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!

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.

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”?

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

On my very first day the station director told me I would never have a chance in national radio because of my regional accent. I went home listening to some bloke called Mark Radcliffe presenting Out On Blue Six on my pocket radio and wondered how his Mancunian accent had slipped through the BBC Radio 1 net. I liked Mark, particularly the way he never talked over the records. I was all about the music. Which was why me and hospital radio didn’t work out.

I began as a “tech op”, editing tapes for news broadcasts, and then had a go at reading the news. Then, after a few months, I was given a chance to present the station’s regular “Dedication Line” show. The format had a couple of problems, not least of which was the fact that the station never ever received a single dedication. So, we were despatched to the wards to cajole patients and visitors into offering requests. Now the last thing you want if you’re an inpatient in a hospital is to be badgered by some charlie from a tinpot radio station, especially one you’ve never heard of and will never listen to.

Because on those visits one truth became crystal clear: No-one – not one single, solitary person outside the confines of our tiny studio – ever listened to the station. This fact was as soul-destroying as the narrow catalogue of easy listening tunes we were allowed to play. It seemed that every show would feature a made-up request from Doris on ward 9 for Nessun Dorma. And although you could occasionally throw in a Wichita Lineman or a bit of classic Motown, it was very difficult to remain enthusiastic. There is only so much Howard Keel a pair of lugs can take. I packed in hospital radio, and my dream of becoming a DJ ended.

Fifteen years later, radio has changed massively, both in content and in the way it’s delivered. For a start, digital has opened the airwaves to hundreds of new stations, not many of which are any good. Like the digital TV “revolution”, increased quantity has led to decreased quality. Regional accents are everywhere, and that’s a good thing, although it seems there are still too many Fearne Cottons being handed radio shows based on their profiles rather than their talent.

Mark Radcliffe is still around, on the “nations’s favourite” Radio 2 (having survived his ill-fated foray onto Radio 1), now co-presenting the excellent Radcliffe and Maconie show. It’s a show in which the music – not the presenter’s ego – is king, and its mostly hand-picked selection is refreshingly free of the dreaded and predictable programmer’s playlist which dogs much of the station’s daytime output.

Over on 5 Live, the BBC has the nation’s best talk radio station, although it’s about to get a major shake-up. Simon Mayo, probably the best broadcaster in the country, is moving to Radio 2, ahead of 5 Live’s relocation to Manchester (although thankfully Mayo’s always-entertaining Friday afternoon movie chat with Mark Kermode will remain, presumably being broadcast from London). Danny Baker, another top-class radio broadcaster is also likely to leave 5 Live when it relocates. Most likely I’ll stop listening to 5 Live too.

My radio listening has decreased since the arrival of Spotify. But the big problem with Spotify, despite it’s undeniable greatness, is that there is so much music available it can sometimes be difficult to choose what to listen to.

When I do listen to radio shows it tends to be on demand via the iPlayer. Podcasts also eat into my radio listening, with Collings and Herrin and The Word being current favourites.

Much of the rest of the time I listen to Last.fm, a personal radio station that probably best represents what the future of radio is going to sound like. Last.fm builds up personal playlists based on what you listen to, and the results, once you’ve built up a decent profile, are remarkably satisfying.

So what does the future hold? Personalised stations with personalised presenters? Your favourite tracks and new recommendations introduced by a virtual John Peel? There still has to be a place for the radio presenter, as a guide or an entertainer, as company as you trawl through the megahertz.

Like other forms of media, radio is going to continue to evolve in the 2010s. For the time being I’m still going to listen to Radcliffe and Maconie, albeit on the iPlayer, streamed wirelessly via my laptop. There will always be a place for the radio presenter, some say DJ, wherever technology takes us.

