I recently became a Spotify Premium customer, for two main reasons:

1. I’d spent an afternoon listening to spotify at my desk and wanted to carry on listening to the same playlists on my iPhone while I was walking somewhere.
2. As a technology guy I was curious if it was any good

So I forked out my £9.99 to give it a go for a month. Aside from the fact I had to use their website (rather than just tap an in-app “buy now” button on the iPhone), the sign-up experience was simple and easy.

The iPhone app is really good; it suffers from the same problem that all non-Apple music apps have on the iPhone, (namely that the music terminates if you leave the app to reply to an SMS or check your email). It’s not perfect, but it’s a really solid 1.0 release. Playing music over 3G appears to Just Work.

However, I won’t be renewing my subscription for a 2nd month because it’s just too expensive.

Don’t get me wrong, I expect Spotify Premium to be expensive: it offers up a huge proportion of the world’s commercial music for your listening pleasure on a ton of desktop and mobile platforms, ad-free with features like playlist management, integrated art work, artist and album browsing and search and plenty more.

But the kiss of death is that if I pay for Spotify every month for several years and then stop, I leave with NOTHING.

That’s just not a sensible investment in anybody’s book. £9.99 can buy me 2 or 3 albums per month if I’m a real bargain-hunter. By quitting Spotify after 2 years, (£240) I’ll be down by 80 albums.

Crazy.

How to help consumers justify Spotify Premium

If I pay for Premium for more than a month or two, that should tell Spotify that I’m basically a music lover, and every such user should be rewarded as such.

Why not create a system that allows me to accrue album credits for every continuous month I’m a paying customer? This both encourages loyalty to the subscription system as well as reinforcing a strong sense of value for money.

As a bare minimum, I should earn the ability to keep 1 or 2 albums per month at the end of my subscription.

If Spotify really want to be disruptive then I’ll get to accrue at least 5 albums worth of credits for every month I’m a subscriber (after some initial intro period of about 3 months).

For spotify, the infrastructure costs are practically identical - users get to download a tiny percentage of the tracks that they listen to, (which is already a premium feature to enable ‘offline listening’). The biggest issue is that of licensing - would the record labels be willing to allow a purchase-model of music to be integrated into the subscription streaming-model they’re currently charging for.

For consumers, it would mean Spotify Premium was no longer a frivolous throwaway cost, and could be looked at as a long term music investment that would likely involve even bigger spending on music because of Spotify’s enormous streamable catalogue.

That would at least start to give Mr iTunes and his music monopoly something to worry about.

I spend several hours a day with this guy, but I don’t even know his name.

He’s been following me around for several months, possibly longer.

Every day he sits and watches me as I do business, send personal messages to friends and family, and arrange my life.

He is… the gmail video chat advertising guy.

Who is that guy?

More to the point, am I the only one who finds instant messaging in their email client difficult to cope with? The immediacy of the interruption is unparalleled so I tend to keep “chat” turned off, which annoys colleagues. It’s important to get in the zone, and minimizing interruptions seems like an important way to improve my chances.

If you’re a professional programmer, do you still keep IM running all day?

The buzz around the iPhone 3G launch caused a lot of excitement, plenty of crashed servers, and some very unusual queuing. Despite that, iPhones were still fairly easy to buy within the first week of the phone’s launch. As a small business owner and avid technologist, I couldn’t resist. Perhaps I should have.

Here are my five killer reasons why the iPhone 3G sucks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone struggling to come up with “an idea” for a new techie startup could do a lot worse than checking out this latest article by Paul Graham entitled “Y Combinator: Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund“.

Paul lists thirty different ways of thinking about start-up opportunities. I was relieved (and spurred on by the fact) that my own in-development project fits into at least one of the categories!

I was also pleased to see that most of the focus isn’t on blue-sky wacky concepts. It’s a much better idea to build and sell things that attack existing well-known problems or solutions by doing something subtley different or simply better.

When I read Ryan Carson’s post about the UK having everything it needs to foster new businesses, especially those that are web or technology-based, I was in full agreement. However, having made the trek from Cambridge to the docklands area of London today, I can state that there is one thing that is sorely missing (and has been for several years): easily accessible wi-fi that doesn’t cost the earth.
A quick overview of my day:

• Cambridge train station - no wifi
• 1 hour train journey to London - no wifi
• ExCeL public concourse area - no free wifi
• ExCeL exhibition hall - no free wifi
• London King’s Cross train station - no wifi (I’m not a first class customer)

To summarize, I had no way to access the Internet on my laptop without handing over a hefty monthly subscription to one (or more!) providers. All I needed was enough access to check my email and post some content to my website, and I only need it 2 or 3 times a year (for conferences). But it wasn’t to be. The ExCeL centre own provided wi-fi actually requires that you call a sales hotline - not very useful when you’re trying to post notes during a talk!

Exactly how are we meant to be taken seriously as a country that wants great technology companies to thrive when a startup founder can’t even check his email at a startup conference? Of all places, you’d think that a huge conference centre in the capital city might be a place that you’d find free Internet access, especially when the entire conference is designed to help foster early-stage businesses whose ability to trade can often be dependent upon their online activities.

While it’s easy to level criticism squarely at the BStartup organizers, it’s my experience that over-charging for wireless network access is a scourge that is completely endemic in this country and something needs to be done about it.

NB:- I should add that at FOWA last year, superb wi-fi access was provided for the full duration of the conference. Maybe the BStartup organizers need to have a word with Ryan and his team.