Earlier this week Mark Zuckerberg posted his status (FB status presumably 
stating “Spotify is so good” and the whole digital music space thumped with billion-dollar bass 808s.
While we all look forward to what Facebook will be doing with Spotify as Spotify works on its US domestic licensing (which prevents the US public at large from accessing the increasingly-coveted product, as the EU-based public has for some time enjoyed, ad-supported or premium ad-free), the music internets went into high BPMs after Mark issued his vote of approval.
So there is a madding crowd for Spotify suddenness, and US access is in high demand. Luckily, I have had Spotify beta for several months now, and liked it a lot when I first tried it, but later got distracted and went back to my mainstreams: iTunes, iPod, SHOUTcast, and Streampad music blog discovery mostly on Tumbleblogs. But Spotify is indeed good… first of all, it’s good software. The UX is very fine. The graphic design is like a strong, heavy, and ultimately winning weapon. Most importantly everything links and is draggable.
What’s missing? I guess I am not quite satisfied with the Now Playing experience during discovery, and the fact that Radio basically means “lean back listening” these days not “Radio”, but I will always find something missing in anything, while still being positively impressed.
The largest “miss” which is probably next on their product backlog is social services. Beyond Last.FM scrobbling, there is no social integration. For example right now I am listening to David Guetta, album One Love, track David Guetta – On The Dancefloor (Featuring Will I Am & Apl De Ap) . I want to be dancing in a club, not in my kitchen geeking out with headphones while my family enters dreamland. I’m in a zone. I want to share with my peeps and maybe find out who else is in the zone, with Guetta or maybe the same genre or maybe even on the same downbeat in the same BPM. Why not? Why couldn’t I find friends who are on the same beat? There is no reason why not with the technology we have. Once that’s done we could mash up the tunes against the synchronized beats. But… I digress.
Spotify currently has no social integration. I’m not talking its own SocialNet like Last.FM approaches, but just the social services such as FriendFeed or Ping.fm or other innumerable offerings out there. I’m sure that’s coming soon… unless a Facebook deal shutters out the openness. I hope that won’t happen.
I hope that Spotify will emerge as a surviving player amongst the corpse-ridden battlegrounds of digital music knights: Napster (not dead, just different) Total Music (dead), Rhapsody (not at all dead, just bleeding), and all the playlisters including Muxtape (dead), Seeqpod (pretty darn dead!), and about six others I could remember if I rifled around in my email. I guess 8Tracks is still gaining momentum and that’s great – good for David Porter and his crew, making me think the only playlisting model that’s sustainable is for the brand to pay royalties at lowest rate possible and make the play-time such a great experience that it can be adjacently monetized, probably by the context adjacency of other user value.
This post started off as a tweet. I guess I had way more than 140 characters in me. Thankfully I do have a blog for these rare occasions. Now heading back to ‘da club!