, in many ways this is an accurate representation of Nokia's present status. Only a few years ago, Nokia reigned supreme. But it's shocking complacency with its position as market-leader had led to it falling far, far behind the competition. How could a company as huge as Nokia allow Apple, the young upstart in mobile communications, to boldly go and leap light years ahead of them within two years?

Having worked for Nokia in the past, I'm sad to see this state of affairs, but at the same time I'm not in the least bit surprised. Nokia always followed a business plan that was startlingly out of touch with its customers, and relied heavily on a perceived brand loyalty--a brand loyalty that didn't exist.

Nokia's market complacency came at the same time as a design crisis hit the manufacturer. After Frank Nuovo--designer of some of Nokia's most iconic phones--left the company, Nokia released a stream--in fact, more a flood--of poorly designed, ugly, chunky, plastic phones. Phones so without character that artificial means had to be created to spice them up. More plastic could be attached to them which would, Nokia insisted, allow you to 'Xpress Yourself.'

Rather than innovate with the phones themselves, Nokia put millions into developing Club Nokia, a cynical attempt to increase after-market loyalty by selling add-ons, graphics, and ringtones. Wow. Exciting. Cool.

Club Nokia was an unmitigated disaster. It could never consolidate brand loyalty because at that point, there was no brand loyalty. Sony had entered the market, smartening Ericsson's designs. Motorola even innovated with the RAZR. And Nokia? You may find this hard to believe, but they were busy trying to get everyone in the world to make the Club Nokia their home page. Honestly--this was their strategy! Club Nokia would be so much fun, that nobody would want to go anywhere else on the internet except clubnokia.com.

At the time, I was the chief copywriter for Club Nokia. I was dumbfounded. This seemed to me to be the epitome of Nokia's arrogance, complacency, and ignorance. Did they really think people would do that? How could anyone be so out of touch with reality?

It came as no surprise to me that a few years later, Club Nokia was written off as a failure. By then, it was too late. Nokia's zeitgeist had passed. Their phones became unremarkable: too cheap, or too expensive with no innovative features. And then, out of the blue, came the iPhone. Suddenly, every phone Nokia had on the market looked like a relic from the past.

And this is the image we are left with--the marketing image from Star Trek. Nokia. Still around in the future, still behind the times.

[Update: Right on cue, this article from Electronista concerning Nokia's decline in popularity with teens.]