And there, in 30 seconds of televisual madness, John Barnes manages to both hit a new career low and defile the greatest football record ever made.

Quite an achievement for a man whose playing career ended with lumbering embarrassment at Newcastle and relegation at Charlton, and whose managerial career with Celtic (‘Super Caley go ballistic’ etc) and Tranmere must surely rank as one of the least successful of all time.

Barnes never exactly pulled up any trees playing for his country either, and some might say his original rap on World in Motion was the best thing he ever did for England. It would be hard to argue with that opinion.

Because World In Motion by New Order, some say EnglandNewOrder, is indisputably the best football record ever made. You can keep your Three Lions, and your Back Home, and your All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit.

It is the best football record ever made because: a) It is really very good; and b) It helped change the face of English football – and some might say football in general – forever.

Cast your mind back to the end of the 89/90 football season. English football was virtually unrecognisable to the bells and whistles phenomenon it is today. Liverpool won the Barclays First Division, but they didn’t get into Europe. English clubs had been banned from European competition for five years, and Liverpool for six. The shadow of hooliganism still hung over the game.

It was only a year on from Hillsborough, and the memories of that disaster remained fresh in the mind. Racism was prevalent on the terraces, and football was hardly an attractive place to take the family.

And on the pitch things were fairly uninspiring. The PFA and football writers’ players of the year were David Platt and that man John Barnes, and there was very little foreign talent around.

Not that you would get much of a chance to watch it. Armchair fans were restricted to the occasional Big Match and lamentable highlights shows on ITV.

Overall, English football was in a pretty miserable state. There was absolutely no reason to think that the national team would have any success at the World Cup that summer in Italy. There was very little optimism.

And then came World In Motion. New Order, fresh from the success of the Ibiza-infused Technique, teamed up with Keith Allen, Dad of Lily, to record the track. Also roped in were Barnes and various team-mates including Paul Gascoigne and Peter Beardsley, both of whom, legend has it, recorded versions of the rap that never made it onto the final track. Throw in some Kenneth Wolstenholme samples, and the end result was something quite special.

The genius of World In Motion is that, as the rap admits, it ain’t a football song. Yes, there is talk of creating space and beating your man, but really it’s bigger than that. ‘Love’s got the world in motion,’ the chorus proclaims. Love, not football. It’s only at the end, as it swells to a climax, that the song throws in, ‘We’re playing for England, En-ger-land!’, and by then you’ve been drawn in and can hardly help singing along.

World In Motion helped create belief in a national team that arrived at Italia 90 with little to no chance. Peter Hook has said that the song ‘enhanced patriotism’, and that’s true. These were the days before every other car flew a cross of St George, and just about the most commitment anyone gave to showing their support for England was to collect World Cup coins or Panini stickers.

It’s obviously an exaggeration to say that World In Motion propelled England into the semi finals, but it certainly helped. It encouraged us to go out and buy England shirts, have a couple of beers, throw our arms around our mates and holler, ‘En-ger-land’. It encouraged us to love the game again.

What happened next is securely stored in the memory of any football fan. Sir Bobby’s genius, Lineker’s goals, Waddle’s penalty, Gazza’s tears. And that was that. English football was never the same again.

Within a couple of years we had the Premier League and wall-to-wall TV coverage. We had an influx of new talent, sponsors and money. There were new stadiums and kits and haircuts and multi-coloured boots. Not all of the changes were positive, of course, but overall the game became a bigger and better thing.

And World In Motion was the starting point. Had it not created a surge of pride and goodwill that propelled the England team into the semi finals of Italia 90 who knows where our national game would have ended up? We might still be watching the bloody Big Match. And that would be no good at all.

So now it’s 20 years on, and it’s World Cup 2010, and England have no chance of winning the thing. Or do they? If they hold and give and do it at the right time, anything is surely possible.

