Spotify’s New “Social” Release Fails Basic Privacy Test

How excited was I to see the announcements for the latest release of Spotify this morning?  It allows for connecting to friends – albeit only via Facebook, integration of your existing music catalogue and a few other bits of awesomeness.

BUT (and I really shouldn’t have been that surprised given the Facebook tie in) that the default settings for the installation are to share anything and everything from installation.

So anytime you create a new playlist it gets shared.  Unless of course you go and manually disable automatic updates.

Given all the flak Google got over Buzz and it’s presumptions on automatically opting people in, given all the grief Facebook gets for it’s over sharing it is such a shame to see Spotify falling into such a simple trap.

Oh and don’t even get me started on seeing adverts re-appear on my desktop version – I am a paid up member of the premium subscribers gang which was supposed to be non-advertising!

UPDATE: It gets worse.  After a few minutes use adverts are popups, and also taking over other areas in the UI.  On a netbook this is unacceptable as pace given over to my music is already squeezed and now it’s even worse.  Also audio adverts have re-emerged.  Not happy at all

Spotify Premium Now HALF-PRICE!

UPDATE 15 June 2010: The logs show this is still one of the most read posts on my site despite having been originally posted last October.  The half price offer was short lived BUT it transpired it was also only an introductory offer.  After six months Spotify just cut me off, no warning, no offer of renewing, nothing.  One morning (same day as their “social” features went live actually) it all stopped working.

I still think £9.99 a month is too high a price point for the service and so have not resubscribed.   Sorry but there are NO half price (or any other) offers coming out of Spotify right now.

Only a couple of weeks ago I posed the question on Twitter “would Spotify double uptake if they halved the price?” To which, of course the answer was no, and it was pointed out quite clearly.

Last week we had confirmation from 3UK that they would be releasing the HTC Hero with Spotify Premium baked in next month and hey guess what I’ve just had in my inbox…

Now I am really really tempted.  Having bought 5 or 6 albums in the last month alone at £4.99 a month with offline cache the Spotify model is starting to look attractive.

UPDATE (17:50):  Having just dry run the offer it looks like it is a one-time-use discount code so it is entirely possible the offer is only being made to i) existing Spotify users and ii) even that group may be in some way limited.  Let me know if you had the offer.

TescoDigital – Update on Rebuilding Trust

Last week was all about TescoDigital’s inability to deliver, inability to resolve and inability to retain.  The full story is over here.

But as an update on Sunday 15th I received an email from Malcolm Gwynne, another “Customer Service Manager” (just how many do they have) over at TescoDigital apologising for the problems and  offering up £3.97 in eWallet credit – kinda like prepay for digital music on TescoDigital’s site.

I am sorry for the delay in getting back to you and that there was a fault with the Lily Allen album.

This has now been fixed and I do apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.

I have now added £3.97 to your eWallet so that you can try again.

Please go back to TescoDigital and follow the instruction on how to use the eWallet.

Grateful as I am for the credit has this helped TescoDigital rebuild my trust in them; not one iota I’m afraid.  The reason is two fold;

Firstly, the very attraction of online digital music transactions is the immediacy of them, I see something, I click buy and a couple of minutes later I’m listening to to those newly paid for tracks on my computer.

Malcolm’s response took over 72 hours from my last email – that’s too long, especially when until that point the emails had flowed freely almost conversationally.

And I guess there in lies a problem with digital communication for customer service.  The expectation of timeliness inherent with the medium.

If I post a letter to someone a week for a response doesn’t seem unreasonable, an email say 24 hours, an instant message – well instantly of course.

So for a purchase to take 4 to 5 days is just not a viable model for me.

Secondly, and I’ve touched on this already.  If you’re going to tell the customer it’s fixed then make sure the bloody thing is fixed.  £3.97 added to my eWallet – I think not!

