The James Kilgour BlogA Life Blog.

Spotify is a new music service, where you listen to as much music as you like for free! It all runs through it’s very well designed client, and the service has all the latest music.

Getting an invite to the service was the easiest! Luckily, I managed to win a competition to get an invite; the code arrived today in my inbox!

Downloading the software was very quick, and installing even more so! I only had to make one click inside the installer window!

Once installed I opened the program. I was shocked! It look almost identical to iTunes, except with no prices! The choice was good; ‘Funhouse’ by Pink and ‘Human’ by The Killers were just two of the available albums.

You would expect with such a service, (especially one in beta) would be very slow to load. Not at all. The songs start straight away, and actually, quicker than in Napster or  in iTunes. Neither have I had any problems with the streaming.

The service is also meant to have ads, but after 20 songs, I’ve only heard one of these, which lasted about 15 seconds or less. It was for Xbox Guitar Heroes, and I didn’t really bother me much.

The only thing that could improve the service would be the ability to download the songs free as MP3s! Here’s hoping. If it wasn’t for my Napster subscription, which allows me to download, than I’d probably switch to it.

So, if you want to give the service a go, I have some invites to give out. The first commenter’s on this post will be sent one each, (to as many as I get).

Update: 30.1.09 I have just recieved new invites. Please comment below. Due to the high number of requests, I will give priority to those who have commented elsewhere on the blog. Thanks.

JK

SpiralFrog.com is a fairly new music download site. So what? There are loads out there, and how can their prices beat a giant like iTunes? Well. They have. All music on SpiralFrog is free. Yep, nada. But don’t worry, they are legal. SpiralFrog is legal, free ad supported downloads.

On a recent trip to the US, I managed to get onto the site and try it out, and I was surprised. It has quite a lot of music on it, from both Universal and EMI, downloading is very quick, and the ads are hardly noticeable after a while, and no worse than any other site with Adsense etc.

Now, the music does carry DRM, which is very restrictive: you can’t burn the music to a cd, use it on an iPod or Zune, and every user is required to sign in and complete a survey every 30 days to keep their music alive.

Neither the DRM or the stupid surveys (which are the same every month!) bother me. The only real problems are the geo-banning; currently the site is only available for those in the US or Canada (like so many sites), and also, the music available is quite limited. They boast 1.2 million tracks, but they have a lot of Orchard auto-biographies for the big artists like Madonna and Britney Spears.

Until SpiralFrog can sign up Sony BMG and WMG, their site will never be any fear fro the likes of iTunes.  But what is their now is very good. My worry would be for the longevity of the business though. For the brief time I used the site, I never once clicked an ad, but downloaded about 60 songs. How can SpiralFrog subsidise this for the millions of users it has accumulated? This will be the site’s real challenge, engaging users with ads, and getting to the point of revenue.

JK

Blyk is a new phenomenon in the mobile world. Not only do they offer completely free texts (217 a month!), but also 43 minutes of anytime, any network calls.

Halt! What’s the catch? Advertising. Every day, they send you up to 6 ad messages to your phone, 70% of which your phone has to receive by being on. Also, the service is only available for those out there who are  between 16-24, living full time in the UK.

I’ve been using the service as my secondary phone for the past few months. I must say, actually the service is pretty decent. On average, I usually only get 2-3 ad texts a day, and there generally quite interesting. Just the other day, I got a free track download onto my phone from Alphabeat’s latest album, and last week I even got a free bottle of Lucozade using a voucher in an ad. There aren’t coverage problems either, as Blyk is powered by the expansive Orange network. For the amount of free texts and calls, the service is actually quite a good one.

The only real difficulty I’ve had was a month ago, when their text servers went down for two days, leaving me and thousands of other users unable to send messages. However, the Blyk team did post updates on their forum, and they allowed us to send free MMS messages instead for the weekend.

I’d definitely recommend it to any one out there who could do with lowering their phone bills; it just makes me wonder how the other networks can’t lower their prices.

JK