Falling out of love with SpotifyJune 10th, 2011
Spotify used to be an amazing service run by a group of – what appeared to be – awesome people. When I had my free account and needed help I could just zip in an e-mail and someone would be back in touch within a day. They were really friendly and really helpful.
Fast forward to today. Despite being a paying customer, my support requests seem to be lumped in with the free customers. Apparently only ‘Premium’ members get answered quickly. Unlimited members I guess are not important to Spotify. At least this is the message I get when I send in a support request.
When support do reply they come across as unhelpful and unfriendly. This contrasts dramatically from when they were a younger company and keeping customers happy was important to them.
Spotify staff manage to turn their user interface fail into making you appear stupid for not understanding how to use it. Lets quickly look at buying music. Before it was obvious. Every track had a price and you knew what you was getting. Now, if I click on a track I get the rather cryptic. ‘Get for 1′. What the hell does this mean? I don’t know, apparently you need to visit their website and read about it. I did, I still don’t get it. If I click on it again I get a prompt. ‘Please enter your password to confirm purchasing music using your account’
What? How much money are you going to take? What is 1!?
When I asked the Spotify support staff what this all meant and what music cost.. they worded their answer in a way that made me feel stupid for not understanding. I still don’t understand so maybe I am stupid. Still… a feature shouldn’t require you to leave the software to understand it. Secondly, if a customer who is paying for a service asks how they can give your company more money then you should be as helpful as possible..
I still haven’t purchased music, I still haven’t entered my password. I still don’t know what ‘Get for 1′ means. In my opinion. The whole new system is shit.
Moving on. Spotify support staff do not know their own product and do not acknowledge bugs. Spotify now lets you import your own local tracks. This is awesome as when your connection fails you don’t need to fire up iTunes (boo hiss) to continue listening to music.
However, it is flawed. It is flawed because music labels list multiple versions of the same album. So they might list default album, album with 1 bonus track, album with 2 bonus tracks etc. This means that when you load up your local files. All of these appear on the artist page. This means that when I view Lost Prophets I see ‘Start Something’ 4 times. 4! Its a bug.
I contacted support. They told me to delete my local files which are affected… What? Deleting the local files makes the feature pointless. It stops me from listening to music on Spotify when my connection fails. It makes the whole feature redundant.
It turns out after poking around there is a setting. The rather cryptic ‘Show tracks from these sources’ option in Spotify preferences. You would think a competent support person would know this setting exists and inform you about it. When doing this they should mention that the setting is a bit bugged and you need to restart Spotify for the albums to disappear…
Perhaps more importantly they would acknowledge the problem which made you contact support in the first place. Having ‘show tracks’ enabled makes the artist page pretty much unusable for the majority of artists. You would then expect them to say they are either fixing it / have informed someone / explain why this isn’t a bug. Alas no. They peddle some piss poor advice and leave you to it.
This is why Spotify is a bit shit. The software is decent, the music is great. The convenience is awesome. The staff.. pffft. I wouldn’t let them work for me.
I am going to start looking for a new alternative.. which is a shame as until a few months ago I was a vehement supporter and advocate of Spotify. Even when they did respond to a support request 300 odd days after I sent it. Which.. still isn’t resolved. (Unknown artists assigning albums to popular artists with the same name.) Now I feel somewhat insulted I am still giving them my money.
Can anyone suggest a good alternative? Has anyone else had this experience with Spotify?
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
3 Reasons Why Legal Music Downloads SuckJune 7th, 2010
Here we go, 3 reasons why you shouldn’t buy music from digital music stores such as iTunes.
1. Digital Downloads are worth nothing.
On iTunes a single is worth £0.79.
However, the value of something is what someone is willing to pay for it. Music purchased from iTunes cannot be sold, cannot be transferred. It immediately becomes valueless. Thus second hand digital music is worth £0.00. Hardly a great investment.
I know some people who would never buy a new car – And I quote.. “It becomes worth 10% less than I paid for it as soon as I drive it out of the showroom.” – Yet they are happy to spend hundreds of pounds a year on iTunes. Music which loses 100% of its value as soon as it hits their computer. Seems a bit silly really.
2. CD’s are better value for money!
A CD retains it’s value. You can physically touch it, you can sell it on if you get bored of it.
Lets look at a real world example. Coheed and Cambria :: ‘Year of the Black Rainbow’
iTunes: £7.99.(digital)
Play.com: £7.99. (CD) – http://bit.ly/a8Dyv9
They cost the same! Despite the extra costs to get the raw materials, create the CD, package it, post it etc. Furthermore you get more with the CD. You get a ‘Making Of’ DVD and the lyric sheet along with the same tracks found on iTunes.
If you look closely at Steve Jobs when he is using iTunes I am sure you can see ‘$$$’ appear in his eyes.
3. There are better alternatives
For older music, more often than not, a CD is usually cheaper than the digital copy. For listening purposes, if you are staying at home you might as well use a free service such as Spotify. Even paying £10 a month for Spotify presents better value for money than iTunes. It has the same drawbacks, you cannot sell / transfer music and yet it has the advantage of opening up a library of (probably) millions of tracks.
Over to you
What do you make of legal digital downloads? A big swindle or the future of the music industry?
Posted in General, Observations | 2 Comments »
Starting a business ~ ResearchMay 26th, 2010
A key part of any business plan is research. This research is used for a number of things. It allows you to research the market to see if there is space for your idea. It allows you to research your competition to see what they are up to. (This step will often improve your business idea.) Perhaps most importantly it allows you to define your potential pricing and the place you will occupy in the current market.