TescoDigital: Fail – The Full (Long) Story

Yesterday I mentioned that my purchasing efforts with TescoDigital over the last few days have been anything but satisfactory.  I gave them the whole day to continue corresponding (which up until my last email at 11am they had been very quick to respond) but nothing so to the world I lay bare the story to do with what you will…

Tue 10th

Email marketing about the new Lily Allen album being available for only £3.97 to download.  Perfect especially in light of i) my already having waited for just this release (don’t judge me) and ii) my new found love of buying music digitally.

09:48 Wed 11th

Followed link in email and signed up for yet another store account (can you believe TescoDigital requires a separate account to Tesco.com?), dutifully downloaded their own branded music download manager (same as Amazons methinks) and handed over the credit card details.

Download manager sparked to life and promptly complained that the download server couldn’t be found.

The infrastructure engineer in me did the usual checks; cables, firewalls; conflicting software, DNS resolution, port sniffing.  Nothing the server was nowhere to be found so a quick email to customer services was in order.

c10:20 Wed 11th

Had a quick snigger at the default subject titles thinking this the most apt and filled out a form just letting them know the error message and asked for a response.

10:47 Wed 11th

A wonderful stock response was forthcoming.  Basically it was the usual “here’s what we say you need, we won’t actually read what you have already written about the problem but could you please tell us everything about your system and restate the problem?”

Having worked with helpdesks in the past I can well understand this approach – it can weed out the silly and repetitive nonsense which takes up so much time.  BUT maybe just maybe on that original contact form if they’d asked for say i) a level of expertise and ii) confirmation that I’d already tried everything they were about to suggest the user experience might have been a little better, the process a little smoother.

Anyway, a quick response just answering those questions as required and…

13:45 Wed 11th

I’m very sorry that you weren’t able to connect to the Tesco Digital website. It is temporarily unavailable as we were doing some essential maintenance and upgrade work on the servers/Tesco Download Manager. This has taken a little longer than we had originally planned. I would advise you to try again later on this evening, please try to redownload from your order history.

Okay so they were having problems.  So why not fess up at the outset and save me some effort!

08:48 Thur 12th

So I waited until the this morning to give them plenty of time to solve their server issues. But, now the TescoDigital don’t seem to know who I am.  What I found strange was that I had actually re-downloaded the stub from their website in my order history.

Needless to say another email to Wayne Hansen (TescoDigital Customer Service Manager) pointing out that something was still broken.

09:47 Thur 12th

Again, I’m sorry to advise this error message was due to the system problems we had on our Tesco.com website yesterday.
I’ve updated your Tesco Digital account to delete this error message, please try to redownload your music tracks from your order history and this should resolve your issue.

So again I try and now the error heads into DRM territory.  Oh deary me.  Now I only chose to use TescoDigital because it quite clearly says it doesn’t apply DRM to it’s MP3 downloads.  Further whilst it does say that you can only download the files so many times and that remaining attempt are indicated on the order page I could find no indication of that usage count. More to the point I have only been downloading the stubs when and as directed by TescoDigital.

Needless to say another email requesting that Wayne actually confirms the problem is resolved before telling me to try again.

10:45 Thurs 13th

And then it happened.  TescoDigital actually failed.  Why do I  think the fail is now and not when the process broke down earlier?  Easy – technical faults happen, it’s a fact of life and I accept that, especially when the provider can be seen to be responsive and attempting to solve the issue.  The fail here was in Wayne’s response;

After 11 emails TescoDigital decide to ditch the purchase rather than fix the problem – despite it being of their own making.  I did respond to Wayne suggesting that as I actually still wanted the album perhaps TescoDigital should just get on with it, but 24  hours later no response so…

13:28 Friday 13th

I’ve just bought the same album from AmazonUK for 97 pence less thanks Tesco with no hassles at all.  Your loss.

TescoDigital: Fail – Last Chance for Customer Service

Image via Wikipedia

A caveat before I begin – this is just me prepping up for a right good rant.  But  before I post the full absurdness of my interactions with Tesco Digital over the last two days I want to give them the opportunity to respond to my last email of this morning – let’s say the close of play tonight.

So far the story involved some marketing, a response and purchase, a failing digital download system, stock customer service answers and no product at my end.

So until later on be prepared for a rant or two.

