Music streaming service Spotify has exploded in the UK media since I mentioned it in my article on the death of the download in The Guardian a few weeks back. From this month UK users can access the service without an invite. The Guardian’s Chris Salmon has called Spotify ‘life-changing’, and the excellent The Word magazine has also enthusiatically endorsed the service.

For the uninitiated, Spotify is basically iTunes without downloading. A huge catalogue of music is instantly available via high quality streaming, with buffering eliminated by innovative caching technology. And it’s free to use – assuming you can put up with the occasional radio-style ad popping up between tracks every half hour or so. (If you can’t put up with that, you can go ad-free for £9.99 per month.) It’s undeniably brilliant, and must surely represent the future of digital music.

One side-effect of using Spotify I’ve found is that I’m listening to a lot more albums, in full and in order, than I do with other streaming services such as Last.fm, which are geared more towards individual tracks. Downloading has also favoured individual tracks over albums – why risk paying for a full album’s worth of tracks you might not like rather than just plumping for the single you liked on the radio?

The beauty of Spotify is that you can listen to full albums without downloading – or buying – them. So if you want to confirm that your suspicions that Morrissey’s Years of Refusal is not in fact the return to form it is billed as, or that Springsteen’s Working on a Dream is pretty disappointing (with a title track that is remarkably similar to In My Arms by Teddy Thompson), you can do so without committment. Presumably Mozzer and The Boss are compensated in a small way, and you don’t end up buying a CD you’ll never bother listening to again, so everyone’s happy.

Meanwhile, you can check out the new Deluxe Edition of REM’s Murmur to see how it compares to the standard edition you already own. In fact, I’ve found myself listening to whole albums that I have easy access to on CD in my High Fidelity-style A to Z filing system, via Spotify simply because it’s so elegant and fun to use. So I can be listening to For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver, or Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes with my laptop jacked into my hi-fi amp, and never have to go to the awful trouble of opening the CD cases. And then, of course, there are those recommended albums that I don’t own, but probably should check out if I have any chance of staying ‘hip with the kids’ – at the time of writing, the most popular albums for UK Spotify users are by Kings of Leon, Lily Allen and MGMT, all of which I’ve heard lots about but wouldn’t normally listen to.

Spotify isn’t perfect. The radio feature, with categories based on genres and decades, can’t hold a candle to Last.fm’s recommended playlists. I don’t want to listen exclusively to 60s soul or only 90s alternative, I just want to listen to music I like, which could be from any of the genres or decades available.

Incidentally, for those who, like me, are using both Spotify and Last.fm, you can set Spotify to automatically scrobble to your Last.fm account via Spotify’s preferences menu.

Unfortunately, the future of Spotify might be uncertain. The Guardian (again) has reported that Spotify has been forced to remove thousands of track due to licensing problems. And I worry that Spotify’s ad-funded model might not be sufficent to ensure its survival, as I can’t see a huge number of users feeling the need to upgrade to ad-free membership.

But here’s hoping Spotify survives and flourishes. It’s a genuinely brilliant service, and the music industry should embrace it as the future.

UPDATE 19/02/09: This guy has Spotified his entire CD collection…

Music, Technology Spotify

Tech Review: Samsung NC10 Netbook

For the last few weeks I’ve been writing this blog, and doing lots of other stuff, on a Samsung NC10 Netbook. And it’s a great little piece of kit – ‘little’ obviously being the key word.

I needed something portable that I could take between home and the office, but as a writer I also needed a fully-useable keyboard. That had ruled netbooks out – until now. A quick recce to PC World confirmed that the NC10’s almost-full-size (93 percent according to Samsung) keyboard is cleverly-designed and easy to use, making fast, accurate typing a cinch. The touchpad, with combined finger scroll, takes a little getting used to, but once mastered it’s great. As for portability, the 10.2″ NC10 weighs just 1.33kg. It’s tiny-tastic.

For such a small unit, the widescreen display doesn’t feel compromised. With its 1024×600 resolution you really don’t notice a horizontal size reduction, and the vertical ‘crop’ just means sometimes having having to scroll down a little further in your browser window. It’s bright and clear, with a wide viewing angle, and I’ve yet to suffer the eye strain I often get from a standard 15″ TFT.

