Morning superstars! If you happen to sleep with a desktop or laptop in your bedroom for personal reasons, this is a cracking widget to have. Got a favourite song that’ll have you leaping out of bed tomorrow morning? Find it in Spotify, download the widget and boom! You’ve got your very own Spotify alarm clock:

We don’t know how it works (or even if it works), it just does (probably). You can read more about the widget here and download it here. Smashing.

There’s a new social media network out there for the kids. It’s called a serious breach of data protection laws. Not a sexy name, but here’s how it works – just submit your email address to a company, and wait for some ten-thumbed prick to cut and paste your address into the CC box of an email, along with hundreds of others. Boom! Dozens of strangers have your personal details and the company in question drives a tank through the Data Protection Act.

It worked for customers of Orange, and now Spotify have done much the same thing. Avid Bitterwallet reader Jack has been in touch about a joint promotion Spotify are running in conjunction with TalkTalk – entrants submit a favourite Spotify track and their email address, and winners receive a premium subscription to Spotify. Not that you have to win to receive a prize – yesterday, Jack was lucky enough to get a mailing list of over 240 email addresses, all CC’d into an email sent by Spotify. Obviously he was less than delighted to note his own address amongst those distributed to all recipients.

This isn’t just an inconvenience, or an irritation – it’s a breach of the law. And of course, Spotify took the matter very serious, and certainly didn’t just knock out a trite email to anybody who complained in the vain hope they didn’t take the matter further:

Hi There,

Spotify would like to apologise for the previous email you received today regarding the current TalkTalk competition. Spotify inadvertently copied all users who requested information on the promotion into the same field, which exposed your email address to others.

Privacy is of the utmost importance to Spotify and we’ll be reviewing our processes to ensure this type of error will not happen again.

Yours sincerely,

The Spotify team

Plenty of those who received the email are now co-ordinating plans to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) about the breach. Some just want a free Spotify subscription for their trouble. Of course mistakes happen, but when they’re mistakes that break the law, there needs to be some gesture by the guilty party beyond a piss-poor excuse. Over to you, Spotify.

The launch of Spotify is “looking pretty good,” according to the company’s CEO Daniel Ek. Of course, they’ve been sneaking Americanisms our way already by having a bunch of people pronouncing it ‘Spodify‘ on those commercials they run on the free-service.

In some boring keynote speech, Ek showed the Americans what Spotify does and, more importantly for us, what it plans to do.

The system is going to grow from something that simply streams music. Ek has let on that we’ll now be able to buy tickets and merchandise through the platform.

There is also talk of a way in which we can follow artists via Spotify, in something akin to Twitter. Ek says: “We will likely adopt something similar (to Twitter) where you can follow or become a fan an artist. What that means initially is that everything on Spotify will be visible to that user in a way they can discover something new by Madonna or another artist they enjoy. But that could also potentially mean there could be a messaging channel directly from the artist to the fans. And that’s likely something we’re going to adapt.” We could also see backstage videos, lyrics next to every track and playlists with the “live set list of the show you saw.”

Bigger news is that Spotify are “in discussions with manufacturers where they even have Spotify buttons – a physical button – on the phone that can play content. ” That could make huge business for the platform, but whether or not phone makers will be up for it is another matter. That said, in Sweden, telecom company Telia sold netbooks with a 3G data card in it that came with Spotify included.

Exciting times are ahead for Spotify, but whether all these things will be used as carrots to entice us into buying premium accounts remains to be seen. One thing is for sure – once it rolls out across America, that’s when the big money will start changing hands.

[Billboard]

The world of free streaming music suffered unexpected buffering yesterday, and it was all the fault of electro-popster La Roux. Despite having a name reminiscent of French breakfast pastry, La Roux’s debut album, with advertising-friendly anthems such as In For The Kill and more moody electronica besides, isn’t a bad shout – if you like to imagine you’re trapped in the 1980s like Terrance Stamp’s Zod in the Phantom Zone.

The album was released last Summer and has been available on Spotify since, but yesterday was made unavailable to users with a basic subscription. According to Music Ally premium subscribers can still stream the album, although plenty of people with Spotify Premium for their mobiles also seem to be having trouble.

