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]