I am looking to set up a small 2 man web agency. I have been analysing the local competition in the area in which I plan to start up. A big part of my plan is to own a decent share of the local market and there will be local advertising to facilitate this. It was therefore cruicial to make sure that there aren’t too many people doing what I want to do.
In looking carefully at my target area I identified 61 web designers. I used Google maps for this. What followed was painstaking clicking and reading. From the 61 developers I found at the following…
There was only 1 direct competitor. The 5 top end companies were small -> medium agencies that specialised in working with brands or the public sector. This is the long term goal so they wouldn’t come into play until at least year 3. The indirect competitors were SEO specialists or Flash people. My agency will do these things but only as part of bigger projects. If anything these indirect competitors are more likely to become outside contractors.
19 people were rocking a 90′s special website or something worse. 17 websites were miscategorised. These were mainly directories or computer repair companies. Oddly there was also a kabab shop there. 14 were inactive. This means either their site was down or they were no longer taking on clients due to new commitments.
What does this mean?
There will always be a lot of competition, as a result establishing ourselves locally will be important in the first year. The lack of people in the local area providing similar services proves potential for what we plan to provide. Partner this with the 27,000 VAT paying businesses in the local area… the goal of 30 clients in year 1 seems very achievable.
Difficulties
One of the difficulties I found was trying to work out the potential demand for web design in the local area. This is something that I should probably prove before I attempt to get some funding however I am finding it a bit tricky.
The council is pretty useful and tells me the number of VAT paying companies along with the sector each company is in. In my target area there are a significant number of businesses in most sectors. Ideally I need a footman to go around and do some market research. Maybe pay someone to do a survey. This is a last resort.
Just as effective would be to determine the % of companies that had a website 1/2/3/4/5 years ago and what percentage have a website now. Proving a forward trend proves the market.
One last thing
Before jumping into something you need to know the strength of the area in which you are participating. For this I will be using the http://www.alistapart.com/ survey’s to make some comparisons and try to establish some trends. On this note the 2009 survey results are really overdue.
Next
Once I have finished my research I will fully define the services that we are planning to offer. After this I will be looking into the most cost-effective methods to advertise and spread the word. I also need to create a brand which should be interesting. Anyone… one thing at a time.
I will be in touch soon with another update.
Posted in Starting a Company | 2 Comments »
Sorting out Facebook privacyMay 18th, 2010
It is difficult to talk about online privacy without sounding paranoid. Here is how I see it.
1) I do not want strangers to know my precise location at any given point. This is mainly down to security and trying to limit the already obscure risk of burglary when I am out. Perhaps also to limit the even more obscure risk of being abducted on my daily stroll. (Do you see what I mean about sounding paranoid?)
2) I do not want people to be able to see pictures of me. Well, not exactly. The problem is that images often do not carry a context, furthermore you often have very little control over what images other people post. For example. I would like to try restrict the publication of the odd drunken picture. Such pictures spread around friends are fun, such pictures spread around strangers is just plain creepy.
3) I would like to keep most of my private life private.
The problem with Facebook is that the default settings are a bit iffy. The main two which raise an eyebrow are.
a) Account -> Privacy Settings -> Applications And Websites -> What your friends can share about you.
By default this was set as pretty much everything. Ok so I have been ignoring the prompt to make my account more private for about 6 months but still… most of this information doesn’t matter however being able to share photos / videos / status updates and family information… that potentially might not bode well. Considering how I only talk to maybe a fifth of my Facebook ‘friends’ I unticked everything. I just see no reason why friends need to share any information about me.
b) Account -> Privacy Settings -> Applications And Websites -> Instant Personalization Pilot Program
This horrible invention allows ‘partner’ websites to detect facebook users and personalise their websites based on the information they receive about you. Sorry… but no thanks. I think this is really horrible and is the complete opposite of point 3 above. While this is only a pilot program at the moment, it seems that the idea is to expand it. As a programmer it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to harvest the facebook details of visitors..
Friends of Friends
The only other thing I did was make most of my data invisible to friends of friends. As I said above, the majority of ‘Friends’ on Facebook are not actual friends. Thus… 95% of ‘friends of friends’ are strangers. I came to the conclusion that if I do not want strangers to view something I probably do not want friends of friends viewing it either.
Concluding
Facebook for networking is awesome. People who spend hours playing Farmville or doing one of the millions of pointless questionnaires may want to reassess some of their life choices.. however, each to their own. It is just important to remember that to make use of 95% of Facebook’s features you really do not need to share tonnes of information about yourself. I would advise everyone to spend 5 minutes running through their privacy settings to ensure they are happy with what is being shared about them.
Posted in General, Observations | No Comments »
New CompanyMay 17th, 2010
I have finally found that spark which I needed to upgrade my business. Stanley Web Design has been doing OK for a while now but it was never started with much intent or a plan. The idea was that it would just be a name that I would work under and work would come my way. Work has been coming my way for a while now but I would like to tackle larger projects and get more people involved.
Over the coming weeks I will be creating a new business plan, I will talk you through my research along with what I am aiming to do. I will be as transparent as possible but there will need to be some things that I will need to omit to keep a competitive edge.
I will also require some funding and I will let you know how my quest goes to get that.
According to my business book I need to start with research. This is where I will begin and I will update the blog shortly with how that has gone.
In the meantime I would just like to take a moment to complain about how many good domain names are being camped by a shocking website which hasn’t been updated in 3/4/5 years… it would be great if people could release domain names that they are no longer using. Registering a domain for the duration of a project instead of the life of the person would – in my opinion – be a big step forwards on the web.
Posted in General, Starting a Company | No Comments »