If you look up Internet on Wikipedia, it is described as:

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide.

However, as we’re getting ready for 2010, the internet is getting less and less global thanks to our “beloved” media institutions.

Services like Hulu don’t work outside the US. Why? If I can’t watch the stuff legally, on Hulu, or buy the shows on iTunes, I go about getting the same show somewhere else. It’s not that I wouldn’t pay, it’s just that no-one wants my money. How is this possible?

From a technical point of view, it would cost Hulu (or it’s ISP) a bit more to have traffic go out of the US through transit, but hey, I would be willing to pay a bit more for it. I thought Hulu was ad supported anyway? So where’s the problem? The license owner (the TV network) would make more money that way. They aren’t seeing a single cent if I were to get that show elsewhere.

What about the BBC iPlayer? Why isn’t that accessible globally? I can watch BBC on cable TV, or via Satellite for free too, just like people within the UK. Ok, I don’t pay any TV license, but then again, I don’t pay that in the UK either. So no real reason there either.

And then there’s my favorite app: Spotify.

In an age, where I can get any music track within minutes, why do you still have a different catalog in every country? It’s ridiculous. I’m paying £9,99 per month, to get access to unlimited music. But then I find out, that I have to switch my account between UK and France, to get all the music I would like. That’s the only reason, I still open iTunes from time to time. It could be so much better!

It would even save Spotify storage, as you seem to be keeping the same track from different CD’s with different track IDs.

The US roll-out, I can understand. It’s all a matter of scaling the backend, but you could at least allow Premium signups in those countries. Again, you don’t seem to want to make money?

And don’t start blaming it on the music / TV / film industry. We all KNOW it’s their fault, but you are owned by them! So point out to them, that censorship is something that we can bypass. Heck, I’ve got IP blocks, and there’s VPN services for the rest, in nearly all European countries and the US, so I can get around the limits. But at the end of the day, you’re the loosing party! (I should build a product with this!)

So this is where we’ve come by 2010. The internet is getting limited on a per country basis, and net neutrality is the fancy word that the industry doesn’t like.

So I’m begging you guys: Please make more money, by making your services global. Isn’t that what the internet is all about?

I have spent all morning playing with the App, and it’s as beautiful as the client for Mac. The entire UI is not as “chunky” as Nokia’s Media Player, it’s more like an iPhone app, in the sense that it has smooth transitions between the different panels, which makes the entire experience very nice. As you can see on the picture on the side, you have something similar to Apple’s Cover Flow, which shows you the current previous, current and next track cover art. Another thing you should check out, is skipping in a track. It gives you big digits on top of the cover art.

All in all, very very sleek.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Spotify, if it wouldn’t sync your playlists in realtime. This is, pardon my french, fucking awesome! Like on the iPhone or Andriod, you can select which playlists to sync, and you’ll see it syncing.

Just a note at this point: Don’t even bother syncing a few big playlists like mine via 3G, unless you’ve got a data plan that allows you to download the entire Internet. I synced my Calm Mood and Various Goodness: Dance playlist via WiFi, which generated 1,15GB of traffic. So yeah, I wouldn’t even try that.

But the guys at Spotify have thought of everything. They added an option under More, which allows you to say that it should only offline-sync stuff when you’re connected via WiFi, which is probably a setting you should not change.

However, don’t be afraid to listen to Spotify tracks via 3G/HSDPA. Just listening to a few tracks on 3G won’t cost you too much traffic. It’s about 3-4MB per song.

I tested it on Three UK, and it worked surprisingly well. Just as good as the Desktop client, which I think is an amazing accomplishment!

So all in all, if this doesn’t make you upgrade to Spotify Premium, I don’t know what will! It’s amazing! The only thing missing is the possibility to queue tracks.

In 1944, Russ Morgan, Larry Stock, and James Cavanaugh wrote the song, “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You”.

That’s the start of the E-mail I got on the 11th of September 2008. Back then, Spotify was still in private alpha, and I was still a big fan of Winamp. That day, all changed. The E-mail was my sneak preview invite to Spotify.

Since then, Spotify was launched to the public, and found it’s place in many people’s lives. I would even go as far as saying that Spotify changed the way people consume music. Before Spotify, I used Last.fm for my scrobbling and discovering of new Music. But there was always this thing, it wasn’t a real Music player. It was a streaming service.

