Music Wants To Be Free And Social - So Does Spotify
iTunes just got a kick in the head when Spotify revealed their plans this morning realeasing the Spotify version 0.4.3 which includes the largest feature upgrade since Spotify's launch in late 2008. Why? Because music just become very social. It's on now and Apple can ignore it only at its peril.
The release is centered around a set of social features more than anything else. It lets you create an identity that is defined by the music you listen, or put other way you can create a personal playlist and share it with your friends. In the new release you see your friends profiles and by clicking them you also see all the music they listen to (given they allow it to be seen).
Not so surprisingly, in the light of the recent Facebook-Pandora partnership, Spotify profiles can also be linked to Facebook profiles, and more importantly, to all the Facebook Friends' profiles. This feature pulls your Friends from Facebook into Spotify and lets you share your music with them. This is something I've been waiting for quite a while. I am slightly surprised I haven't seen it earlier, but it's here now and implications are not insignificant. This no less than changes completely how we listen and discover music!
The new release will also allow you to import your current music collection and mix it easily with the Spotify streaming service. This is also a big change in how we will consume music in the future, but, not nearly as big as the fact that the first time music will truly become social.
There's much more great stuff in the latest release, which I didn't touch at all. You can find all of it here. Let's chew on this and report back after we all get a better taste of what music becoming social really means.
Music doesn't want to be free. The artists who write and produce it don't want it to be free. The bands who market it and distribute it don't want it to be free.
The labels who control a fair amount of music copyright don't want it to be free, though we can argue with them about whether or not their business model should survive.
The only two groups who want it to be free are radio advertisers, who could care less, and people who don't want to pay for it under any circumstance, even for the work it takes to create it.
Such nonsense. Such unthinking, knee-jerk webspeak without a shred of historical, creative, or business insight behind it.
cvcobb01,
All information wants to be free. Take a step back, take a deep breath and don't just think about monthly revenue per track, but what's happening all around us.
Psonar is another worth checking out.
It's a free cloud-based solution which is focused on allowing users to do more with music that they own, unlike streaming services where you effectively 'rent' the music as long as you continue to subscribe (and hope that the music doesn't get pulled by the copyright owner.)
You can upload the music you own so it is accessible everywhere, from any internet-connected device.
It offers unlimited storage and unlimited streaming for free.
You can also search and listen to clips of any other track uploaded to the cloud and buy that music if you like.
Psonar does more though - it also provides web-based iTunes-style management so that you can drag and drop tracks to any device, such as your iPhone, Android device or MP3 player - in fact anything that you can connect to a PC via USB. This means you can have your music on your device when that's best, but also in the cloud - so it's also great for backup:
http://blog.psonar.com/2010/02/26/laptop-dead-music-safe/
So - it's perfect if you love your old MP3 player, want to keep your music on an inexpensive memory stick or for when you don't have an internet connection and thus offers you the best of both worlds.
Nice piece of software. Its just that with Spotify you can listen the whole song, not just the first 30 seconds (of any track) before you have to pull out the credit card.
Great, thanks, Ville.
Very valid point about the 30s - it's a shame the big labels are so restrictive when it comes to discovery of new music. If we also had 72 million euros of funding, we could do better than 30s!
We have got plans though... follow me on twitter for info - @rich_urwin.
There's also a ton of really cool other discovery & social we can do...
Good stuff. Thanks Richard!