The Rocketbelt Caper was selected as one of ShortList magazine’s 25 greatest summer reads for men, alongside books by Antony Beevor, Irvine Welsh, Chuck Palahniuk and Malcolm Gladwell. “What happens when you mix three men, a crushing ambition to build a Buck Rogers-style jet pack, murder and a $10 million lawsuit?” asks the mag. “The sound of Hollywood falling over itself to snap up the film rights to this bizarre story.” If only…

Russ Routledge got to see his friend Muhammad Ali on the Champ’s final visit to the UK. He showed Ali his photos, and handed out copies of my Ali feature, but was saddened by his hero’s declining health. My account of Russ’s friendship with Ali is here.

Spotify is now available on the iPhone (and Android, and soon on S60). As expected, it features an offline mode that allows users to store 3,333 tracks on your phone. The iPhone app has just been updated, and Spotify have also added an offline mode to the PC version. You’ll need to be a premium user, but £9.99 a month for virtually unlimited music seems a small price to pay.

Lots more content has been added to the TV Ad Music website, including this interview with Slow Moving Millie, who provides the music to the Virgin Media backlot advert, and an explanation of why the track on the Land Rover advert is NOT by Noah and the Whale. See the latest ads here.

I’ve yet to receive my free copy of Free, the book by Chris Anderson. Almost 3 months on it doesn’t look like I’ll be reviewing it any time soon on these pages.

In related news, the Rocketbelt Caper free ebook download offer will be ending in the near future, and if you haven’t yet downloaded it for free you can do so here.

I say “new”, but most of it is the very definition of old rope. Alongside the admittedly very shiny and apparently very good Beatles Rock Band video game, is a glut of “remastered” albums released on a long-forgotten format known as “CD”. So we have one cutting edge 2009 release, and several very old fashioned releases that would have seemed cutting edge circa 1982.

The remastered CDs will sell of course, thanks to millions of pounds worth of marketing and blanket media coverage, although not as many as Dame Vera Lynn, who pipped the Fab Four to this week’s number one in the UK album charts. But do we really need them?

There’s no denying they’re a great pop band – maybe the best pop band of all time – and I’m a big Beatles fan (despite that rubbish pun of a name, the often tiresome psychedelic nonsense, and the inescapable fact that John Lennon was a right tit…). They recorded some of my favourite songs of all time – Blackbird, You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, Eleanor Rigby… Most probably if I had an XBox I’d buy The Beatles Rock Band game. But the remastered albums have precisely zero appeal.

The Beatles albums have already been released as they were meant to be heard – on vinyl (most of them in mono). The subsequent original CD releases are apparently of ropey quality. If that is the case then I’d be delighted to return my CDs to Apple/EMI to be replaced at their cost with satisfactory ones. But I don’t see why I should be expected to fork out for “remastered” CDs.

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of this whole thing is that Apple and EMI have yet to release the Beatles’ music digitally for download. This is due to a long-running disagreement (yes – over money) with the unhappy consequence of making the Beatles virtually irrelevant to an entire generation of music fans. I wrote about the online “Beatles Gap” in the Guardian.

Now that the music has been remastered, and with Rock Band pricking the interest of the internet generation, why not release the Beatles catalogue for digital download, rather than on hoary old CD? (And if CD, why not cassette or mini-disc?)

The answer, I’m certain, is greed. Digital downloads will eventually be released, probably in 12 months time when fans have had a chance to empty their wallets purchasing the CDs. They’ll then be expected to buy the downloads as well. Anything to wring more cash from the Beatles’ legacy. Money, that’s what they want.

The whole farrago reflects poorly on Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr (and of course the other players involved in the Beatles’ estate). Nether surviving Beatle can be accurately described as being short of funds, and Ringo in particular has seemed to become particularly irritating in recent years.

First there was the Liverpool 8 debacle, then his regrettable rant at those autograph-seeking fans who have so generously contributed to his fortune. Then there is the frankly dim-witted Aviva name change advert in which Ringo asks, “Would any of this have happened to me if I’d still been Richard Starkey?” No, a common name like Richard would never have worked, you’d have needed an unusual name like John, Paul or George…

So ignore the money-grabbing tactics, but continue, like me, to love the Beatles’ music. Listen to the vinyl (or the old CDs), convert it to mp3, maybe hold out for the digital download release. But you don’t need the remastered CDs, and The Beatles don’t need your money. Money can’t buy them love.