But Spotify! Spotify was a music player. Yes, it played music you didn’t own, but it felt and sounded just like your local music. No buffering, skipping in the song, etc… the same as with your local Winamp / iTunes. I was amazed. It was amazing, and quickly became my favorite music player. It allowed me to listen to all, or at least most, of the music I love, and it was legal!

In the last year or so, everyone I showed Spotify to, has started using it. It’s amazing to see, how everyone instantly likes an application like Spotify. I have handed out invites in Belgium, France, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, US and also the UK.

I’m convinced that Spotify has struck the perfect mix between Free and Paid content. 6 months ago, I thought: 10€ / month for higher quality streams only and ad-free music? No way! I personally like the ads, as they were different. Yes, they got boring after the fifth time hearing them (“Hi, I’m Roberta from Spotify. We hope you love Spotify as much as we do….” – That’s from memory!), but they weren’t as bad as the TV ads, and come on, 1 ad every 30 minutes, that’s fine.

But with the new additions, like Offline-Syncing and Mobile support, it’s actually worth getting Spotify Premium. I’ve got no iPhone (an S60v3 tester needed?), but offline-syncing is great for someone like me who’s always on the go.

It’s inspiring to see how a small startup like Spotify came along and single-handed innovated the industry. The Evil Giants have actually taken a shine to the Spotify Freemium idea, and aren’t suing the shit out of them. It’s a pity that my Various Goodness list has a lot of unplayable tracks after the pull of quite a large amount of music, but it’s slowly coming back.

The Music industry should finally realize that they are in a global society. Geo-restrictions, deferred releases, all that is just stupid nowadays, and until they change this, piracy will not drastically decrease.

But it seems like there’s still hope. Spotify seems to have quite a good relationship with the Industry giants, and maybe they can convince them to finally enter the 21st century with their licensing laws.

Spotify has changed the way people consume music. The world is changing, and Spotify is a big part of that change.

This was started by a video of Loren Feldman which can be found on YouTube.

The question that comes up: Is it important to own Music? I say no.

With a platform like Spotify, you have no interest in owning Music. You can access all your Music anywhere. So why would you want to own it? With the offline syncing feature coming soon, and mobile apps, you aren’t bound to the internet anymore. So it’s like carrying all your music with, anywhere. Even if there’s no internet.

Concerning the music catalogue: Yes, there are some things not in it, however, at the speed that it’s expanding at the moment, it will have most of the music you’d want soon. And if you want music that’s not in the Spotify DB, then just go out and buy the CD. Like you did before.

Why won’t Spotify disappear though? For one, it’s backed by the Music Industry. They have finally recognized that the world of music is changing, and have jumped aboard the Spotify train. So we won’t have to fear any lawsuits killing it.

And then, people are changing. We listen to Music on iPhones and other Mobile devices with Internet Connectivity. We often have all our Music digitized on a PC, so we already use the right devices to listen to Music. So it won’t be a big change to listen through iTunes or Spotify. Especially because Spotify is so much faster than iTunes.

So all I can say here: Spotify will survive

So, a few days ago, I got an SMS from my FB Alerts, stating that the new album was now released on iTunes. So I immediately got it. It’s an amazing album. The two first songs from it (Some People; Without You) were both very good. But the Album contains some more very very good songs.

The songs I really recommend from the Album: Ofcourse Some People and Without You. But I would have to say, my favorite is: Because.
Other great songs are: For Nobody (great vocal effects!); With The Sunshine; Every Day (very nice track!); Your Man (also great!).

The album is great for clubs / parties and long car journeys

This is probably one of the best albums I’ve heard in a long time. I think the last time I had an Album that was this good, was Bob Sinclar’s ‘Western Dream’.

So if you are into dance music, this album is a definite must. I really hope that this album will soon be available on Spotify, so that I can quickly share it with my friends.

Anyways, I wish everyone from the Ocean Drive project good luck with their album and hope that we’ll see some more releases in future.

Spotify just released their update! And now get this: It supports Last.fm scrobbling! Amazing! So just set it up in the configuration of the client and starts scrobbling! The official announcement can be found here.

Now the only thing missing is playing Last.fm recommended songs.

So I’ll be resuming to scrobble finally!

for the last few days I wanted to write this post, but just didn’t get around to publish it.

Before you continue reading, you should of have read my last post about Spotify a few months ago: Spotify – Last.fm on crack!

Then there’s a small video about Spotify here:

A few days ago, I was sitting together with a few other CS students, and we got to talk about Music. I immediately showed off my favorite music player, Spotify.

