This blog is now a year old. Originally it was intended to promote my books and journalism, and as a place for me to bounce some ideas around. A lot has changed over the past 12 months. Most crucially, the freelance journalism market has pretty much collapsed, and as a result I’ve had to change the way I work.

12 months on, most of my writing is for the business market. I’m still writing books, and the occasional newspaper or magazine article, but the focus of this blog needs to change.

I’ll continue to post news about my books and articles as and when there is any, and I’ll probably still post random movie reviews and football rants as and when my creative juices dictate.

But the focus of this blog is going to shift towards music and music technology, and particularly something that featured a lot on this blog in 2009 – Spotify.

One problem I’ve found with Spotify is that having so much music available can be too much, and it can be difficult to decide what to listen to.

This blog will aim to keep you up to date with Spotify and related technology news, and provide reviews and links to new and catalogue music worth listening to.

The blog will head off in its new direction in the first week of January 2010. You will be most welcome to come along.

Music, Technology

We are now just days away from leaving the decade that has been the noughties, although we don’t yet have a similarly catchy name for the 2010s. And if 2009 was a little thin on helpings of five-star entertainment, the noughties as a whole was thick with it. So here, as seems obligatory, is my wholly self-indulgent, why-should-anyone-else-care, mercifully brief review of the best of 2009 and the noughties.

In music, the big news of 2009 was the UK launch of Spotify, the streaming music service that has already changed the way millions of us listen to music, just as the iPod did at the beginning of the decade. Most of the music picks below are linked to Spotify for your listening pleasure. (The other links point to Amazon.co.uk.)

In terms of actual music, 2009 wasn’t a vintage year. There were enjoyable albums by A Camp, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Noah and the Whale, but the only couple I really had on repeat play were Sigh No More by Mumford and Sons and the odd but fantastic indie-prog opera that was The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists.

Great movies were equally difficult to find in 2009. I wasn’t as blown away as the Oscar voters by Slumdog “Milliner”. Much better were Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, The Hangover, Swedish kiddie-vampire flick Let The Right One In, and JJ Abrams’ surprisingly entertaining re-imagining of Star Trek.

No 2009 movie was as good as the best of 2009’s TV. Season two of Mad Men was a joy, with Don Draper developing into one of TV’s most intriguing characters. The Thick of It was the best British offering, with Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker spinning fantastically out of control. And any Seinfeld fan will have loved the reunion storyline that ran through the hilarious final(?) season of Curb Your Enthusiam.

Books? Maybe it was weariness in my first year away from book publishing, but I’m not sure I found a single 5-star book in 2009.

But what about the noughties as a whole? It was a great decade for music, and I’m struggling to whittle my selection of faves down to less than ten. So I’m going for Gold by Ryan Adams, Josh Rouse’s Nashville, The Trials of Van Occupanther by Midlake, Glory Hope Mountain by The Acorn, O by Damien Rice, Come On Feel The Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens, The Crane Wife by The Decemberists, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, Funeral by Arcade Fire, and Give Up by The Postal Service. (Annoyingly, my two top picks aren’t available on Spotify, so the service is by no means perfect.)

The best movies of the noughties? They’ve got to include The Lives of Others, The Royal Tennenbaums, Donnie Darko, and Daniel Day Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s incredible There Will Be Blood.

The noughties was quite possibly the decade in which TV came of age, thanks in no small part to HBO. The Sopranos ran through until 2007, and the intelligent, multi-layered mob drama, with every episode better than most movies, probably deserves to be called the greatest TV show ever made. Perhaps only David Simon’s intricate, addictive onscreen novel The Wire can challenge for that accolade. HBO also brought us Curb Your Enthusiam, Six Feet Under, Deadwood and Band of Brothers, all brilliant in different ways. Elsewhere in US TV, the reimagining of Battlestar Galactica was approximately one zillion times better than any reimagining of a really quite rubbish 70s sci-fi soap had any right to be. From US network TV, Arrested Development was a brilliant and much-missed sitcom, and The Shield was a brutally gripping cop drama that literally pulled no punches.

As for books, my favourites of the decade include Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Damned United by David Peace, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers meddled brilliantly with the formula of how books are supposed to be written. And The Road by Cormac McCarthy was quite possibly the best book I’ve ever read.

So that was the noughties. What will the next decade bring? Will the album format survive? Will the CD become obsolete? Will Voddler do for movies what Spotify did for music? Will electronic books take off?

As for that catchy name for the years 2010 to 2019, anyone for “tennies”?

Books, Film, Music

Spotify’s mobile app has been available on Symbian/S60 phones (including most Nokia smartphones and some Sony Ericssons and Samsungs – see a full list of supported phones here) for a few weeks now, and I’ve had a chance to try it on my N78, and also compare the Nokia app to the iPhone version.

Spotify Mobile allows users to stream a huge catalogue of music over WiFi or 3G and, crucially, to store 3,333 tracks in offline playlists. The Spotify Mobile app is free to download, but you’ll need a Spotify Premium account to use it, which costs £9.99 a month.

Downloading and installing is a breeze. Just access m.spotify.com on your mobile browser, and you’ll automatically get the appropriate version. Once installed, just enter your Spotify username and password and the playlists from your desktop version of Spotify appear.

Various Symbian phones look to have different onscreen layouts – neccessary, of course, as the various phones have different sized screens.

On the N78, the app’s main screen offers four options: Playlists, to view your playlists; Search, to search the entire Spotify catalogue; Home, to view the latest releases on Spotify; and More, with options for connection mode and syncing.

You can search the catalogue by track, album or artist, and enjoy instant playback, just as you would via the desktop version. If you find a track or album you like, you can easily add it to an existing playlist, or create a new one.

The Now Playing screen offers a big cover image, with the usual pause, skip, and rewind/fast forward options. Holding forward or back makes a large time elapsed display appear over the cover image, so you can easily find your favourite bit of a particular track.

Sound quality is fantastic, streaming at 320 kbps, which is twice the quality of many MP3 files, and higher than iTunes’ highest quality Plus downloads, which are 256 kbps. I listened with a set of Bose earbuds plugged into the phone’s jack, and also connected the phone to my HiFi, and was very impressed. There was a big improvement over MP3s played through Nokia’s music player, and a noticeable absence of any background noise. And, of course, with a Premium subscription there are absolutely no adverts.

For many, the killer feature of Spotify Mobile will be the offline mode. And I’m here to tell you it works a treat. Just select which playlists you’d like to make available offline, and syncing will begin. I set my app to sync when connected to WiFi, which is obviously the fastest option. It took between 5 and 10 minutes to download each album, so the initial sync takes a while. But it’s worth it. Once synced, those tracks are there for you to enjoy whenever you like with or without an online connection.

By my reckoning each track takes up around 6MB of storage space, so storing 3,333 tracks will require the best part of 20GB of memory cardage. This highlights a slight problem, as the biggest MicroSD card currently available for the N78 is 16GB, although Sandisk are set to release a 32GB card in the near future.

I also had a quick play with the iPhone Spotify app to compare. Features-wise, it was very similar, although I found it difficult to add new playlists on the iPhone, and overall preferred the Nokia app’s onscreen layout. Also, in a big win for the Nokia app, Spotify can be minimised and play in the background while you use the phone for other tasks. On the iPhone, because of Apple’s restrictions, Spotify can’t be minimised, and must be shut down to take a call or read a text.

Overall, Spotify Mobile is a must have for any Nokia Smartphone or Symbian phone user, genuinely putting a world of music in your pocket.

More Spotify posts

Music, Technology