New Order – World In Motion (Spotify)

Every so often you get blown away by a band, and tonight was one of those occasions. I might not even have been here tonight had Danny and the Champions of the World not been on the supporting bill. The always-entertaining Danny (operating in reduced circumstances with opening act Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou joining him for a stripped-down set) was great, but The Duke and The King were even better – undoubtedly one of the best bands I’ve seen up here for years.

Originally a side project for Simone Felice of The Felice Brothers, The Duke and The King (named after a pair of travelling hustlers in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) has now become Felice’s priority, and seem destined for very great things. Felice (The Duke) and Bobbie Bird Burke (The King) recorded debut album Nothing Gold Can Stay in a one-room woodstove-heated cabin. It’s a good album – warm, catchy Americana – but it becomes really great in a live setting.

Adding Simi Stone and Nowell Haskins to become a four-piece takes the songs to another level. All four are outstanding vocalists, combining voices to produce outstanding harmonies, and the swapping of instruments and singing duties gives the set real variety.

Opener If You Ever Get Famous starts as folky Americana with Felice’s voice and guitar, adds Stone’s fiddle, Haskins’s drums and Burke’s bass, and builds into a glorious, harmony-fuelled gospel-soul number.

Then it’s straight into The Morning I Get To Hell, with audience participation encouraged and gained. The setlist is great – the cream of the album, plus a couple of Felice Brothers songs – Don’t Wake The Scarecrow and Radio Song – and a few nice cover versions.

One of the many highlights is a wonderful sing-a-long version of Neil Young’s Helpless, which has Danny and The Champions and the majority of the audience joining in. But the most surprising moment is when Haskins (aka Reverend Loveday) goes centre stage to perform a jaw-dropping acapella version of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come. This guy’s amazing voice gets a huge roar of approval from the Cluny crowd, so loud it must be heard all along the Tyne.

The fact that these guys seem to be enjoying themselves a great deal only enhances the evening. It felt like a privilege to be here tonight, seeing a band that in a more perfect world would be on every iPod in the land. That day may come, but until then we can feel incredibly lucky to have seen a band with so much talent it could barely be squeezed into this tiny venue.

The album Nothing Gold Can Stay is on Spotify.
A fantastic live session can be downloaded free from Daytrotter.
A Later… performance of The Morning I Get To Hell is on YouTube.

Spotify, the much talked-about music streaming service, has today launched a new feature aimed at filtering out bad music for discerning listeners. The feature, called ‘Airplay Floods’, uses a revolutionary musical genome identifier to weed out bad records from albums and playlists in the Spotify catalogue. It has already been nicknamed the ‘crap filter’.

Spotiguide was the first media outlet to see the new feature. In tests, turning on the Airplay Floods function removed tracks such as The Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum) by The Cheeky Girls and Candle in the Wind 1997 by Elton John from the Spotify catalogue. Spotify programmers refused to reveal exactly how the patented method to identify the ‘DNA’ of bad music works. However, despite repeated attempts, Spotiguide was unable to play Everything I Do (I Do It For You) by Bryan Adams or Believe by Cher while the crap filter was active.

‘Airplay Floods is a game-changing feature,’ said Orla Filop, a spokeswoman for the Stockholm-based company. ‘Spotify has already revolutionised the way people listen to music. Now it will revolutionise the type of music they listen to, greatly reducing the amount of rubbish their ears are subjected to.’

Although welcomed by many Spotify users, the new feature has already been criticised by anti-censorship groups who claim that the company should not remove listeners’ rights to listen to bad music.

‘The Airplay Floods feature is an attack against freedom of choice,’ read a statement from anti-censorship group ADF. ‘Tastes vary, and one man’s Beethoven is another man’s B*Witched. If people want to listen to Black Lace or Billie Ray Cyrus, then they should be allowed to do so in peace without fear of censorship of mockery.’

Some Spotify users have also reacted angrily. An early comment on the Spotify blog from user Flair Pool read, ‘hey IDIOTS coz i LIKE sexbomb by tom jones n listen 2 it every day n u have RUINED spotify cos now I cannot listen to sex bomb by tom jone you IDIOTS (sic).’