Now it’s very likely that you don’t give a sod about La Roux and her battery-operated pop shenanigans, and it’s only one artist after all. But that’s why it’s unusual – other Polydor artists such as Take That are still available on the basic subscription. A spokesperson for Spotify confirmed to Music Ally that the rights holders had the album pulled, despite agreeing to its use several months ago.

The album has also been blocked from UK streaming service We7, who who commented:

“Take down requests happen from time to time and quite often the albums are reinstated as fast as they were taken down. Most of these things are trying to understand the new ecosystem that digital brings and the metric impact on CD Sales, downloads, streams, subscription, live events, piracy etc. For many this world is still in its infancy so searching for understanding is critical and that is why we work positively with the labels and artist managers to help understand the impact.”

We’ve had a quick gander at recent CD sales and it can be no coincidence that the album has re-entered the Top 20 in the past few days, the first time since July. Coupled with the views of We7, it seems likely that Polydor are making hay while the sun shines – they’re attempting to drive up sales of the physical album by restricting online access. Essentially, while the music industry is making all the right noises about supporting digital music and partnering streaming services like We7 and Spotify, they’re quite prepared to pull the plug if they spot an opportunity to drive revenue and screw the consumer – La Roux’s is unlikely to be the only album on the up to be taken down.

[Music Ally]

Last.fm was king of online music for many years, wearing its crown at a jaunty angle and adored by millions. Then Spotify rolled up to attempt world domination through new territories and new platforms. And now MySpace and gone and… well, nothing much, really. It’s been the preserve of unsigned bands for several years but since Facebook went public at the end of 2006, the site has become increasingly unpopular in this country. That’s all about to change, according to them at least, with the launch of MySpace Music in the UK.

It’s all going on, with free streaming of entire back catalogues of artists on both major and independent labels, as well as offering DRM-free MP3 downloads in association with iTunes. How much music are we talking about? According to MySpace, millions of tracks and tens of thousands of music videos. For free. For you. You lucky blighters. Playlists can be created and content shared by users creating an account, but otherwise music can be streamed for free.

Unlike Spotify, MySpace Music is browser based and there are no audio commercials – the only advertising you’ll be bombarded by is on-screen. That means no chance of getting the raging horn when you hear Roberta from Spotify, but on the plus side you won’t hear all the monosyllabic twats who pester Spotify’s feedback hotline day and night.

It’s an attempt to rebrand MySpace as a place for sharing entertainment, distancing itself from the broad (and far more popular) church it was previously. Will MySpace Music take off? It’s been available in America for the past 15 months, but then Spotify hasn’t launched in the US yet. Not that Spotify has necessarily ingrained itself on the mainstream psyche of the UK, but how many people will be keen to fall back in love with a service they may have abandoned long ago? Is MySpace the talk of the party once more, or the fat girl crying on the stairs?

Spotify are on a subscription drive at the moment; in the UK they’re busy experimenting with the price of the Premium service under the wafer-thin guise of a client promotion. Meanwhile in their native Sweden, they’ve just launched their first ever television commercial to push user numbers up:

We get the jive of most of it, except the bit where the plane appears – that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to us (unless it’s flogging the ability to use Spotify Premium anywhere in the world?). Those Swedish speakers who helped us out with this post – any thoughts on what that babble is all about?

Yesterday we revealed some users of Spotify had received invites to subscribe to their Premium Service at a heavily discounted rate. The offer was presented as a promotion in conjunction with Swiftcover. We highlighted the promotion because it doesn’t make a lick of sense – offering discount subscriptions so early in a product’s life only serves to devalue it, and potentially upsets those loyal early adopters who are paying full price.

We then discovered from Bitterwallet readers that Spotify were offering different users different amounts of discount – anywhere from 10 per cent to a whopping 50 per cent off for six months, seemingly without rhyme or reason:

The biggest mystery is the level at which the client Swiftcover is exposed to users. It isn’t. Beyond the initial email which barely mentions Swiftcover in passing (the email doesn’t even feature their logo, nor is their name even hyper-linked to their site), the client has nothing to do with the promotion; they’re not mentioned again when you click through the link, and since Spotify Premium promises an ad-free experience, what exactly are Swiftcover getting for their money?

