Category Archives: Misc

I listen to a lot of music, and I love the internet, so one year ago I was avidly following the race to capture the internet music space. Obviously this race isn’t quite over, but it’s been about 10 months since I handicapped the race (and some here, too) and about 9 months since I wrote what turned out to be one of the most popular posts on my blog, a rather harsh review of Spotify that garnered a couple hundred page views by itself (even the picture of Spotify’s interface that I included got a few hundred views alone, so there was clearly some interest).

In my original handicapping of the internet music scene, I gave a big nod to iCloud and Turntable.fm. iCloud seemed like it would have an immediate headstart based on the cross-promotion possibilities with iTunes and iPhone, and Turntable.fm saw explosive early growth and looked like a winner based on it’s ability to sell virtual goods. Plus, Spotify hadn’t officially launched in the US yet. What’s happened since? Spotify has grown after launch, but not incredibly (just 3 million subscribers, only 20% of whom pay for the service). Turntable has gone legit with licensing by the major labels, and they’ve raised a bajillion dollars. And most people still don’t know what iCloud is.

That gets us to my original review of Spotify. The highlights: On the day I signed up, Spotify was doing pretty poorly and users couldn’t play a large number of popular songs. And the discovery-through-facebook method wasn’t particularly thrilling because nobody was on the service yet. I’m happy to report that 9 months later I’m still using the service, and it has now gotten more money out of me than any single internet service in the past couple years outside of the Apple app store. The viral/social component is great as Facebook jumped on board with Spotify integration whole-hog, and now my news feed constantly shows me songs my friends are listening to. One click there and Spotify launches, and I’m listening to whatever it is my friend listened to. Popular playlists are also a cool feature, and one I actually use. The radio feature and app store are cool too, though I use those less. I gave Spotify a 72/100 in my review based on the nonworking aspects, and modified that to an 80/100 after they fixed the non-playing songs issue. Now that the social features actually work, I’d revise that up even further to a 85/100.

But is Spotify going to solve all of the world’s music problems, and take over the world? If the numbers are any indicator, then my original review nailed the problem:

It’s not better than downloading the whole album for free as a torrent. People who pay for music pay for music, and maybe for them this service makes sense. But people who don’t pay for music get nothing from Spotify that they aren’t getting for free at a torrent site – on both I need to know what I want, and search for it. As a torrent, I can have the whole thing in 3-5 minutes, on Spotify, I have to pay, they may not have it, and it may not stream if they do. The only chance the music industry has to recapture the people who don’t want to pay for music is to either ramp up enforcement (which they’ve tried, and doesn’t and will never work), or to offer them a value proposition that they can’t turn down – Like utilizing the social graph in a new and cool way (turntable.fm) or offering an interesting method of discovering new music (pandora). Spotify doesn’t do either of those things well. It’s just a legal version of Napster, which is cool, but Napster was cutting edge in 1999, and didn’t have the possibility of drawing on advanced algorithms or facebook friends to suggest new music. Spotify should utilize those things, but it doesn’t.

Spotify is absolutely loaded at this point with every feature you can eke out of a service that knows your friends and your tastes – it’s got radio, it’s got an open development app store, it’s got recommendations. It’s doing everything I said it would have to do to have a chance at revolutionizing the industry. But it still is only converting about 20% of it’s (rather puny) 3 million user base to paying customers. In the end, if utilizing the social graph to provide the experience Spotify is now providing can’t convince more than 600k people to pay, there probably isn’t much that will. In my original breakdown of the competitors in this space I noted that even Pandora, hailed as a blueprint for the new internet/music fusion, hadn’t turned a profit. Spotify is likely in the same position, and the music industry still hasn’t found the route to getting another company to make it’s product wildly profitable again.

I’m no html genius so this banner is probably going to get cut off, but the story behind it is that it (hopefully) shows the publicly listed torrents that were downloaded from your IP address. It’s from this site, which is making the rounds on tech and privacy blogs this week. It’s only got one torrent for my IP address, one which I’m relatively certain my roommate or a prior resident downloaded, but I’ve heard anecdotally that for many people/IP addresses it has an entire and possibly embarrassing list of files. Rather shocking how much is publicly available, and TorrentFreak has already turned the microscope towards the big media companies to see what files IP addresses associated with those companies reveal. Just a reminder that precious little of your internet existence is truly private.

Update: Though no html genius, the banner is down not for lack of smarts on my part but because the host site has been taken down. It is claimed to be temporary, so I’m going to leave this post as-is in the hopes that the very interesting webtool is revised and published again.

