Niklas' blog

Today, Spotify announced their Symbian client, which in plain Queen’s English means that if you’ve got a Nokia mobile, chances are you can now dish out $15/month for a Spotify Premium account and use it on your mobile.

Why? Because loads of people want a mobile jukebox and don’t want to be limited to merely carrying around about ~50-1000 virtual LPs in their digital audio player.

If you pay that amount of money, you’re also enabled to offline playing, which means tracks are cached (temporarily saved) on your phone so that you can play music that’s been previously played offline, e.g. when you don’t have an Internet connection or you just don’t want to pay multi-$ to your phone company and/or waste phone batteries. However, the Symbian client doesn’t support scrobbling¹.

Another thing is that Spotify gives the artists next to nothing. Lady GaGa had “Poker Face” played on Spotify a million times, which amounted to $167. Yep, US Dollars. She’d probably make more money begging on the streets.

In a thoroughly unscientific test based upon figures from this last.fm post, one play = $0,001053. Hence, one million plays would garner $1053 for Lady GaGa, which means she’d be making 6.3 times the money if “Poker Face” would have been played through last.fm instead of through Spotify.

The cool upside to all of this is that if you’re running Symbian on a Nokia smartphone², you can probably run Mobbler, a Last.fm radio player and scrobbler for Symbian smartphones. It’s free and if you’re a last.fm subscriber ($4.50/month) it allows you to freak out by listening to whichever artists last.fm provides (e.g. currently more than 7 million tracks), recommended and loved tracks, playlists by users, “artist radio stations” and access the social features that last.fm provides, that brings a lot more to the table than Spotify lets you have. For instance, I can check what’s been written in my Shoutbox, or see a list of what tracks I’ve been playing. My last.fm account is far more alive than what Spotify lets me do through their service, which only lets me play music and create playlists.

And Spotify is only spread throughout Nordic regions and England. America will get it early 2010.

Really though, wouldn’t you want to give your fave artists more than a billionth of a cent when you’re playing their music incessantly? This is even worse than what Weird Al Yankovic had to say about what an artist makes through iTunes in comparison to purchasing a physical version of his albums.

Now, rather than nerding down completely, I really need to question the necessity for having access to millions of songs at the click of a button. Call me old and daft, but I can’t even see that I really need access to a song while DJing. I loved the idea of immediate access when Native Instruments, the makers of Traktor (the best DJ software in the world if you ask me), introduced access to songs from Beatport right from the DJing interface. Cool thing if you need it, but

1. All songs played are added to a log from which personal top artist/track bar charts and musical recommendations are calculated. They call this automatic track logging scrobbling.[back]
2. S60 3rd and 5th edition smartphones, to be exact.[back]

As I’m completely drained because of sleep deprivation, I’m trying to get lift up by coffee and music. Come with me.

E.L.O. – “Livin’ Thing”

Sure, Jeff Lynne’s hairy qualities and Ray-Bans immediately make you shy away from your screen but this song is magic so bear with it and repeatedly listen.

Making believe this is what you’ve conceived
From your worst day, I’m takin a dive
Oh moving in line when you look back in time
To the first day, I’m taken I’m taken

And you and your sweet desire,
you took me ohh, higher and higher baby
It’s a living thing,
It’s a terrible thing to lose,
It’s a given thing
What a terrible thing to lose

I’m takin a dive. Off the stage. Hey!

Journey – “Don’t Stop Believin’”¹

Yep, I’m in Americana MOR mode this morning, but this is great stuff! People who love The Sopranos keep telling me about how this song is in the final episode of the entire series but I don’t care, this is just another kind of song that makes me want to punch the air and run up stairs like Rocky until I realise nobody’s watching.

The Libertines – “Can’t Stand Me Now”

Shitty video that’s just mashed together by their record company, but the song is absolutely brilliant and I could go on about the lyrics forever:

An ending fitting for the start
You twist and tore our love apart
Your light fingers threw the dart
Shattered the lamp into darkness it cast us…

No, you’ve got it the wrong way round
Just shut me up and blamed it on the brown
Cornered the boy kicked out at the world,
The world kicked back a lot fuckin’ harder…

If you wanna try, If you wanna try
There’s no worse you could do (oh oh oh)
I know you lie, I know you lie
I’m still in love with you (oh oh oh)

Can’t take me anywhere (I’ll take you anywhere)
You can’t take me anywhere (I can’t take you anywhere)
I’ll take you anywhere you wanna go!

Oh, you can’t stand me now (No, you can’t stand me now)
You can’t stand me now (Oh, you can’t stand me now)
You can’t stand me now (No, you can’t stand me now)
You can’t stand me now,
You can’t stand me now!

Elliott Smith – “Angeles/Coming Up Roses”

I was tipped about this live medley through Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands. Absolutely lovely and a great contrast to all the uptempo stuff here.

There you go, four vids to get your arse off the chair and into wakey-wakey mode; now please recommend me a song or three that make you put some pep in your step in the morning.

1. Home-made videos rock.[back]

Songs and people, songs and people and love and friends and a drunken Zak shouting for NWA while celebrating his birthday! Erika turned up unexpectedly which was loadsafun, Maylin of course showed up and was pumped to hear some from the leaked Lady GaGa album, I hollered at a few of Zak’s old friends whom I’d met before such as Petta and Andy and had a blast playing a lot of weird and lovely tracks. Alexander and Per turned up and I played one of their tracks. As it was a Monday people trickled away gradually until only Mia and I were left together with a few daring people who danced and actually graciously asked if we had any Broder Daniel. Of-hella-course! We played that and they went berzerk. It was great to meet our beloved friends and have a little talk.

At home a bit after two am, and while we were sleeping Mia’s mobile phone was carefully placed in a bowl of water by one (or both) of our loving felines. So it’s been drying off for a few days now and is feeling exceptionally better, even though I think it’s still got a little water left in the display. Freaking electronics. Freaking cats! On the other hand, one cannot blame them but only try to hide stuff from them.

Some of what was played at the venue:

Now that the American version of the late 1960s TV-series “The Prisoner” has started airing, I feel it’s incredibly important to remember the original. Here’s a sweet “all-star appreciation” of the series, including bits on how artists and people such as The Beatles, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison were influenced by it.

When I started watching it, thanks to Swedish then-semi-underground TV-channel ZTV, the series had a profound effect on me, making my subconscious kick like a mule and sort of veer me in directions of van Gogh, Rimbaud, Robert Crumb’s “Fritz The Cat” and eventually Einstürzende Neubauten. I also loved the clothes, the veneer of it all, as though every seemingly superficial detail surrounding me hid an unnerving underground threatening to spiral forever and warp what I thought was right, over and over again. In short, it shocked me and threw my world upside-down in a way that “Planet Of The Apes” did when I saw it, 10 or 12 years old; then, I thought every film was supposed to end with everybody being happy apart from the bad people, who were duly punished. “The Prisoner” sort of threw me a gigantic wobbler by helping me realise that not all that looks nice is nice, and by the way questioning what “nice” is, to begin with. Questions, questions, questions. No real answers but from yourself.

Part drugs, part maverick, part genius, the series was an experiment set in a very acidic environment and broadcast to an English populace in the end of the swingin’ 60s. I guess this opened a lot of minds that were supposedly already open.

And here’s an entire stream of the very first episode, “The Arrival“, of the English series. Enjoy.

I’ll just let Lotta deliver your nightmare today.

I wonder if “Paranormal Activity” is scary or if it’s just a lot of hogwash; I’m longing to see “Drag Me To Hell“, though.