We decided to ask Spotify four reasonably straight forward questions about the activity:

• how have registered users been chosen to be eligible for this promotion?

• why is there such a huge discrepancy in the discounts offered – between 10% and 50%?

• is there a concern that Premium users who have recently subscribed will stop subscribing?

• is Spotify using this activity to test different price points for its Premium service?

We weren’t expecting a straight forward answer to the last question, but a reasonably adept PR person could have seen off the first three with ease. Questions from the media about promotional activity shouldn’t come as a surprise, especially for a company as high profile as Spotify. And yet:

Hi Paul,

We run a variety of different promotions with various partners and this is an example of one of them that has a Swiftcover sponsorship.

best,

Andres Sehr
Spotify

Wow. Spotify aren’t prepared to explain anything concerning this promotion. No detail whatsoever, not even an attempt to point out the benefits to basic users, nothing. In fact we’re quite taken back by this circular statement of non-substance.

The basic principle of any client-sponsored promotion is that the client benefits from direct exposure to potential customers; beyond two mentions in an email, Swiftcover gain nothing from this activity. They can’t possibly be underwriting the subscription discounts to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds, because they’re getting nothing back. If they’re receiving airtime in return, then this promotional activity becomes nothing more than added value – Swiftcover are receiving a trickle of extra awareness on the back of a promotion Spotify were intending to run. You don’t charge a client for advertising and then run a loss-leading promotion for them out of kindness.

So are Spotify testing the waters to see what subscription rate is most appealing to users? Are they trying to convert a percentage of the massive number of basic users to the Premium service to pump up their revenue? Either is a far more plausible explanation of Spotify’s motives than this diluted shambles of a client-led promotion, though the end result is the same – none of this looks good for Spotify, and it does nothing to increase the perceived value of the service to new customers.

Are Spotify in trouble already? Or are businesses keen to subsidise their outrageous running costs because they’re the coolest kids on the block right now? Registered users of the online music service have received an email this afternoon, offering the Spotify Premium service (which offers no interruptions from commercials, higher sound quality, mobile app use, offline downloads etc) for a 20% discount over the next six months:

Swiftcover clearly want the brand association, but subsidising the Premium service – doesn’t that suggest the price is already a barrier in take-up for the service? There are a dozen other ways Spotify could have promoted their client without sending out the wrong signals. Spotify put on gigs and offer exclusive recordings for premium users – Swiftcover could have sponsored a series of these. There could have been a giveaway of Premium subscriptions. Neither of these options would potentially harm the current base of subscribers.

Clicking on the link to the offer produces a promo code at the online checkout – there are no terms and conditions mentioned in the email (that might suggest this is applicable to new customers only), so current Premium subscribers would be well within their rights to demand a reduction on their current rate.

The crowd-pleasing Spotify Mobile service is already a massive hit on the iPhone and it looks as though the music-pumping Swedes have got plans for global mobular phonical domination.

They’ve announced that Spotify will be coming to the HTC Hero smartphone via 3 Mobile as of 3^rd November. Better still, Spotify’s presence will be featured as a marketing tool for the phone – in addition to £99 for the Hero handset, a 24-month contract will cost £35 a month, with Spotify included in the tariff for the two-year period.

iPhone users of Spotify currently have to sign up and pay for the Premium service, which costs £10 per month.

Other features of the Hero’s impressive tariff include 750 minutes to other mobiles, unlimited texts, unlimited data, as well as other established 3 tariff features such as free calls via Skype.

If you can put up with being on the 3 network and their legendarily shitty customer service, it seems like a hell of a deal. Truly, the era of the Smartphone Wars is upon us. Oh, the stories we’ll be able to tell to our children, our children’s children, our children’s children’s children and all their daft little mates…

Sky and Napster upped the stakes in the online music war last week but the cool Swedes behind Spotify have take it in their stride and hit back with some enhancements of their own service.

After a few months of hiding it away, as of now, users can purchase music that is featured on Spotify with just a few simple clicks. The download function is in conjunction with 7 Digital.

