Anyway, it’s up now, so Kindle people can go and do their Whispernet thing. The price will vary according to which country you’re in, and to be honest I can’t work it out, so just go take a look.

If you don’t have a Kindle, you can get a non-Kindle ebook here. And, of course, if you’re still living in 2008 or something you can get a version of the book made of cellulose pulp, derived mainly from wood, rags and certain grasses, processed into flexible sheets or rolls by deposit from an aqueous suspension. That’s a paperback to you and me.

The Rocketbelt Caper is the non-bestselling true story of three men who build a jetpack, fall out, hit each other over the head with baseball bats, and other unspeakable things. It is most definitely NOT the source material for straight-to-video rocketbelt caper movie Pretty Bird.

[UPDATE 21/05/10] Having investigated further, the Kindle version costs $2.99 in the US – the lowest price it was possible for me to list an ebook on the service. Amazon keep 65% of that, and then pay me the remainder via a US dollar cheque, on which I have to pay a fee to cash into my UK bank account. So I’m not making any money on this. I’m simply making the book available on Kindle to get it in front of as many readers as possible.

However, in the UK, Amazon hikes the price to $5.86 – almost twice the price paid by US readers. The official reason given by Amazon for this is ‘taxes and operating costs’. Hmm. UK VAT might account for an extra 17.5%, but is there really an extra operating cost associated with sending an item that does not physically exist across the Atlantic? A rum deal, but if you don’t want to pay Amazon’s premium feel free to buy direct from this website instead.

[ANOTHER UPDATE 25/06/10] The UK price has now been reduced to $3.51 for no fathomable reason, but is now only $0.52 more than the US price.

A couple of weeks ago, Spotify launched its iPhone app v0.4, and after a couple of teething troubles, during which it was quickly upgraded to v0.4.1, it now looks stable enough to offer a quick review.

First up, for those who are new to Spotify for iPhone, here’s a run-down of what it does – which is basically pretty much everything the desktop client does. You’ve got instant streaming of the full catalogue over Wi-Fi and 3G, the ability to store 3,333 tracks in offline playlists, and fast syncing between mobile and desktop. Essentially, Spotify for mobile puts the entire Spotify catalogue into your pocket, making it instantly available in very high quality. So what does v0.4.1 add?

New features include the much-requested Last.fm scrobbling – a long-standing feature on the desktop client, and a refreshed look. A major addition is iPod integration, which uses tracks already stored in the iPhone’s iPod in Spotify playlists, saving memory and sync time. Also new is the ability to stream at low bandwidth (98kbs) when without a Wi-Fi signal. The new Starred feature allows you to star and save favourite albums and tracks.

The are also other small tweaks, such as the fact that the volume slider has been replaced by the iPhone’s master volume control, a restore feature that means the app restarts where it left off, and the ability to share tracks and open Spotify links direct from the browser and other apps.

Unfortunately, v0.4 was buggy, in some cases causing the app to hang or crash. To Spotify’s credit, they were quick to release v0.4.1, which fixes some of the problems. Some users are apparently still having problems with the iPod integration feature causing crashes. v0.4.1 allows this feature to be turned off until the bug can be properly fixed. I’ve not experienced this bug, but I have found a couple of other annoyances.

A major gripe is that, presumably due to the iPod integration, after updating you lose all of your offline content, and need to sync it all again. Depending on how many offline playlists you have this can take many hours. It was most likely necessary to accommodate the new features, but there should probably have been a warning issued before installation.

Secondly, it is still annoyingly difficult to add albums or tracks into new playlists. (For the record, you need to go to Playlists, click Edit, click ‘+’, create a new playlist, then search for the album or track to add.) It’s much easier to do this on the Symbian Spotify app.

Thirdly, the app seems slightly slower to respond. This could be because it seems to be constantly syncing offline content, but I’ll keep an eye on it and report back.

Another much-requested feature was the ability to listen to Spotify in the background while using other iPhone functions. Unfortunately Apple still don’t allow third party apps to do this, so v0.4.1 doesn’t offer a change. However, the word is that Apple’s forthcoming 4.0 iPhone OS will allow multitasking, and hopefully Spotify will be quick to update the app as a result.

Overall, although slightly flawed, Spotify for iPhone v0.4.1 remains an essential application, effectively rendering the iPod (and iTunes) obsolete. It’s free to download from the App Store, but you’ll need a Spotify Premium account to use it, which costs £9.99 a month.

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!

William P Suitor was an original test pilot for the Bell Rocketbelt, and also flew the Tyler Rocketbelt and the Rocketbelt 2000. He has clocked up more rocketbelt airtime than anyone else, and flew two of the most famous rocketbelt flights of all time – as one of the stunt pilots on the James Bond movie Thunderball, and in front of a worldwide audience of billions at the LA Olympics opening ceremony in 1984.

He was the test pilot on the RB-2000, but thankfully got out before the project spiralled towards its murderous conclusion. Bill supplied a lot of information for my book, and you can read more about his involvement in the caper here.

Sadly, Bill’s book doesn’t feature the foreword he wanted from the first Bell rocketbelt pilot Hal Graham. As previously posted, Hal died in October, aged 75. According to the Nashville Scene, Hal replied to Bill’s request with a message saying, “I probably won’t be around after tomorrow. Catch it in the papers.” The following afternoon, Hal drove to the local headquarters of the Federal Aviation Authority, which had revoked his pilot’s license two weeks earlier. Hal entered the building, saying nothing, took out a handgun, and shot himself in the head. You can read more about the tragic end to a high-flying life in the article Hero pilot Hal Graham’s hard fall to earth by Brantley Hargrove.

Bill Suitor’s tale has a happier ending, and he is currently attending book signings to talk about his remarkable rocketbelt career. You can get his Rocketbelt Pilot’s Manual 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.