Move from Last.fm to Spotify and the End of MP3

You may recall a while ago I tried out a service called Spotify that streams music to your computer. Well, since then I have had a chance to really try it out, and here are my findings.

The days of MP3 are numbered, and compact disks have taken their last breath.

Bold statement? Maybe, but I think it is true.

I have around a months worth of music in iTunes (somehow!), I have a 60gb iPod, and a 16gb iPhone. What do I listen to? … streamed music from Spotify.

Even in the car! My old iPod has been a great boon for long car journeys, especially since we bought a car with an Aux input rather than use FM transmitter.

But even that fully stuffed iPod can not compare with having a massive library of music at the touch of a button.

What about when you are outside 3g range or on a flight you say? Buy a monthly subscription to Spotify and you can have your playlists reside offline. All the benefits of mp3 files but with none of the storage, backups, filetransfer problems, and if you are bored with them you hit delete and find some new stuff.

The one big problem of course is you no longer own your music, you rent it. But really, I think that is a small thing. I can see iTunes moving to a pay as you go model where when you buy some music you can stream it or cache it offline for one price, and also go with a monthly all you can eat subscription at another.

I have even moved from Last.fm to only listening to Spotify. It’s just so convenient.

It’s the future!

Here is how I moved from Last.fm to Spotify:

  1. Install the Greasemonkey addon for Firefox.
  2. Add the spotify last.fm greasemonkey script.
  3. Go to your Last.fm loved tracks with the Greasemonkey script running.
  4. Next to each track you will see a little green musical note, click that note to be taken to the track in Spotify
  5. Add the track to your Spotify playlist

Unfortunately right now the Spotify keyboard shortcuts are a bit lacking so creating playlists can be a chore, but I am sure they will work on that.

3 Seldom Used Ways to Get Quality Links to Your Blog

Every site owner is looking for more links. Links boost search engine rankings, while sending direct, quality traffic.

When discussing link building you normally see only two tactics really discussed; linkbait and pitching/link-begging. There are other, potentially more effective ways though that bloggers seldom use.

Creative Commons

The first example of using fresh and free content to get links is through Creative Commons licensing. By setting a CC license on your content you can tell other people that your content is available to use under certain circumstances and with certain restrictions. So one example might be that you can use my content for free provided you do not change it and that you link back to where you got it from.

As the unethical people will copy your content any way, and Google is getting much better at recognizing the originator of a piece of content, the risks are low, and you do in fact get a steady trickle of links from this.

By using the CC WordPress plugin you can essentially make your CC license “official” and it can also appear in CC content searches.

Read more about Creative Commons for Bloggers here on this very blog.

Article Marketing

Article, or Ezine marketing is an older form of link building where you write articles and then submit them to special sites called Ezine Directories. The most famous is EzineArticles.com

People who need a steady stream of new content for their own newsletters, blogs or web sites then come along and are allowed to copy these articles providing they keep in place your author “resource box”.

This can provide both direct traffic and generate links for you. The direct traffic comes mainly from people finding your content on the directory site through less competitive search phrases due to these directories growing a good amount of search engine visibility. When web masters utilize your content on their sites, or their email newsletters appear in a web archive, that shows up as a fresh link to your site.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is a type of article marketing where you write for free for someone else in return for a link back to your own site. These are more personally negotiated, and take a bit more effort, but have the benefit of you being able to target which blogs you want to write for to get the best results, and can often have a link both from your author attribution and, if on topic and not forced, within the content.

You need to start the relationship first with the blog owner. Comment with intelligent responses, and befriend the blog owner in social media, that way you will be familiar and they will have an idea of the kind of ideas you are capable of. Then get in touch with some potential headline ideas for discussion. Do not send a fully written piece until you have at least briefly discussed what the blog needs and audience.

Summary

Getting links for your blog is not just about emailing site owners with pitches or link bait, so think creatively how you can get more links while helping other people share your content.

The Future of Music? I think so!

Thanks to my friend Gui I have been invited to try out a cool new online music service called Spotify.

This is a music service that combines free music streaming, ala Last.fm, with an interface just like iTunes. So unlike other services that are just like radio, or where you download mp3 files for a fixed fee, this service is completely free (if you accept non-annoying audio ads every so often) or low cost. You do not download music files, but you can create your own playlists or play individual songs or albums from a very comprehensive library.

My tastes are, uh, eclectic, and even so I managed to find LOADS of songs and artists that I have never seen on other competing services.

The way Gui describes it is music in the cloud, which is a pretty good way to put the service into an internet technology context.

Think about it, we use Gmail, Google Docs, and so on, why should we have physical CD’s or download Mp3 files? Once we have ubiquitous connectivity the idea of owning music will go the way of the grammaphone.

It’s the future!

Unfortunately right now it is only available for desktop computers, but I can see it moving to iPhone and so on very quickly.