As they say on their blog: “If a track or album is available for purchase a little ‘Buy’ button will be displayed next to it. Simply click it and without leaving Spotify, you’ll download the MP3 files.
Music you’ve purchased can be downloaded 3-5 times depending on which label the music comes from.”

“The files are in MP3 format and most of them are either 256 or 320 kbps – the quality is specified when purchasing. The files are also playable in Spotify (under ‘Purchases’) as long as they remain on your hard drive. All the MP3s you purchase are yours to own and can be transferred to any MP3 device of your choosing or burnt to a CD.”

So you’re getting a high quality MP3 file and the music is DRM-free…. but you’ll pay a premium for that. Tracks are being offered for around 99p-£1.19 and full albums are slightly dearer than Apple’s iTunes equivalent.

But Spotify are already thinking ahead and are planning to “package” music in with existing mobile tariffs, ISP bundles, cable plans and with devices including TVs. Daniel Ek, their Chief Fun Enhancement Officer says: “The key for us is getting music in to people’s existing billing habits.”

“If we can transcend it so that, maybe you don’t actually have to pay for the music, it’s included in your data plan with your carrier or ISP or cable operator; it might be when you buy a new product, a TV screen, that you get one year of music included … devices like new Samsung TV screens, where they’ve got Linux built in, which allows you to do software on it – they’ve got YouTube built in, they might have Spotify built in.”

“We want to create a platform where the (Spotify) brand stands for ease of use and people actually build their library using Spotify and feel this is an experience – and, through their carrier, can access that experience.”

Ek, you crazy bastard. But you know what – it might just work…

Another day rolls around and yet another player enters the streaming music market. Spotify had their cage rattled last week when Napster slashed their monthly fee and offered downloads as part of the deal. But now a big horse is set to run amok on the dual carriageway of online music – it’s Sky.

Sky Songs goes live on October 19^th and has content from all of the major labels as part of its 4m tunestrong offering. Subscribers will pay monthly and are not tied to a long-term contract, meaning they can dip in and out of the service as they please. Also, and perhaps crucially, downloaded songs will be playable on any mp3 player.

The available tariffs will be…

• pay £6.49 and download either a £6.49 album or 10 songs, and receive unlimited access to listen to over four million songs online for one month; or

• pay £7.99 and download either a £7.99 album or 15 songs, and receive unlimited access to listen to over four million songs online for one month.

Downloading more songs will cost extra, although it hasn’t been announced if Sky will undercut the prices charged by rivals like iTunes and Amazon. Sky Songs won’t be available on mobile devices at launch, but the multimedia behemoths say they’re planning that and set-top box infiltration in the near future.

What does it all mean for you? Will you be tempted to dip your toe into the streaming music fountain now that a renowned brand like Sky are behind it? Or does the idea of bunging your cash at Rupert Murdoch’s empire make you sick up a small piece of carrot?

An iPhone. Pictured here solely to irritate hundreds of you.

The mighty Spotify just got itself a major rival. Napster have unveiled their new Unlimited service – and its half the price of Spotify’s Premium equivalent.

Launched today, for only £5 a month, you’ll get access to eight million streaming songs AND five mp3s for you to keep and play, DRM-free on any device you like. Sign up for three months and you’ll get a fiver off.

Sounds good, but, it’s essentially a stripped-down version of Spotify’s all-singing, all-dancing Premium service and its offline cache-ing. What you won’t get is an app to access the service on your smartphone, or any mobile streaming at all. What you will get is the ability to ‘preview’ songs on your phone before downloading them as paid-for mp3s. Bah.

Another grouch – with Spotify, you can try before you buy with the ad-supported free service. How do we know that 7,999,000 of Napster’s tracks won’t be remixed versions of the theme tune from Only Fools And Horses? We don’t.

But, five mp3s for a fiver plus a massive catalogue to be streamed to your heart’s content is a big sell – we’ll definitely be giving it a whirl here at BWHQ. How about you lot?

If you’re a premium subscriber to ace streaming online music jukebox Spotify, you’re now suddenly getting a lot more for your tenner a month – even though you don’t get to hear their ads starring the lovely Roberta from Spotify.

