musings & scribings from my head
Mistajam is a man after my own heart.. He is also a pretty funny guy as we discovered when he came into the office recently for The 5:19 Show. Anyone who has heard KIG’s anthem ‘Head, Shoulders, Kneez & Toez‘ will know it’s incredibly difficult to get out of your head, however, I think Mistjam’s parody is worse as I have been singing it for days! Watch the video below and see what I mean.. RUMBLY, RUMBY!
I’ve always been a big fan of music and remember fondly the heady days of free (if illegal) music downloading with Napster circa 2001. Then of course, the music big wigs, woke up smelled the coffee and then realised it was being stole from under their noses. They subsequently took action and all free Napster bit the dust.
Since then, those unwilling to pay for downloading listening pleasure, have had to use Bittorrent or dubious peer-to-peer applications such as Limewire to obtain their favourite music, navigating the minefield of spy ware and trojans viruses which are riddled through both.
The other alternative is the immensely popular Last FM, with more than 21 million users in over 200 different countries. Last FM has been around for almost 7 years and is the undisputed king of streaming personalised music choice. However, I have now found an alternative in Spotify, which also complements Last.fm by hooking into it’s audioscrobbling service..
Spotify is a Swedish based service which streams music instantly to your computer via a lightweight downloadable app, available for Windows or Mac. You can search for artists, tracks or albums in a huge range of genres and listen to them all, free!
The tracks are interspersed with adverts every now and again but I find them largely unobtrusive, certainly better than many major radio stations. There are also banner ads integrated into the app but all advertising can be removed by paying for a premium service.
The songs stream instantly for anyone with a decent net connection and songs are cached on your computer for your next play. You can however, choose how much of your memory you want to allocate for caching.
All songs are licenced to play online although none can be downloaded, which is why it will never kill iTunes.
I’m guessing only a handful of record labels have signed up as there are some albums I can’t find so I hope more will follow giving a wider range of music to choose from.
There is also a social side (isn’t there always?) to Spotify, with the ability to share playlists and tracks with friends.
Personally, I think it’s great, it looks great, it’s very easy to use and I’m addicted to playing with it.. I’m finding songs I haven’t heard in years, good times. I just hope they don’t start charging further down the line when they build up a following, bad times.
Right now it’s still in beta, and it was invite only, but I found this open link on Twitter during the week and half the office is now addicted to it, try it out for yourself and let me know what you think!