- Ow, you use Spotify. Looks cool to play back your Music… Woow, you have a huge Music Library. How many Gigs is it?
- No idea, it’s not on my Laptop.
- Huh? It must be, it can’t be streamed off the internet. It plays instantly!

After 30 minutes of traffic dumping and analyzing, we all agreed that it’s magic! It’s not possible that you can play a song instantly and skip to any place in it without buffering! It defies the laws of the internet! Ping? Packet Routing? Delays? Spotify has never heard of it! It plays as quickly as my local iTunes!

So one of my friends decided to call up Spotify, who’s HQ are in London, so it was a local call

We got a very nice receptionist, whom we asked about Internships. She clearly noticed that we loved Spotify and asked what we love so much about it.

- The Speed! It’s awesome!
- Heh, Yeah, we do that.

I mean, come on! A kind laugh! As if it would be normal. Let me tell you now, it’s not! So that evening, I remembered Peter Saint-Andre mentioning that he knew the CTO of Spotify, Andreas Ehn. He immediatly sent out a mail introducing me to Andreas, and I got a reply shortly after that.

In reply to my accusation that Spotify would be magic and package routing, he just had the following song: http://open.spotify.com/track/4ONTc23rNiTCBqP833K6rc

He also said the following:

Seriously, though, we’re not doing anything magic. Short buffers, lots of capacity, light-weight client application, light-weight streaming protocol minimizing the number of round trips (despite using TCP). And of course there is a local cache, but Spotify is pretty quick for stuff you’ve never played before, too. We do have a bunch of rather good developers.

The thing that I am missing in Spotify is some of the brand new music, and the possibility to see who added what to my collaborative playlist. For the rest the app is perfect! And I don’t say this often

I hope that I’ll meet Andreas Ehn at FOSDEM this year, as I seem to have missed it the last time.

The thing I don’t get, why ask for £9,99 per month for the Premium Subscription. It’s too much. The price Last.fm asks is decent. For 2,5€ I would immediately get a Premium Account. But as it stands now, I don’t see why I should pay that much for so little more.

At this point I just want to say two more things:

I’m sorry, but I don’t have any Spotify invites left So I can’t give out any free accounts anymore.

And second: Spotify definitely redefined music!

And now off to bed

But before I leave, I specifically asked, and I am allowed to post Screenshots this time.

Spotify Logo

It’s me again,

A few days ago, Peter Saint-Andre asked me if I knew Spotify and if I would like to try it. I said no, I didn’t know it, and thought, ow what the heck, I have some time to try out this Spotify thing.

So I received an invite, and started playing around with it. Immediately after launching the application, I was shocked. This App was heaven on earth!

Spotify allows you to play any music you like, own it or not, play it in full length, FOR FREE! It’s like the iTunes store without paying! It had nearly all the music I could think of, except a few very recent songs. The thing you might think now, ow, it’s just a Web player, it will take ages to load a song … NO! It’s as fast as my iTunes. When you click on the song, it starts instantly! When you go to the middle of the song, it plays instantly! No buffering! It’s just like any local player!

It’s just like Last.fm, but with full-length songs and without the social crap.

So, what I would like to see in a future version is, that it imports, or links to, my Last.fm profile to get my music taste and recommendations, and then plays these. Ofcourse, Last.fm scrobbling is also needed.

Another nice feature would be a mobile client, for Symbian OS. It’s so annoying to copy over all these MP3s to the Mobile Phone, if you could simply share your playlists with your Mobile. That would be great. PS: Please create a Symbian client. No-one cares about the iPhone anyways!

Before you start asking me here, if I have invites, no, I don’t. Sorry.

If you already have Spotify, please share some of your playlists, as I am always looking at broadening my horizon. I also created a public playlist (so you can add songs to it) called Calm Mood (Various Goodness). If you have good songs for that, feel free to add them.

Then there’s also a Radio Mode. You simply select the decade(s) you want to listen to, and maybe add the few genres, and hit play, which is a nice feature too, if you don’t want to search for tons of music.

But thats not all! It’s cross platform too! Mac OSX and Windows! I guess a Linux version will be out soon!

So I would like to thank Peter Saint-Andre for this great tip, and hope to see you soon on Spotify.

EDIT: I’m sorry, but I had to remove all screenshots, as it’s prohibited to post “screen dumps” by the Beta Agreement.