The feature is permanently activated for Spotify Free users, meaning that they will no longer be able to listen to tracks such as Mr Blobby by Mr Blobby or Anyone Can Fall In Love by Anita Dobson. Spotify Premium users can toggle the Airplay Floods feature on and off using the F9 key.

What do you think of the new Airplay Floods feature? Post a comment and let us know.

So you’ve created a killer Spotify playlist. But how can you share the playlist with friends, or make it available to a wider audience of Spotify users? There are a number of ways to do this, and the good news is that they’re all really easy.

The most basic way to share a Spotify playlist is to share its HTTP link or Spotify URI. To do this, either drag and drop or copy the link. To drag and drop, left-click and hold on the playlist name in your playlist pane on the left-hand side of the Spotify client, and drag into an email, Twitter message etc. To copy the link, right-click on the playlist name and select “Copy HTTP link” or “Copy Spotify URI”.

Spotify also has an in-built feature for sharing playlists (or artists, tracks or albums) via social networks. Just right-click on the playlist name and select “Share to”, then select Facebook, Twitter or Delicious.

Don’t forget that it you want your friends to be able to add and remove tracks to and from your playlist you’ll need to make it collaborative by right-clicking on the playlist title and selecting “Collaborative playlist”.

So it’s easy to share your playlists with friends, but what about sharing your hard work with the entire Spotify community?

As it happens, there are more than 20 websites dedicated to sharing Spotify playlists. To see a list of all of them go to Spotify’s Resources Page.

ShareMyPlaylists.com features more than 14,000 Spotify playlists, and you can browse by genres and ratings. The website has a community feel, with groups and user blogs to participate in. You can see Spotiguide’s playlists here.

Other Spotify playlist-sharing websites include the UK-based Spotifyplaylists, Spotylist, Shared Playlists, Spotyshare, and Myspotify.com.

Spotify playlists are a great feature, but once you have more than a handful they become very difficult to organise. As of yet, there is no in-built feature to organise playlists, other than the very basic playlist panel on the left hand side of the Spotify client. However, there is a very simple workaround that can help.

The first thing to do is to make your playlist panel as big as possible. To do this, click the minimise button on the Now playing box at the bottom left of the screen, and right-click and delete any previous search terms that appear in the panel. You should be left with your Home, Radio, Play queue and Purchases links, and then your list of playlists.

Now to organise those playlists. Each playlist can be dragged and dropped into any order you choose, we’re going to suggest you use the time-honoured Artist A to Z sorting system, although of course you could sort by genre, label, hair length or anything else that floats your boat.

Make sure that each playlist is correctly named – just right click and select Rename. Here at Spotiguide we name our playlists by artist, and often include several albums by the same artist in a single playlist. If you’re really fussy, you might want to rename to put surnames first, so “Ryan Adams” becomes “Adams, Ryan”.

You can then drag and drop your playlists into A to Z order. Then, to add further organisation, you can create some blank playlists and use them as sorting labels. For example, click + New playlist, and name it “A”, “B”, “C” etc.

You can further sort your playlists into your own compilations, collaborative efforts, playlists created by friends, and more. Just create a blank playlist for each sorting category. You can use symbols such as * and – to make your labels stand out, for example “- – -My Playlists- – -” or “***Party Playlists***”.

The great news is that all of this reorganisation will automatically port across to mobile devices for Spotify Mobile users.

Until Spotify introduces an integrated playlist organiser, this is a simple and effective solution. Of course, once you begin to rack up hundreds of playlists you’re going to have to put in some effort to keep your playlist panel from becoming unwieldy. So spend a while spring-cleaning your playlist panel and you’ll soon be able to find your music faster and easier.

According to research from Government-backed watchdog Consumer Focus, only 2 percent of UK adults are aware of Spotify. The research also found that 4 out of 10 people were unable to name any legal online music service. Of those that could name a service, 85 percent had only heard of iTunes and Amazon. Only 1 percent had heard of Last.fm or 7Digital.