“We’ve finally completed work on the Spotify app for the iPhone and sent it over to the nice people at Apple,” says Spotify. “The application should be available in a few weeks for premium subscribers.”

As the video explains, the app has pretty much all of the Spotify features we we know and love. As hinted at previously, it features an offline playlist function, which syncs playlisted tracks to your iPhone allowing you to listen without being online.

It’s this offline mode that makes the Spotify app a potential iTunes killer. Why bother downloading a track if you can stream it and cache it on your phone? Despite the potential damage the app could do to iTunes downloads, Apple is likely to give it the thumbs-up, safe in the knowledge that the Spotify app will drive more users towards the iPhone. Of course, the Spotify app won’t be an iPhone exclusive – Android and S60 versions are unlikely to be far away.

For Spotify, the launch of the iPhone app will mean a huge boost in revenue. The app will be free, but users will need to upgrade to a premium Spotify account at £9.99 per month. The vast majority of Spotifiers are currently using ad-supported free accounts, but it always seemed unlikely that an ad-supported model alone could support the company. With millions of paying subscribers jumping aboard, Spotify’s future will look a whole lot more secure.

As for the artists and record companies, the (small) amount they are paid per play seems unlikely to rise, and the app seems certain to negatively affect download sales. Some artists won’t like it, and will try to pull their music from the service. But this is the future of music delivery, and those that don’t like it are going to have to lump it.

I originally wrote about the death of the download in January.

If you don’t already have one, here’s a post on the cheapest way to get an iPhone.

If you’re waiting for the Spotify app to appear for your Nokia or other brand of smartphone, here’s how to listen to Spotified music on your smartphone via Last.fm.

More Spotify stuff:
Five ways to make Spotify even better
Can Spotify save the album format?
Where is Beatles band on Spotify?

In a world of rock and pop where the words “genius” and “legend” are thrown around with carefree abandon, here is a man who truly deserves to be called both.

Having survived drugs, mental illness and a rock dad who made Joe Jackson look like father-of-the-year material, for 67-year-old Brian Wilson to be on any stage, anywhere in the world, is something of a triumph.

Tonight he shuffles on at the Sage in a baggy beach shirt and white running shoes, perches slightly precariously on a stool behind his electric piano, and yells, “Hello Newcastle upon Tyne! I hope you enjoy the concert!” His ten-piece band assembles behind him and, after a sweet harmonising intro, launches into California Girls. And what a glorious sound. Paul McCartney reckons the musicians behind Brian are the best touring band in the world, and on this evidence it’s hard to argue with Fab Macca. To hear intricate teenage symphonies like Good Vibrations recreated live with such detail in this fantastic venue is simply stunning.

Brian seems happy and genial, even if some of the between-songs banter and skits induce a touch of deja vu. And when he sings, his voice fragile but unmistakable, it’s thrilling. To hear Brian Wilson sing God Only Knows feels like nothing less than a privilege.

The show lasts for two and a half hours, and the only grumble for my 50 quid is that there is not enough material from the Pet Sounds and Smile LPs in the set (no I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times or, my fave, Surf’s Up). The emphasis is on the upbeat, and there is little room for Brian’s more melancholic output. Not that the wedding dancers in the aisles care a jot. By the end of the show, everyone is on their feet, including Brian, leading his band through a finale of Surfin’ USA and Fun,Fun, Fun. Hats off to the band, and thank you to Brian. Won-won-won-wonderful.

Listen to my Beach Boys / Brian Wilson Spotify Playlist.
Listen to Brian’s latest album That Lucky Old Sun on Spotify.

I compiled the list, based on stats for visits, searches and downloads, and supplied pithy comments, with help from TV Ad Music’s Keith. Even if you skip the ads with Sky+ there’ll be tunes you recognise, and the likes of Don Thomas and The Seeds are well worth checking out.

You can see the TV Ad Music Summer Special here.