What do you think? Is this the future, or am I so wrong you just have to put me right? (and not just in music tastes!) … let me know in the comments …

Video Content Licensing Fail?

As a content and intellectual property creator I have a keen interest in all things content licensing. Of course I am also a voracious content consumer, so I feel I have a good handle on both sides of the equation, while obviously having no better solutions than anyone else at this point.

In most cases I shake my head with dismay at the crazy people of Hollywood, but on some occasions I can see people getting this stuff right and it makes me glad.

Catching up on my feeds, I had both experiences on the same day.

First of all comes the good news. I read that MTV has released a new service that aims to show every music video. They are in effect putting the Music Videos back on top, like when they launched as a TV channel, after years of reality tv and other non-music nonsense.

This service can be found at MTVMusic.com and it certainly looks slick.

Now the first of the bad news. I can’t view it.

MTV Fail

This is a real shame, and I can’t really think of a good reason why they would want to restrict who views the music, especially in this day of instant iTunes downloads. It seems a prime opportunity to ditch the region release idiocy and have an immediate worldwide market. Yes, new music needs to be rolled out and promoted, but old already released music?

My daughter and her friends love going to YouTube to check out music videos, but they have to be supervised for obvious reasons! While they would still need to be supervised going to MTV, I am sure there would be fewer opportunities to click into video nasties, once my part of the world is allowed to view it.

So onto the other bad news, those crazy hollywood folks are at it again, this time it’s Redbox accusing Universal of trying to grab a big share of their DVD rental kiosk business via what seems like a procedure that the Corleone family might have balked at.

It would prohibit Redbox from selling used DVDs, require Redbox to wait until 45 days after a DVD is released before offering it for rental, limit the number of movies that can be distributed through the kiosks, and would force Redbox to give Universal 40 percent of its total gross revenues.

Consumer-friendly, eh?

Now obviously this is going through the courts and we only have one side of the story, but on the face of it this does not seem the behavior of companies with the end customers best interests in mind. More the “sue grannies and small children for downloading nursery rimes” kind of Hollywood that we are growing to know and loathe.

So how could all this be made good?

Perhaps a leaf out of MTV’s book, but with better distribution. People obviously like and use these kiosks. Killing the distribution model is not a solution, you just get bitter customers who turn to illegal downloads. Give people what they want, how and when they want it, at a fair price, otherwise they will route around you. First to YouTube, then to the P2P download networks.

Or am I wrong? What do you think? Please share in the comments …

What’s the Future of Content?

This is my confession. I was a pre-teen intellectual property pirate.

Every thursday night I would sit in front of the television waiting for the “Top of the Pops” television show to come on with tape recorder primed and ready to “steal” my favorite songs of that week.

My piracy and “bootlegging” didn’t stop there. It only got worse.

Once my brother recieved his double-deck tape recorder we went into overdrive. We would make and swap mix tapes. Friends and I would copy computer games. There was no stopping us.

Only then we entered the world of video. Our first VHS machine became a paradise of counterfeit movies. We must of cost Hollywood tens of dollars in missing revenue. Maybe even a hundred dollars of profit. We were that hardcore by that point.

I say all this to establish that when I complain about my own intellectual property being ripped off that I am being a hypocrite.

My first experience of having something of my own “stolen” (in the purely digital intellectual property sense) was when my first book appeared on P2P networks. My friend Tony found it and showed me that it was being distributed by Kazaa or one of the others, I can’t recall. The publisher had offered the book as a PDF and now it was zinging its way around the intertubes with wild abaondon.

I didn’t lose any money, at that time I didn’t get any royalties and was hardly likely to. In fact it probably made me money because the more people who saw my name attached to the book the better. What it likely did do as a downside was make the publisher think twice about their persuing that line of business. Like a cold shower.

Like it or not, unlike my generation, this new generation have grown up with instant access to any media they want. I’m not even sure the thought of buying it enters their heads. My daughter and her friends do not even watch MTV, why would they wait for a popular artist to appear on some schedule when they can watch any music video as and when they like on YouTube? Don’t for a minute think people leave them on YouTube either, look into the right forums and you will see how easy it is for those preferred videos to end up on iPods, and other media players.

People over the age of 20 will likely know the great feeling of purchasing music or a video in a store, something we have been waiting to be released especially. I have seen kids grow tired of music that hasn’t even been released yet. Ripping open packaging is something they only associate with console games, and how long will that last? Games can be downloaded even officially now.

Once a product is entirely ones and zeros, and the culture makes it the norm to copy rather than buy, can we continue to act like the old rules apply?

As a person who makes a living out of content and information, I realize what a perilous situation we have made for ourselves.

What many of us produce now is ephemeral and intangible, where value is in the eye of the beholder, is it the future or just a blip in history?

PicApp – Free Professional Stock Images?

