BatFlattery

You may know that Spotify comes in a free, ad-supported guise, as well as a premium, ad-free one that costs £10 a month. I’ve been listening to the free version, and I’ve discovered a fairly annoying (and pretty slimey) tactic on the part of the software.

One of the ads that keeps coming on is the awful DEC appeal for the “crisis” in Gaza. Since I don’t like hearing people bleat on about giving money that will likely go to the terrorists rather than the innocent collateral damage of the terrorists, I hit the Mute button on the Mac. After awhile, thinking the ad must be over, I hit unmute. Nope, still playing. After a couple of minutes of this, it dawns: Spotify is monitoring the state of the mute button and pausing the ad!

And lest you think this is a feature for the music, that just happens to have the effect of forcing you to listen to the ads: hitting mute during music play does NOT pause the playback.

Absolute bastards.

I’ve been using Spotify for a few weeks now, and I’m starting to get that “car-crash in slow motion” feeling: the record labels still don’t seem to get it, and the service is degrading before my eyes. And it’s still in beta!

First there was a massive withdrawal of tracks days after I signed on. But OK, there was still a decent amount of music. On the home page, there were a number of cool tracks in the top ten, including Infinity 2008, Poker Face by Lady Gaga, and Viva la Vida by Coldplay. Today I went back to the home page for the first time in awhile, and the top 5 tracks are all in red, including the tracks just mentioned. An attempt to play them gives a “This track is currently not available in United Kingdom” message. WTF??

Even more bizarre: many of these artists have albums in the top ten, which are listed just to the right. Clicking on the album allows you to play the track! Is this a Spotify screw-up, or intentional? Who knows?

Just unbelievable.

BTW if you want to get in on Spotify before it completely collapses, I have ten invites to give away.

UPDATE:

According to a commenter on the Spotify blog, the problem is caused by restriction of the particular versions of the songs that went into the top list, but that other versions are still available in the UK, and thus the ability to play from the album is not an oversight. So the problem should disappear as the top list is updated. Still seems a bit of a silly error, and a chilling reminder of the way the record labels want to keep the world divided up.

As a longtime user of Amazon’s DVD rental by post service, I was a little annoyed when they sold it to LoveFilm. But after some initial teething problems relating to the transfer of my account, I have to admit that LoveFilm is pretty good. The website has some great features, like categorisation of your list into high, medium and low priority movies, and multiple lists if you and your partner each want their own list. And if you search for movies by eg genre they are sorted intelligently, so that more recent and more popular movies feature first, making it more likely you’ll find what you want, rather than having to plough through every weird film ever released in the genre. (Of course if you want to find that obscure cult film, you can easily do it by searching directly.) The service is fast, so you get a new movie a couple of days after posting an old one back, and of course you can keep a movie as long as you like.

This is in strong contrast to the BlockBuster rental by post service which I did a free trial on. The website was awful. Searches produce lists sorted alphabetically, so you have to wade through dreck released fifty years ago to get to the movie you want. The whole experience was very un-user-friendly. You cannot return the movies to a BlockBuster store, so there is no integration between the online and the physical store network. The whole thing just reeks of poor execution. Which makes sense, I suppose: LoveFilm do this as their main business, while BlockBuster were forced into rental by post to deal with the decline of their core business model. BlockBuster’s heart isn’t in it.

These days I use LoveFilm more for TV than movies: you can rent series on DVD, usually getting three episodes per disk, so it’s quite a nice way to catch up on all of a series that you might have missed some episodes of, or stopped watching because you lost the thread of the plot. You can even plough through a series of 24 in near-real-time: a three-disk rental scheme would give you enough disks for 12 hours of 24, giving you a bit of a break and some sleep before the next three disks arrive!

LoveFilm is definitely worth checking out if you love movies and TV.

I have to admit that I have pretty much lost total interest in Facebook, and although I still need to find my stride in terms of posting on Twitter, I do read Twitter every day. At least. (Mostly, I admit, to find out what Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross are up to.) FB just seems too demanding, too annoying, too commercial, too slow. Twitter is quick and easy and cuts to the essentials. God knows how they will make money with it but I am enjoying it while it lasts.