Effortless computing

Much excitement today about the excellent Spotify music service’s latest upgrade – linking into your Facebook profile and allowing deeper interaction with your friends’ playlists and listening. The co-founder says

This is the next generation of mixtapes. What’s a better way to pick songs than by browsing others’ music collections? In the future, you can imagine looking through the favourite songs of celebrities. You could see Bono’s playlist, for example.

More in Times Online. If they could just launch in the US they’d be giving iTunes a good run-in.

The intermittently* wonderful streaming music service Spotify has added a tab showing artists related to the artist you’re currently viewing. The relationship is based on other users’ tastes – ‘users who listen to x also listen to’ –  which is effective but not always the whole story… For instance, Brian Eno isn’t ‘related’ to his erstwhile band Roxy Music, nor to famous collaborators such as Robert Fripp, David Bowie, Talking Heads, David Byrne or U2.

*Many users have had trouble with streamed music dropping out for a few seconds. The workaround is to pay for the premium service and make your playlists available offline, which downloads them to your computer or iPhone.

You can now get almost all* the music you ever want on your iPhone – Spotify‘s application is live. You can search their vast library of tracks, play almost instantly, create playlists (which are shared with your desktop Spotify), save tunes for offline listening.

What more do we need? Truly effortless.

*Like the Gauls, a redoubtable few hold out – led by the ultimate non-conformer, Bob Dylan.

Update: of course it doesn’t work when you’re using another app on the iPhone, which is a lot of the time. Maybe that’s why Apple allowed it?

Spotify is a great music service, so good that it’s gaining 50,000 new users every day – without any marketing*.

Get your product or service right, and it’ll be its own sales force. At Conosco, we’ve always told our helpdesk they’re our primary sales team – and they’ve proved to be – but we still have to fund Google’s chocolate factory…

* Oh, they aren’t paying customers, but who wouldn’t be in Spotify’s shoes.