Google+’s main challenge, as I see it, is to develop a core use that draws users away from Facebook in a new way. Let me explain by highlighting the core uses of the other major social networks of our time / Myspace was really the first social network that worked, and it did so on the strength of one principle – a custom space on the internet that is yours to do with what you please. It was a great idea, and at the time, completely groundbreaking in that it was too far head of its time in many ways. It started out before internet companies needed a revenue model to get anywhere, and in many ways that made Myspace a really charming experience. The core principle worked for its uniqueness, but primarily surged based on usage by a teenage customer base that was increasingly using the internet as a way to entertain themselves in the boredom of middle and high school. I was a teenager when Myspace was popular, and every teenager I knew had a Myspace, while my Dad wondered what on earth the internet was. Brands that sought the attention and money of teenager flocked to Myspace, and the network seemed like a hit. Except that eventually the principle wore thin for that teenage set when they grew up a little and realized they didn’t want shiny stars shooting behind 4 simultaneously playing youtube videos of a crappy pop band above two years of sappy blog posts about gym class to represent themselves to the world. Plus, it was really hard to look at some of those pages, providing a big disincentive for users to explore the service more than just their immediate friends.

     (Believe it or not, this isn’t just a bad myspace layout – it’s a layout somebody put together and recommended to others)

Facebook’s one principle was to be the antithesis of Myspace in certain ways (no shooting stars, no music, a fixed color scheme and one choice for layout). But the core principle that made Facebook work initially was as a psuedo scrapbook of all the things your friends were doing, with tagging all over so you could just sit and get completely distracted clicking on the profiles and pictures of people you hadn’t seen for years for seemingly no reason. People refer to it as Facebook stalking, and while I suppose that’s accurate, it paints a pretty voyeuristic picture of a completely voluntary decision to make certain things in life public by putting them on Facebook in the first place. It’s not even a really destructive thing, and it tends to make the service money! The more you partake in life on Facebook – inputting interests, perusing and clicking on things your friends like and liking them, the more Facebook can target you with ads that are more likely to convert, and the more Facebook makes from transactions using Credits. Facebook was wise to position itself in other ways to survive when their generation of users (Facebook rose on the backs of college students) again realized that they were in need of an image shift and that they didn’t want pictures of keg stands and posts about how drunk they were last night to show up as the online representation of themselves – Facebook persisted by allowing users to lock up their privacy and delete pictures and walls, while at the same time becoming indispensable (for now) as a picture warehouse, game platform, phone and address book and messaging service.

Twitter works on an entirely different principle – it’s a way to connect with anybody in the world, and access everything they choose to say on the service, with no privacy walls whatsoever. It’s part news aggregator, part friend activity monitor, part brand outreach, part celebrity follower, part location sharer, part revolution starter – Part of what has made Twitter so hard to monetize is that despite being popular, it appeals to people for different reasons. It’s really the only technology of its kind, and it works on many levels, making it a powerful social network (if not a very profitable one). Whereas Facebook is a very individual experience in many ways (much of the use is directed completely by the user and you navigate to the person you want), Twitter is an avalanche of information about where people are, what they are doing, what’s going on in the world. You are agreeing to submit yourself to viewing the 160 character thoughts of a random assortment of people anytime you access the service, and “following” somebody is not nearly the commitment that “friending” somebody is.

(A really ugly picture representing three successful social networks and, at the same time, looking like it was made before the founders of those networks had graduated college)

LinkedIn doesn’t deserve extensive treatment, but it is relevant here because Google+ is really Facebook+, and LinkedIn is really Facebook+Job Stuff. Whereas Facebook represents you as a person, LinkedIn’s core principle is that it represents you as a professional – a great, profitable twist, because Job Stuff is pretty important to people, and people who take Job Stuff seriously tend to be willing to spend money on Job Stuff, meaning advertising works well on Facebook+Job Stu… ahem, I mean LinkedIn. Where Facebook’s emphasis on on the Social in social networking, LinkedIn’s is on the Networking – perhaps a glib way to put it, but accurate I think. LinkedIn wasn’t particularly creative as it comes to pushing technology forward – sort of just a “well that’s obviously a good idea”, but also a “boy this is set up just like Facebook isn’t it”.