Subscribers can now make their saved playlists available offline, which essentially means that the music will be saved to their hard drive, allowing them to access it even when they’re away from an Internet connection.

The offline mode is already available to Spotify subscribers who have the service on their iPhone, and as with the mobile version, they’ll be able to store 3,333 tracks at a time.

As of earlier this week, new subscribers can also pay their monthly fee via Paypal as well as with a debit or credit card as Spotify increasingly becomes a viable alternative to illegal downloading.

Have you signed up for the premium service recently and is it everything you hoped it would be? Or have you dipped your toe in the premium water before going back to the ad-filled free version. Maybe you’re as mad as a badger and don’t believe in its overpowering majesty. Spill it.

A couple of shortcomings (as highlighted in our review on Monday) and the £10 monthly subscription aside, the Spotify iPhone app seems to have been well received.

Unlike the excellent WunderRadio and other streaming apps, Spotify has received a massive amount of mainstream attention – it’s a rarity for a single app to be discussed on breakfast television or appear on the front page of the BBC News portal – not unless in involves shaking infants to death. The onslaught of attention has seen the app sit pretty at the top of the iTunes chart since it was released; although plenty of iPhone users will download it without being aware of the subscription barrier, a modest proportion will have been converted to paying customers.

So what do O2 make of all of this? After all, they won’t have been involved in the negotiations between Apple and Spotify, and now they’re having to service a popular app that is eating up a massive amount of 3G bandwidth – the app only needs wi-fi to cache offline playlists, but it can stream constantly over a 3G connection. That’s potentially a lot of bandwidth usage by a single customer, isn’t it?

This morning we received an email from Bitterwallet reader Lewis:

“After Spotify came out on Monday for the iphone I have been using it a lot – I’ve probably used about a gig of mobile data in the few days since release. Today I got a text from O2:

“Get the most out of apps and the web by using Wi-Fi, at home or out and about. It’s quicker, especially for apps like video, and really easy to set up. Tap the link and we’ll take you through the steps. http://shop.o2.co.uk/update/wifi.html

“I checked with a colleague who is also with o2 and has an iPhone but has not been using Spotify and he didn’t receive the message.”

I downloaded the Spotify app on Monday to review it for Bitterwallet, but I haven’t used the app for streaming, just for caching offline playlists using wi-fi. I received the same text on Monday night. And we weren’t the only ones; a quick check of Twitter shows other Spotify users received the same text:

Everyone’s first thought concerned a grand conspiracy involving O2 keeping tabs on exactly which apps we’d downloaded. However we’ve checked with over a dozen other owners – it’s hit-and-miss whether they received the text, regardless of whether they use Spotify or not.

The timing is significant though. Spotify is arguably the highest profile iPhone app to be launched so far in the UK, and those keen enough to pay the subscription will hammer it. Absolutely hammer it. Then you consider the dozens of apps that stream, upload or download audio and video, and all the other functionality that can be carried out as easily over 3G as it can over wi-fi. O2 have been hit by a series of minor outtages in recent weeks, and now are suddenly very keen to push iPhone customers away from using 3G wherever possible, or as one customers put it on Twitter: “they might as well be begging us not to use the network too much”.

Are O2 simply trying to better manage their users, or is the iPhone and the likes of Spotify squeezing the life out of their service?

[UPDATE - O2 have been in touch with our friends at TechRadar to tell them that sending a text suggesting people use wi-fi within 12 hours of the Spotify app launching was entirely coincidental: "We regularly update our customers with service messages. We have recently had an increase in calls into customer service about setting up Wi-Fi so we decided to send a text to our customers giving practical advice about setting up Wi-Fi on the iPhone. We appreciate many customers already know how to do this and apologise if they felt the message was not relevant to them." So it was for the good of the customer after all, and O2 in no way benefits from their customers sucking up less bandwidth. There you go.]

It’s Spotify day on Bitterwallet; they really are trying to take over the world, aren’t they? The Swedish music tzars have just released a video of their application for the S60 mobile platform – here’s how it’ll work (more or less) on a Nokia handset: