"Songs you listen to often on Spotify sit, encrypted, on your hard drive. The application looks first for these; if it doesn’t find them, it pulls down 15 seconds of the song from the closest server while it looks for copies of the rest of the song on the hard drives of other users near you. This is file sharing. It increases speed and lowers the demand on central servers by spreading it among several connections. Spotify and The Pirate Bay don’t just share a country; they share an operating system."
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Some of the magic why Spotify is such a slick service.
Daniel Ek’s Spotify: Music’s Last Best Hope - BusinessWeek
(via david-noel)
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Notes from last year’s festival. Here are the bands I liked, most of which I forgot to look into:
SXSW
Man/miracle
Broken bells
New frightened rabbit
The Walkmen
The big pink (dominos)
Titus Andronicus
Get Johnny Cash to cover it. Is he available for weddings and bar mitzvahs?
Music apps, like iTunes and Pandora, have found a lot of metrics that correlate with music listening habits. Not long ago, iTunes added skip count (the number of times you hit the next button after hearing the first 10 or 15 seconds of a song).
Here’s one I don’t think any service is taking into account: whether a user raises the volume on a song after it starts playing.
Music software has no way of knowing whether you like one song more than the previous, unless the user chooses to actively rate a track — thumb up in Pandora, 5-star picks in iTunes. Most people, I’d assume, don’t make the effort.
But you might find that many people, when they hear a song they like, will pump up the volume. Music services could listen to that, and take note for future instances of when it’s deciding what to play.
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"My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all."
— John Lennon