The research, which was carried out among a “representative” selection of 1995 UK adults aged 15-plus, concludes that more must be done to make consumers aware of legal online music services in an effort to combat illegal downloading. That’s fair enough, but can it really be true that only 2 percent of UK adults are aware of Spotify?

Spotify has well over 2 million UK users – that’s more than 3 percent of the UK population right there. And the current invitation system is restricting the number of users in this country. Every Spotify user has probably got at least a handful of friends and family who they’ve told about Spotify, but who haven’t yet signed up. So the real number of UK adults who have heard of Spotify is actually much higher than the percentage figure offered by this research.

The problem comes with the fact that the survey covered that “representative” selection of the population. Among that selection would no doubt have been many people who had no interest in either the internet or music. Those people are about as likely to illegally download music as they are to pop to the moon for a platypus sandwich.

The survey would have been much more useful if it had covered internet users, or more specifically internet users who consume music online. Among their number, it’s likely that a vast majority would have heard of Spotify, and the other online music services. Whether they are likely to use them rather than illegally downloading is another matter.

The chief executive of record industry trade body the BPI, Geoff Taylor has criticised the tax payer-funded research, and is quoted in The Telegraph as saying, “It’s just not credible to suggest that people who are downloading illegally haven’t heard of iTunes, Amazon or other legal music services.”

The BPI and Ovum launched separate research on the same day concentrating on how UK Internet Service Providers could launch bundled digital music services. The BPI report concludes that online music services could earn UK ISPs £100 million by 2013.

The awards are being hosted by afront at The Pansentient League, who also maintains the Spotify Resources page at Spotify.com. You can vote for Spotiguide, or any other Spotify community website, at The Pansentient League’s Spotties page.

And by voting you could win yourself a free subscription to Spotify Premium. Spotify Ltd are offering three 3-month Spotify Premium subscription vouchers, which will be awarded at random to three lucky Spotties voters. Voting closes at the end of March. Good luck!

Vote for Spotiguide here!

A key question we get asked by independent artists is, “How can I get my music onto Spotify?” It’s actually pretty easy and inexpensive to do that. And the next question is, “How much will I earn?” The amount that artists receive from Spotify is a hot topic, of interest to artists and fans alike. The short answer to the question is, “Not a lot,” but earnings aren’t everything when it comes to receiving the wide exposure that Spotify availability can generate.

Ditto Music is a service that allows artists to set up their own record label and release their music via digital stores and streaming services. Basic charges are 30p per track per store or service, and £5.00 for track storage, plus extra charges for services such as chart registration. So it’s possible to get your track available on Spotify for £5.30, or on iTunes and Spotify for £5.60. But how much will you earn?

The company is pretty upfront about potential earnings. Download stores take around a 40% commission, so a track sold for 79p via iTunes should earn the artist 49p.

For Spotify, the artist earns 0.02p per play. That means you’ll need 50 plays to earn 1p, 5,000 plays to earn £1, or half a million plays to earn £100. You’ll also get a percentage of advertising revenue, but we can safely assume that this will be even more negligible than play royalties.

Of course, that amount just represents Ditto Music’s deal. Other companies will have individual deals and receive differing amounts. Last September, Robert Fripp, the former King Crimson guitarist, revealed in his online diary that Island Records received £1.68 from Spotify for 618 streams. That’s 0.2p per play – ten times the amount Ditto Music artists receive, although obviously Island artists will need to give their label a cut of that.

It’s still not a large amount, and certainly not enough for Robert Fripp – King Crimson’s tracks have since been removed. You really need to be the likes of The Black Eyed Peas or Lady Gaga, with your tracks being streamed millions of times, to earn significant money from Spotify.

But, as we’ve said here before, the way to make money from Spotify is not by relying on royalties, but by using it as a promotional tool to encourage physical sales, including merchandise and tickets. Readers of this blog post who might have been prompted to check out King Crimson on Spotify, and perhaps go on to buy the albums, cannot do so. They can, however, check out The Black Eyed Peas or Lady Gaga.