                                                                                 (My favorite comic on Google Plus, though I disagree with the last pane [see below])

Google+ is basically Facebook+Different Social Management. That’s it at this point. It’s not even a new take on how you interact – it borrows heavily from Facebook in lots of respects, be it the News Feed/Profile setup, the “Friending” mechanism of adding somebody to a circle, and the desire to be your picture warehouse and phonebook and address book. It’s missing a core principle that is different from Facebook- Myspace had being a unique online sanctuary to yourself, Facebook had stalking everybody you knew in a digestible format, Twitter had a firehose of unapologetic information from everybody you’ve ever been interested in hearing from, LinkedIn had Job Stuff. But what does Google Plus have? It’s more like Facebook Minus, Facebook, minus all my friends, photos, events, etc. It isn’t even as easy as typing in the names of all your friends to recreate the Facebook experience – you have to actually put all of your friends in circles that have been suggested to you, or you have to invent an entire inventorying system on your own, on the fly. Sometimes you drag one person into many circles, sometimes just one, but each time it feels more like work than like an innovative social experience. It can do everything Facebook can, and maybe even a bit better in some respects, but only if I sit through and recreate exactly what I have on Facebook already. It is completely derivative.

Maybe in 2-3 years I’ll look back and wonder how I was so blind to Google+’s beauty (even dumber… search engines ignore plus signs as a default, so “Google+” is difficult as it comes to the very technology made famous by its namesake). But more likely, I think Google+ will complete the holy trinity of hot, buzzy social products that eventually get dropped of Wave, Buzz, and Google+. Google really needs to add some new spark to Google+, or the early adopters may be the only adopters.

I write a lot about music services on here, because music services are sort of in the startup world now, they are sort of copyright-relevant, and I listen to a lot of music. Spotify has been the hot new music service, out now for paying customers and with a wait if you want an invite to the free service. Spotify’s angle is that you can listen to anything you want at any time in a giant catalog of music, with some limitations if you are a freebie customer, and essentially no limitations if you are a paying customer at 5 bucks a month.

Eager to try out the service, I paid 5 bucks figuring it was worth a month. Here’s my experience:

1:00 pm – Ooooo Spotify! I want to try it, but I’m so impatient I might as well pay the $5 and try it RIGHT NOW.

1:05 pm – Signup was easy and I’m now listening to music while I work on some other things. Immediately I’m familiar with the interface:

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On the right there is a little bar with my facebook friends who have spotify (only about 20 right now), and if I click I can see their shared iTunes playlists. Spotify automatically imports all of your iTunes music into the program – convenient. On the left is a couple shortcuts – obvious things like links to my own playlists and music, and then at the top a “What’s new” button. There seems to be three main modes of discovery built into this button – New stuff featured by spotify, “top lists” which is a list of the most popular stuff, and “feed” which pulls from recommendations made by your friends.

I click feeds, and find 10 messages from spotify and 1 from a friend, who recommends a song I don’t like. Ok so that feature isn’t really working yet, maybe the service is too new.

I click “top lists”. The top tracks are basically just the top radio songs, as are the top albums – a mixture of Adele, lady gaga, katy perry, and other things I wouldn’t listen to for free.

I click “What’s new”. I see LMFAO, Limp Bizkit (??), Fatboy Slim, and Foster the People. Not really interested in those first three, but Foster the People is playing at Outside Lands and I’m going to that, so I click Foster the People and see I can listen to their whole album! Now we are getting somewhere! I click on “Pumped up Kicks”, their most popular song…. nothing happens. I don’t see any reason why the song shouldn’t play, it’s clearly available, but it doesn’t play. Bummer. So I click on another song on the album, which also doesn’t play. This is getting frustrating. I click on another song, and it plays, so I listen to that for a bit and go back to some work.

2:30 pm – After doing some work, walking around to chat with some people about some work stuff, I realize my earphones haven’t been in for at least 40 minutes and I plug them back in. Nothing is playing. I flip over to Spotify and find that “Pumped up Kicks” is still waiting to start again… Hmm, I need a new route. I realize I’m seeing a TV on the Radio show in September, so I search and find that Spotify has that entire new album up! Great. I click on a song and let it shuffle, back to work.

2:35 pm – Music stops again, one song into the album. Seems the “pumped up kicks” problem isn’t isolated to Foster the People. I click around for another song that works, forced to skip two on the album. Back to work, I was actually getting something done.

2:50 pm – Music stops again, three songs later. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THIS THING. I’ve been wanting to listen to the most recent lykke li album a bit more but have neglected to downl….. acquire it through other channels so I type that in, find the new album, and click on the second song. Lykke li bursts, and I’m back to work.

