OK, OK, this is going to be something of an I-was-wrong. (There must be an elegant word for that, but it escapes me, unsurprisingly.) About Spotify, that is. If not here, then at least in person I've been less than enthusiastic about it, and given that I'm something of a contrarian, the great press it's picked up almost from inception has hardly endeared it to me. And if I've had one beef about all that coverage - and I'm talking coverage in the most mainstream of places here - it's probably summed up in the question "Er, haven't you heard of Last.fm? Where have you been?" OK, that's two questions, but you catch my drift.
Now I'm going to get round to that wrong-ness admission (still can't think of the word for it ) shortly, but first let me reiterate my Spotify gripes.
From the get-go I've found its slickness a little offputting. Like I say, I'm a contrarian. Of course, in truth, the first time I used it I was impressed with its UX, the ease of use, the robustness of the streaming, and even if I naturally favour the web-based, Spotify's manifestation as a desktop app made a lot of sense.
Oh, and it had a lot of pretty decent catalogue in there. Plainly not as extensive as Last's, but then again, unlike the latter, with Spotify you could request specific tracks. The cloud jukebox of theory rendered, well, real.
Oh, hold up, this is the gripes bit. Thing is, yes, it was plainly good at the start, but there was just something... The ads, of course, were annoying, but that's the Freemium model for you. I could always, well, pay. But they - the ads, that is - spoke of something else, of a business model a little too easy to see, a little too surface. But as I say, I understood why the ads were there, and could live with them.
Then the emails started. Emails so un-targetted as to be an intrusion. Let's call 'em what they are: SPAM. Oh I know, not technically. No doubt I'd ticked - or not ticked - the right - or wrong - boxes, somewhere. But for all that, if I get an email telling me about Paul Rodgers with Queen or Blur or La Roux or... well you get the picture... if I get an email like that I'm thinking SPAM, right? And then there's the offers: join now and get two free downloads. Wow, sign up for a tenner-a-month service and get a couple of MP3s on the house. The largesse is overwhelming.
And then... there was the customer survey. Call me a freak but I tend to do surveys. OK, not the telephone insurance survey which woke me up on Sunday morning, but most online consumer surveys I do tend to fill in. It's partly a confessional need, but mostly - I hope - it's driven by inquisitiveness. You can tell a lot about what a company thinks by the questions it asks... about what you think. And I certainly wanted to know what Spotify wanted to know about what I thought.
So I did it. With Justin. I thought we'd find it revealing, but I don't think either of us had any idea how revealing. I'll do no more here than bullet our observations, but I think they stand...
a. It was too long, way too long! It took us 25 - twenty-five - minutes to complete. Who has that kind of time spare? Apart from us. And it was work for us, right? Seriously - that is utter lunacy. The worst of it was that the survey had a progress bar; after the first couple of "rounds" we were getting seriously traumatised. (It's what a friend of mine refers to as the "Drowning by Numbers moment", although I do feel honour-bound to say he'd felt it during one of mine and J's presentations. Everyone's a critic, apparently.)
b. OK, this is the school teacher bit (and probably a dangerous thing to mention, in type) but it was full of real stinker typos. I don't have an essential problem with this - we're all guilty - but in a document which had, presumably, passed under many eyes, it struck us both as, well, lazy. (As opposed to "well lazy". Eats, shoots, leaves, up with which I will not put, etc.)
c. The questions were, at times, logical nonsense. You know the kind of questions, the ones where the answer you want to give - should give if you're being in any way honest or accurate - just aren't an option. Where the options haven't really been thought about. Where the answers, in all truth, display...
d. Utter transparency. This was surely the worst of it. Seriously, doing the survey I felt like I could see the case being built for a combination of advertisers and record labels in front of my very eyes. Which is like being used, if you think about it.
e. I said that was the worst of it; I didn't say the last. But I'll make this it. The reward for filling the damn thing in was pretty pitiful: to go into a draw for a bunch of CDs drawn at random from the Top 40.
And there it is again: the Top 40. The email ads for Queen and Blur. It just feels too, too... industry.
And yet, and yet... I'm starting to feel very foolish for all that.
First up, I start to get not a few friends talk - no rave - about it. Not credulous friends, either, nor techtopians. Skeptics, you might think. But raving Spotify for all that.
Then Joe, my oldest son gets back from University and, well, it's all about Spotify. Joe's a 70s soul fanatic. It happens. And he's building one bastard soul music playlist on Spotify. iTunes? Forget it. The next thing I know, the cooking time kitchen iPod-off between me, him and younger brother Franck has become a Spotify-off, and Faith No More is up against The Temptations, and Foreign Beggars are facing off The Drifters. You get the picture.
So I'm there already, to be honest, then only this morning, I get the final confirmation. I'm probably the last to realise that you can Scrobble from Spotify, and officially. It hadn't even occurred that you'd be able to do it with anything other than a hack (and there was one: Scobblify). After all, when J and I filled in that survey a few months back, Last hadn't even been mentioned as a competitor. Just goes to show that coders think differently to marketeers. Thank Christ.
Here's what the Spotifly blog had to say on the matter:
Almost immediately after launch we started getting heaps of requests from people who wanted to be able to scrobble the music they were playing on Spotify to Last.fm (Last.fm is a cool music recommendation site for those of you who don’t know). The demand was so high that people started creating their own solutions to scrobble, which were cool but a little hard to install and run for the average user.
So today we are really excited to announce that we’ve added scobbling support directly into Spotify, no more need to install any other software. To setup scrobbling just open the user preferences in Spotify and enter your Last.fm username and password and you’re ready to scrobble.
(I'm ashamed to say that post's from December by the way.)
Now this is how it should work: it's an ecosystem after all!
(It's also how it should work in terms of companies listening to their customers, too, but that;s a different matter.) This morning I was recommended a new release by my favourite neo-surf band, The Mermen... by Amazon. I checked it on Spotify - and there it was! Listened to it all the way through, it scrobbling all the way of course (turns out it just needs a prefs tweak). Then Last starts recommending other neo-surf acts. By the end of the morning, I've not only gone and ordered the the new Mermen CD, but one by the fabulously-monickered Man or Asro-Man as well. Cool.
None of which is to say that there's not a long way to go: Spotify's inventory needs a major boost to satisfy our more perverse tastes. But like I say, this IS how it should work. iTunes, I have to say, is looking very sorry indeed.
How's that for an apology, then?
Simon
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