Cannes: Blindness - Premiere
Image details: Cannes: Blindness – Premiere served by picapp.com

If you run a website that needs lots of stock photography, particularly pictures of celebrities, it can get very expensive. It means licensing photographs or waiting until you get a cease and desist legal threat from the owner. PicApp aims to solve this problem by making stock photographs free.

Registration is free and not actually necessary, but I would recommend you do.

What’s the catch? You don’t get a clean image, the photograph has some “stuff” along with it that actually pays for the use of the photograph. You have to decide if this is a good trade off yourself. Take a look at the example top left of this page to see what you think.

First you get the dashboard where you can search for “creative” or “editorial” pictures. Creative pictures are the “man in suit” variety, while editorial are pictures from the news, like celebrities. It’s the latter that can really hurt the old bank balance and therefore where the main interest lies.

PicApp - the best content for the best publishers

Once you have your results you can take a closer look at the images that came back
PicApp - natalie portman images

Selecting a particular image allows you to embed, in a manner a lot like Flickr or YouTube

PicApp - Image of Cannes: Blindness - Premiere

Verdict

I absolutely would NOT use this service for “creative” images. The prices at istockphoto are so low I would much prefer an image without any cruft around it. The one role I see this playing is in the celebrity field. Searching for “Natalie Portman” on stock sites either comes back with nothing or pricey. Hopefully the in-your-face aspect of the service will be worked on so the frame doesn’t detract so much from the picture, it’s early days and I know they are listening to feedback.

One element that might interest you though is in future publishers will be able to share in the proceeds. As a way to make some side money while adding some colour and interest to our pages, this could be an interesting service to watch.

The End of the Ebook?

Kindle Ebook ReaderYesterday I had a debate with my friend Ryan about the future of ebooks.

I had just uploaded my audio and PDF transcript and was seeing subscribers coming along nicely. I was suggesting the same tactic for another project we were working on together.

You might already know, I am a big fan of ebooks. I buy them, I read them, I give them away, I even plan to sell them.

Free EbookRyan doesn’t believe in them. He thinks bloggers should do series posts instead. In fact, he doubts ebooks have much of a future.

I can see his point. Ebooks are about reading a large amount of material in one package. Most I imagine get read online rather than printed out or downloaded to a reading device such as Amazons Kindle.

Then look at prominent bloggers such as Aaron Wall and Brian Clark, their content has been turned into member sites rather than ebooks. Aaron in particular is surprising as for years he made a good income out of his SEOBook but now his content is delivered as an SEO Training Course.

It is easy to see the attraction of a member site for content producers. First off is obviously the recurring revenue. One sale versus monthly income. After that it is also about lifetime value, a one-off book purchase versus an ongoing relationship with all the opportunities that implies.

For the customer, with a member site you get not just words and pictures but video, audio, discussion, web conferencing, chat, and maybe tools and utilities also. An ebook is capable of more than words and pictures but rarely is.

The downsides to ebook delivery is clear also. Ebooks are routinely copied and shared, it is so easy to do and largely untraceable. The more people try to prevent it, the more damage is done to legitimate customers by applying restrictive DRM and other draconian measures.

Is this the beginning of the end for the humble ebook or is there life in the old dog yet?

Please share your thoughts in the comments …

UK Viewers Get Raw Deal in BBC/iTunes Linkup


What do you call it when someone tries to sell you something you already own?

As you might know, in the UK we have a Television Tax called the “TV License Fee”. Yes, if you want to watch a television in the UK you have to pay a mandatory, enforced tax. This money goes to the BBC. Even if you never watch a BBC channel.

The plus side to this tax is we pay for lots of lovely BBC programming which makes the content world class (in theory). It used to be that we would get advertising-free content but that only applies to the main two BBC channels and Radio it seems.

Seeing as we have already paid once for this programming you would expect in this intertubes age that they would offer programs for download, and that is exactly what they plan to do with their iPlayer service. While much criticised for using Microsoft DRM and excluding non-Windows users, it has been very successful with over 3.5 million programmes enjoyed since launch.

All good? Yes, until you find out that if you miss your window with iPlayer (or have an incompatible computer) you are going to have to pay iTunes £1.89 for the pleasure. Double what our friends in the USA pay (US$1.99) and even at that price it would be expensive seeing as we already paid for it with the TV tax!

I can understand having to pay for DVD’s. There is manufacture costs, packaging, shipping, storage and such. Should we really pay for digital delivery of already aired tax-funded programming? In Norway they are putting popular shows on Torrents for anyone to download gratis. Why not the BBC?

Initially a small set of series will be trialled. Rumour has it these will include popular shows such as Dr Who and Torchwood. So nearly two pounds an episode for an iPod scale video or by 13 episodes for around the same price in full rippable DVD format along with extras and a nice box. I’d probably choose the latter.

Most people I think would choose to Torrent it. It can’t be stealing, after all … we paid for it already.

Update: It’s now official – Read more over at BBC News.