Keen to ditch the downloads and access Spotify’s streaming catalogue via your phone or iPod Touch? Then you’re going to have to wait. Although Spotify has recruited programmers to work on iPhone and s60 apps, an official release is still some time away. (Sadly, the iPhone Spotify app demo on YouTube is a fan-generated mock up. See also this design consultant’s vision.)

However, there is a way of listening to your favourite Spotify tracks on your iPhone or s60 smartphone (most Nokias, lots of Samsungs, and a few LGs) without downloading. It involves ‘scrobbling’ your Spotify tracks to Last.fm, which is pretty simple if you’re already a Last.fm user, but if you have no idea what scrobbling means then read on…

The first thing you need to do, if you haven’t done so already, is to sign up to Last.fm. With all the recent hype surrounding Spotify, it’s easy to forget just how good Last.fm is. It’s essentially a personal radio station that builds playlists based on your listening habits. It does this by ‘scrobbling’, or identifying and tracking, each piece of music you listen to. Signing up is easy – just enter a user name, email address and password, and you’re away. And, of course, it’s free.

If you’d like Last.fm to scrobble the music you listen to on your computer or iPod you can download the Last.fm Scrobbler. The more tracks you scrobble, the better recommendations you’re going to get. (I’m currently at 20,284…)

To scrobble your Spotify listening habits, open Spotify, go to Edit and Preferences, tick ‘Enable scrobbling to Last.fm’ and enter your Last.fm username and password.

Next, you need to install Last.fm to your phone. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch you can download the official app, for free, from the App Store. Nokia and other s60 users need to download the MobblerLast.fm radio player. You can also get Last.fm apps for Google Android phones and the 3 INQ1.

The apps differ slightly by phone, but essentially you’ll now have a choice of personalised playlists, including a personal library made up of your scrobbled tracks, and a recommended playlist based on your scrobbled tracks. You can skip, ban, and ‘love’ tracks, and the app will continue to scrobble as you do so. If you’re new to Last.fm it’s going to take a few weeks to build up enough scrobbles to take full advantage of the service. So fire up Spotify and get listening…

(Bear in mind that streaming music obviously uses a lot of data, so it’s recommended you only use these apps on an unlimited data contract or your Wi-Fi connection.)

[UPDATE: The Spotify iPhone app is go!]

Music, Technology iPhone, Last.fm, Nokia, Spotify

My story on the death of the music download is in today’s edition of The Guardian. The gist is that high quality streaming services are set to replace the failing paid download. You can read the full thing here.

With computing becoming increasingly cloud-based, it no longer seems necessary to download or store music. As network connectivity becomes pervasive, the possibility of having every piece of commercially available music at our fingertips, instantly playable via our next-generation portable music players, mobile phones and Wi-Fi home entertainment systems comes closer. So will downloading digital music to an iPod soon seem as archaic as taping the Top 40 on to a C90? Read more here…

The article features comments from Mark Mulligan, vice president of Forrester Research, Eliot Van Buskirk, who writes about music technology at Wired’s Epicenter blog, and Christian Ward from Last.fm.

Mark Mulligan provided the following statistics:

How UK internet users get their music:

24 percent of UK internet users listen to streaming audio.
9 percent of UK internet users buy paid downloads.
42 percent of UK internet users buy CDs or music DVDs.

Source: Forrester Research, 2008.

While researching the story, I also interviewed James Cridland, Head of Future Media & Technology for BBC Audio & Music Interactive. There wasn’t room to include his comments in the published article, but he had some interesting things to say, and they’re worth adding here:

‘With products already available out there, I can listen to almost any commercially-available track, for free, on the internet,’ said James. ‘Whether it’s last.fm, Seeqpod or blip.fm, Limewire or BitTorrent, almost any type of music is available to anyone who is determined enough.’

‘But many listeners just want to switch something on and listen – not have to choose particular tracks and train a personalisation system. Radio offers a simple music service, without search-blindness. Radio’s strengths shouldn’t be forgotten: particularly radio presenters (“trusted guides”) introducing you to new music you’ve not heard before.’

‘Anthony Rose [BBC iPlayer boss] has already talked about increased personalisation within the iPlayer, and I’d see more recommendations and personalisation being introduced into the iPlayer in 2009.’

According to figures released by RAJAR/Ipsos MORI in December, almost a third of the UK population (16.1 million) have listened to streaming internet radio, while 2.9 million have listened to personalised online radio, a rise of 28 percent over the previous six months.

I also interviewed Dan Nash at Napster:

‘We will be launching the web version of Napster early next year, allowing for unlimited streaming playback of the Napster catalogue from the web browser of any PC,’ he said. ‘However PC consumption is still only a part of a user’s music experience. Broadband and mobile data coverage and speeds are at least five years away from providing a user experience good enough to persuade people not to download music onto their portable players and just stream.’

‘There are other factors to bear in mind: the number of users sophisticated enough to use these features in a widespread manner is still relatively small. Though the way users consume music is rapidly changing, the idea of ownership is still strong – if you pay for something, you want something tangible you can keep. Finally, the majority of digital music still comes from sharing files, whether they have been pirated or uploaded from CD compilations and this will continue for at least the next few years. So there needs to be a big cultural shift as well.’

[For the purposes of disclosure I should admit to never knowlingly having heard the word 'magnetoresistance' before it was added to this article by The Guardian!]

Music, Technology iTunes, Last.fm, Spotify, The Guardian