As for the specs, the NC10 offers a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Processor, 1GB of RAM (easily upgradeable to 2MB via a handy slot on the back of the unit for less than £20), and a 160GB HD. It has three USB ports, VGA port, and an SD card slot, and onboard Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and webcam. But perhaps most impressive is the battery. I’ve been careful to fully charge and discharge the 6 cell Li-ion each time, and I’ve had at least 6.5 hours use from each charge – one one occasion probably nearer 8 hours, which was beyond all expectations.

In use, the NC10 is quick to boot up and shut down, and copes perfectly with browsing, video playback, streaming, downloading, and anything else I’ve managed to throw at it. It runs XP, which feels a bit dated, but it’s at least quick and reliable. It is possible to install OSX on the NC10, although you lose some functionality, so I’m thinking Linux might be a better option. The website sammynetbook.com offers tips and a forum on using and tweaking your NC10.

Software-wise, the NC10 comes lightly-loaded with a suite of Samsung management software and refreshingly free of unwanted installations. I’ve gone ahead and installed the open source applications OpenOffice.org and Paint.NET, which combine to offer an excellent, and free, desktop software package.

The only minor grumble I have is that the onboard speakers are expectedly tinny, and you’ll need to use headphones and tweak Samsung’s EDS sound software to get decent audio. I’ve connected it to my TV and Hi-Fi amp, and happily streamed iPlayer content and Spotify with great results. Obviously there’s no room here for a DVD or CD drive. And the piano black finish on my version (it’s also available in white and blue) is obviously a fingerprint magnet, but it’s nothing that a quick rub with a glasses cleaning cloth can’t put right.

Overall, the Sammy NC10 offers fantastic laptop performance in a tiny netbook package, with great screen and keyboard, a remarkable battery life, and load of other useful features. As a piece of tech, it might not do anything new, but this tiny bit of kit does a hell of a lot brilliantly.

9/10

Technology Samsung NC10

Last week, much of the UK ground to something of a standstill. Commuters missed work, schools were closed, public transport was withdrawn, and London town was pretty much boarded up like an old abandoned mine.

A couple of inches of snow received blanket coverage across the media, and people were sternly advised not to venture outdoors for the foreseeable future lest they end up like poor old Captain Oates at the South Pole. This despite the fact that only a fraction of the country had actually seen any snow. Indeed, by the following morning, the streets of London themselves had endured nothing much more than a thaw and some drizzle, and the place was notably clear of both snow and put-off commuters. It wasn’t so much the snow that brought London to a standstill – it was the weather forecast.

Up here in Newcastle upon Tyne we avoided the bad weather – until yesterday. As I crawled my car through a white-out blizzard along snow-bound and ungritted roads, past abandoned cars and the odd bus parked in someone’s front garden, BBC 5Live’s weather forecast told me it was bright and dry. (By yesterday evening the Met Office was offering a severe weather warning for heavy snow across the North East of England for the following morning. In reality, today Mother Nature has given us only beautiful clear blue skies.) Aside from the obvious question of London bias, I wondered why we bother listening to weather forecasts at all.

By the forecasters’ own admission, weather forecasting as a best-guess scenario. They look at what the weather is like now, and extrapolate what might happen next. Our island location makes UK weather especially unpredictable and forecasting particularly difficult.

It is possible to accurately predict the UK’s weather some of the time. If I said that the weather on any given day was going to be quite cold with a chance of rain, I’d be right more often than I was wrong. But that would be of little use to people who need to know about blizzards or hurricanes. As Patrick Young said, ‘The trouble with weather forecasting is that it’s right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.’

It wasn’t too long ago that the BBC included horoscopes in its breakfast news programme. Was Russell Grant’s star-gazing any more fanciful than Peter Gibbs’s bold-as-brass attempts to convince us he can predict the future?

Even some of the weather presenters seem to have given up on the whole charade. Sky News weatherman Francis Wilson – a former BBC Breakfast Time colleague of Russell Grant – has for several years worn the shattered look of a man who has realised that perhaps he did not peruse the full length of the selection counter before plumping for his chosen career.

So how accurate is the weather forecast? The Met Office asseses its own performance, and says it achieved its targets in 2008, for example predicting maximum temperature 85.5 percent of the time. But predicting maximum temperature is perhaps not quite the same as predicting blizzards and hurricanes.

Can anything that hasn’t happened yet be accurately predicted? Or should we just file weather forecasting alongside astrology, numerology and the witterings of Nostrodamus?

Personally, I won’t be happy until George Alagiah ends every BBC News bulletin with the words, ‘And now to find out what’s happening with the weather… why not crane your lazy neck and have a look out of the window? Goodnight.’

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