Simple and effective webpage to announce Spotify’s immediate availability in the US. From the video:
All your favorite music. All your friends. All in one place. It’s how music was meant to be enjoyed.
I can’t help but agree. You can request an invite for Spotify Free, or sign up for Spotify Premium & Unlimited now.
This morning I woke up to read one of the most exciting news of the past few months. As being reported by Paul Miller over at This is my next…, it looks like Spotify is finally launching in the US:
We can hardly believe it ourselves, but we just spoke to someone from Spotify with a totally American accent and confirmed that the unlimited music service is indeed launching tomorrow at 8AM ET.
This is fantastic news for all of you living in the US. I know there have been several subscription-based music services available for a while, including Rdio and Rhapsody, but to me Spotify is the one. This is when music streaming goes mainstream. I’ll never understand what took them so long. It seems to me that acquiring licenses to operate in the US should have been their No. 1 priority since day one. I guess American labels were even more skeptical about music streaming than their European counterparts, but I always assumed that once Spotify managed to acquire licenses in several European countries, the rest of the world would have followed soon. The real story, of course, was a lot more complicated than that.
Maybe the recent streaming services launched by Amazon and Google have finally awakened the labels and made them take another look at Spotify’s licensing model. Remember, the labels are not making any profits from either Amazon’s or Google’s services, since both companies have decided they don’t need to acquire licenses, maintaining they’re only acting as storage lockers for their users’ already purchased music. In contrast, Spotify’s model is already proven to be working elsewhere, and it’s a small-but-consistent revenue stream that the labels can’t afford to ignore.
All in all, it seems that this story will finally have a happy ending for music lovers all around the world. Spotify is a terrific service, a huge value for the money. The client applications are awesome, it’s cross-platform, it works incredibly well, and it syncs your playlists across all your devices. Besides, if you’ve never seen a collaborative playlist in action, you’re about to get your mind completely blown away: it’s the ultimate party-preparing tool. Take it from a long-time Premium subscriber, those are the best 10 bucks I spend every month.
Spotify is a perfect example of how technology can make our lives easier. At its best, it is transparent, almost invisible. The only thing we should ever have to worry about is what song we want to play next. Now, if only the rest of the world would also wake up and join in, who knows what could happen. The music industry might even become interesting and exciting once again.
Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re right.
Henry Ford (1863 - 1947), US automobile industrialist.
This one is dedicated to my brother who, there’s no doubt in my mind, can do anything.
Marco Arment:
If you care about your online presence, you must own it. I do, and that’s why my email address has always been at my own domain, not the domain of any employer or webmail service.
Truer words have never been spoken. Also:
I’ve always built my personal blog’s content and reputation at its own domain, completely under my control, despite being hosted on many different platforms and serving different roles over the years. It has never been a subdomain of any particular publishing platform or host.
To me this is also essential. In the beginning, Analog Senses was a Tumblr blog, but even then it always had its own domain name, from day one. It’s great that Tumblr lets you use custom domain names, and I’m not sure I would have chosen them to host my blog otherwise.
When the time came and I decided to leave Tumblr and move Analog Senses to a self-hosted Wordpress site, all I needed to do was back up my database, redirect the DNS to point to my new server, import the backup into Wordpress, and after a couple hours of tweaking minor details I was all set. This sort of freedom is only possible if you own your content and, most of all, if your online identity belongs solely to you.
The original Tumblr-based Analog Senses still exists, by the way, but it has taken on a new role. It’s now named Analog Tumbles to avoid confusion, and it acts as a companion to this site. It’s mostly an Instagram feed, but it also features those posts that have a direct relationship with the Tumblr network (posts in which another Tumblr blog is mentioned, for example, or links from Tumblr that mention Analog Senses). The fact that Tumblr is a social-network-turned-blogging-platform or vice-versa means that there are a few situations that are easier to handle from within the system, and that’s why I decided to keep it.
Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), Irish dramatist & socialist.
Best YouTube video EVER. I also can’t wait to read John’s review, as epic as it may be. Bring it!
Via The Brooks Review.
TechCrunch:
If you’ve seen Casino Royale (the remake, not the original campy version), you’ll recall the scene where James Bond loses all his money attempting to call what he believes to be a Le Chiffre bluff. He is forced to exit the game, but then Felix Leiter, the CIA operative also in the game, tells Bond he’ll stake him since he’s clearly the stronger player. Again, that’s more or less what Apple did with this maneuver to Google’s Le Chiffre.
Great piece explaining the bidding process for Nortel’s patent portfolio, which includes over 6,000 patents spanning mobile and wireless innovation. The bidding war ultimately ended with Google as the big loser, beaten by an unlikely alliance formed by Apple, RIM, EMC, Ericsson, Sony and Microsoft.
For the average consumer, it’s easy to forget that the mobile computing industry is a fierce battle that’s not only being fought with great products, but also with plenty of backstabbings, backdoor deals and odd partnerships.
The phrase “the enemy of my enemy…” seems appropriate. Also, the poker analogy throughout the article and the James Bond references are pretty cool.
1:05 am, July 5th. Which makes me 28 years old.
And here I am, feeling better than ever. It’s still very true, mind you, the best is yet to come.
Josh Lewis:
We learn how to create by taking in the creations of others. We learn how to shape an experience for someone else by having experiences of our own. So, you want to know how to make someone weep for joy? Have someone make you weep for joy.
Fantastic read. There is so much to take in from here, that it would be a crime to spoil it. Trust me, go read it. Now.
With my thanks to Christian Sheehan, who spotted it first.