Give me a "Kravmärkt" Spotify, please.

Svd.se has an article today on how Spotify makes money and how this money is distributed (or should I say heavily filtered?) to the artists. And we all know how the artist's cut looks these days.

My proposal is a "Kravmärkt" version of Spotify. An ethical, ecological if you will, version that distributes the money directly to the artists without any costly and highly unethical intermediaries. Not only would I not hesitate to use such a service (as opposed to my reluctance to use Spotify today), but I would gladly pay 99 SEK per month for the premium version knowing that my money went to the artists I'm listening to. Something like this:

The farce continues

The Court of Appeal in Stockholm have managed to get hold of a Spotify employee, Fredrik Niemelä, to be one of the lay judges when the Pirate Bay trial is to be tried again. As we all know Spotify is partly owned by the very same record companies who are part in this trial, so any moron would see that Mr. Niemelä ought to be disqualified at once. Except himself, of course:

– Jag har noga övervägt min anställning och kan inte se att det finns risk för jäv. I så fall skulle ingen som någonsin arbetat med försäljning kunna vara nämndeman i ett misstänkt stöldfall, säger han till SvD.se.

I'm sorry? You're saying you wouldn't consider it a problem if you were an Ica-employee and were set to be a lay judge in a trial where Ica was a party? There's no chance of you being biased with your employer sitting on one side of the courtroom? I'm impressed.

After the scandals surrounding the first trial you'd think the Court of Appeal would spend just a little extra time making sure none of the judges was on the entertainment mafia's payroll.

*Update 2009-09-24: Seems like there's more than just a Spotify-employee amongst the judges... I'm fascinated by how impossible it seems to be given a fair trial with unbiased judges here in Sweden. What is this, a banana republic?

Voddler - a fiasco in the making

Voddler is supposed to be a kind of Spotify-like service, only for movies and TV-series. This is all good, but according to the article in SvD, Voddler will be burdened by the same antique release window system invented by the movie industry that is killing the DVD market and causing people to illegally download US-released movies and TV-series that won't hit European theaters for months:

Alla filmer kommer alltså inte att finnas i gratisversionen och filmer kommer även att kunna flyttas från gratisvarianten till premiumvarianten och vice versa. Baserat på filmbolagens så kallade releasefönster kommer filmer även att kunna försvinna helt i perioder.

Seriously, who's gonna pay for a premium account?

Unfortunately it seems as long as you want to stay on friendly terms with the entertainment mafia, you're going to have a poor, defective service. If you, on the other hand, decide to give the customers what they want, expect to be persecuted prosecuted by an industry that makes its own laws. It's really a lose-lose situation.

Spotify owned by criminals

Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? Unfortunately it's true. Not only is the music industry making money on royalties every time a song is played back by you on Spotify (*), prominent members of this criminal industry actually own 18 percent of the Spotify shares, which they got virtually for free in exchange for access to their record archives - no free stocks, no deal:

According to newspaper Computer Sweden, which has got hold of documents that Spotify send to the companies registration office in Luxembourg, the record companies bought the shares for 100,000 kronor (€9.700, $13.900).

The record labels are: Sony BMG (5,8 percent), Universal Music (4,8 percent), Warner Music (3,8 percent) and EMI (1,9 percent). Also Merlin holds a small stake.

Time to uninstall Spotify and stop feeding the monster. Try Grooveshark instead, and lose those annoying ads at the same time.


(*) At the very least I think they should provide some sort of record label filter, so the users could choose to exclude artists from certain labels, thus minimizing their income.

Spotify for iPhone

If you're one of those people choosing overpriced hype instead of features, chances are you might be the owner of an Apple iPhone. If you also happen to be a Spotify-user (if not, check this out), you'll finally be able to use it with your iPhone - not thanks to Apple or Spotify, mind you!

A brilliant mind has created an open source Spotify-client for the iPhone called Spot. Of course you will need to jailbreak your phone in order to use the application, but then again this is something you have to do anyway if you want to unlock your ridiculously expensive phone's full potential.

Check out the demo below, and download the software here.



Or you could just wait for the official version of the mobile Spotify application, which is gonna cost you though.

Spotify invites

Why do you need an invite to be able to start a free Spotify subscription (unless you live in the UK)? Good question, and I've got no good answer. Fortunately there is a solution for those of you out there who have not yet received an invite, and don't want to use a UK proxy every time you use Spotify...

Check out Spotify.fleo.se, handing out several hundred invites daily. I don't know how it works, heck I don't even know if it works, but other people claim it does, so just go ahead and try it.