3: 15 pm – Music stops again, a few songs later. Stuck on an indefinitely buffering Lykke Li song, once again. I decide to test some of the other discovery possibilities of the service – I open the “facebook friends” bar, and am faced with a tough decision…. who looks like they listen to music I might like? A few random facebook friends are immediately eliminated based on some mental calculations of how crappy I know their taste to be, and I settle on Smephanie Momlin (name changed for privacy sake). I click her, and it shows me two playlists she has made “1forthecar” and “2fortherun”. Smephanie is apparently from the literal camp of playlist naming. I recently read a pretty hilarious blog post on playlist names here, but I’ll save time and post the relevant portion here:

Some of the other people here, most of whom are still setting up for the party, look over at my iPod playlists which is so fucking embarrassing because the things you name your iPod playlists are very personal and aren’t meant to be displayed in front of a crowd of people you’ve never met. Like sometimes I DJ under the name Big League Jew, like that chewing gum, so that’s right on the TV and 5 fancy girls are looking at it. In my peripheral vision I can see that one of them looks at me and I think, “Stop looking at me swan!!”

If you are an active playlist maker who isn’t a literal playlist titleist (like “Workout 2,” “Dance Party 8”), look through your playlists right now. What would people think of you if they saw them, right? Would they think you haven’t gotten over any of your exes and you are annoying and sentimental? It’s hard to say exactly what they would think, but you still wouldn’t want to show them.

Note to self – remove embarrassing shared playlists before logging into Spotify. I’m neither in the car, nor am I running, so I click on another friend, who it turns out has no shared playlists. I click on another. No shared playlists. Apparently Smephanie is in the minority. I randomly decide to listen to The Beatles. The Beatles, I find, aren’t on Spotify. Okkkk what else do I want to hear but know I don’t have? How about Talking Heads, I just saw “Stop Making Sense” last weekend. Oh good, they have that, I click, and head back to work.

3:40 pm – Happily chugging along with Talking Heads, I decide I want to hear the live version of “This Must Be the Place”. I search Spotify and find they have it! Great, this service is coming ALIVE! Click… nothing. Music eternally buffering. My internet is pretty solid, this doesn’t make much sense. I close the application and reopen it. Still buffers eternally. Disgruntled, I queue it up on Youtube instead.

4:18 pm – After some work leads me away from the computer, I’m back, and I click over to Spotify. Decide to try some Radiohead, they have it, so I click and it works! Back to real work.

After my short afternoon with Spotify, I’ve got a few conclusions:

– It’s awful for discovering new music. Pandora just owns it on that front. Seeing my friends’ playlists is great, but if Smephanie only has shared a handful, or if other anonymous friend hasn’t shared anything, it doesn’t help at all. The “what’s new” and “top lists” pages are populated purely with the crap that people listen to on the radio, which I can easily get for free on Youtube, and I don’t really need to “discover” that music because it a) sucks and b) is all over the radio. I need to know what I’m looking for when I want new music on Spotify, which isn’t necessarily terrible, it just doesn’t leverage my social graph in any discernable way, and it doesn’t suggest anything to me based on what it should know I like.

– Tracks randomly won’t play. Listen, I know this service just launched. But I’m not a beta tester – I shelled out $5 for this thing. Some people are paying more for the super uber premium version, and I would be truly miffed if I paid for that price point and was given eternally not-streaming songs. It’s a buzz kill to be in the groove doing something else and have to switch back over because Spotify hit a “Pumped up Kicks” again.

– It’s not better than downloading the whole album for free as a torrent. People who pay for music pay for music, and maybe for them this service makes sense. But people who don’t pay for music get nothing from Spotify that they aren’t getting for free at a torrent site – on both I need to know what I want, and search for it. As a torrent, I can have the whole thing in 3-5 minutes, on Spotify, I have to pay, they may not have it, and it may not stream if they do. The only chance the music industry has to recapture the people who don’t want to pay for music is to either ramp up enforcement (which they’ve tried, and doesn’t and will never work), or to offer them a value proposition that they can’t turn down – Like utilizing the social graph in a new and cool way (turntable.fm) or offering an interesting method of discovering new music (pandora). Spotify doesn’t do either of those things well. It’s just a legal version of Napster, which is cool, but Napster was cutting edge in 1999, and didn’t have the possibility of drawing on advanced algorithms or facebook friends to suggest new music. Spotify should utilize those things, but it doesn’t.

I’ll give Spotify until the end of the month to convince me, but right now that $5 is probably the last Lincoln they are getting from me (Lincoln is on the five right?). I give Spotify a 72/100, barely passing, and not worth the cost.

(Next Day Update: Spotify seems to have largely fixed the nonplaying issue I was experiencing, which at least makes the service useable. Based on the search terms that brought people to my blog, I definitely wasn’t the only one experiencing the problem, but it’s good that Spotify fixed it so quickly. My other criticisms stand, but this improves my score to 80/100, a B-.)