Releasing your music on Spotify via Ditto Music won’t make you a millionaire, but it will get you music out there, maybe get it heard, and that’s a valuable starting point for any artist.

So you love listening to Spotify on your desktop, and you can put up with the adverts and lower streaming quality, and don’t need the offline mode, so haven’t upgraded to Premium? Fair enough. But by not upgrading to Premium you’re missing out on Spotify’s killer feature – Spotify Mobile. Putting Spotify in your pocket, Spotify Mobile is the essential reason to go Premium. Here are ten reasons why you need Spotify Mobile:

1. It’s free… As long as you have Spotify Premium. Get the app here.
2. It offers access to the entire Spotify catalogue, instantly, via your mobile phone. What’s not to like about that?
3. It’s available on iPhone, Android and Symbian (including Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung) handsets. Get a full list of compatible handsets here.
4. The offline mode allows you to store 3,333 tracks on your mobile and listen to them at any time, even when you have no internet connection. That’s a huge catalogue of downloaded tracks stored on your phone.
5. The Spotify app is simple and easy to use. Features vary slightly by handset, but you can enjoy almost all of the features of the desktop version, including instant playback.
6. Sound quality, at 160kbps Ogg Vorbis (roughly equal to 192kbps mp3 and the same as Spotify Free on desktop), is very good. It’s not as high as the 320kbps Premium users enjoy on desktop, but it compares excellently against mp3s played on mobiles, and for example Spotify Mobile on the iPhone offers a better sound experience than the device’s iPod function.
7. Spotify Mobile streams over wi-fi or 2.5/3G brilliantly. Download of offline content is obviously much faster over wi-fi, but Spotify works great for those relying on 3G too.
8. Syncing between the Spotify desktop client and mobile app is instant, and very impressive. Basically, add or amend a playlist on your desktop, and it will update on your mobile – and vice versa.
9. Cover art – a longstanding annoyance for iTunes and iPod users – is never a problem on Spotify Mobile, with large, high quality cover images attached to every track in the catalogue.
10. The ability to force offline mode means you can listen to your offline content without worrying about data charges, for example when travelling abroad. You can listen to your offline content for 30 days without going back online.

In putting instant access to a huge music catalogue into your pocket, Spotify Mobile is changing the future of music consumption. There are still improvements to be made, for example the Spotify apps do not yet scrobble to Last.fm, but these are minor quibbles considering the benefits the service provides. Overall, if you like music, have a compatible mobile, and live in an area where Spotify is available, Spotify Mobile is completely essential.

A lot of key music industry figures have still yet to get their head around the digital revolution, and one of of those figures seems to be Warner Music Group chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. “Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed,” said Bronfman this week. The announcement seemed to suggest that Warner is pulling its music from streaming services such as Spotify, Last.fm and We7.

Bronfman then appeared to strike a specific blow against Spotify, stating, “The ‘get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price’ strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future.”

However, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek was quick to refute suggestions that this might affect Spotify. “To be clear; WMG are not pulling out of Spotify. Media is taken things out of context. So don’t worry – be happy ,” Ek Tweeted.

Make no mistake, Warner’s huge roster of talent means that no serious music streaming service can thrive without co-operation from the label. But, by the same measure, no record label can thrive without properly embracing streaming services.

What Bronfman apparently fails to understand is that the music industry has already changed, forever. Streaming and cloud-based music is the future, and labels need to learn how to make music from streaming, either directly, or by using it as a promotional tool to encourage physical sales, including merchandise and tickets.

For the time being, Warner content is still available on Spotify (with the exception of previously-removed artists such as Oasis, and missing albums such as The Betrayed by Lostprophets), and also on Last.fm. Instead of threatening to pull its music, Warner Music should concentrate on making more of its catalogue available.

And if labels aren’t prepared to embrace streaming services, then they should go back to selling MiniDiscs and cassettes and see how far that gets them.