Rumour: Apple About to Launch DRM Free Tunes

And after a couple of days posting about how great Amazon’s DRM free service is, a flippant comment that iTunes should head this way to, and this rumour hits the feeds today.

Basically Apple are rumoured to be offering up DRM tracks from EMI at first from today (9th Dec) under the iTunes Plus service and is currently negotiating with a few of the other big names for more.

I wait and see.  It would be a very very significant move and at the moment I’m not at all sure how Apple could make the move without severely crippling revenue streams but hey I don’t own any Apple shares – fingers are well crossed.

MoreThoughts on Streaming Music Services

Pushing my Listening Habits

Hands up everyone who still has fond memories of vinyl records.  What about mix tapes, your very own personal mashup of the Chart Show on Radio 1 (sorry for the UK specific reference but hey) from Sunday evenings – you know those three hours of sitting hunched over the pause button trying to edit out all the mindless talk.

Well in the last couple of weeks I’ve really noticed a significant change in my listening habits.  It’s not that my tastes have changed, my band loyalties (such as they were) or even the devices upon which playback is made.

I’ve been MP3′d up for years and years but only music that I’ve ripped myself – the modern equivelent of that Chart Show mix tape if you will.  I’ve got tens  of gig’s of the stuff and a very ecclectic set it is too.

The change has been nothing more significant than the emotional break from the physical media.

Now this mind shift was probably facilitated by our recent move from New Zealand and the wonderful 20kg baggage restrictions.  The thought of 3 – 4 months without access to our music saw me make a concerted effort to get a few more CD’s ripped and stashed onto a portable drive ready for a new PC / phone / whatever when we arrived.

But in the three or so months we’ve been back in the UK I have listened to little of it.  The reason?  Well Last.FM has had a lot to do with it, and in particular a wonderful little  app on my Nokia E71 phone called Mobbler.  Mobbler is a scrobbler (technical term for a widgetty bit of software that earwigs in on what you are listening too and tells Last.FM).  But more importantly Mobbler is a Last.FM client, it allows me to listen to tracks streamed direct to my phone, whereever I am based up not only my prior music experiences but also those of my online friends, and even others unknown to me with similar tastes.  All very clever and it started me on the journey to being CD free.

From Mobbler, the official scrobbler for Last.FM was loaded on to the Netbook allowing for some heavier duty recommendations (tip – create a playlist of your most frequently played music and just set it to run in the background.  Last.FM then gets a decent enough picture of you).  Linked in to Windows Media Player (tried iTunes but on Windows and a Netbook the experience is like wading through treacle).

Then along came Spotify.  A UK born music streaming service in it’s infancy and currently in beta.  It’s a subscription service a little like Last.FM but without the community efforts (although that’s in the pipeline I believe).  The big difference is you can listen to whole albums, new ones, just released music.  And so far I have listened to pretty well all the albums out during the latter half of 2008 I had wanted to buy.  Fabulous.

Why is this significant.  Well remember buying a CD because you loved the singles only to discover that a good 40% of the tracks were shite?  I won’t mention names but man do I have some coasters stacked in a box somewhere.  That won’t happen to me again.

No more silly 20 second previews on e-commerce sights giving you just enough of an insight into nothing.

Now I can vet the album, if I like it I can stay tethered to my PC and listen to it ad nauseum or as I prefer head on over to a store and buy the thing, or just the tracks I want.  And with Amazon.co.uk’s recently opened MP3 store this means new release albums from as little as £3 each with no DRM evilness.

Mr Job’s you have made a tonne, and we congratulate you on your services to choice but it really is time to scrap the DRM crap in iTunes.

So today the cycle was broken.  19 years after I bought my first CD (3 actually as they came as a package with my first CD player) I made the switch to pure digital.  Sod the purist this is all about convenience, instantaneous entertainment has arrived in Chez Craggs and I for one like it.

Of the three albums I previewed this morning, two were purchased and as I type this I  am reviewing a third.  An album discovered online from an artist who has never appealled before and I’m tempted to buy that as well.

To all the bigots, ludites and general grumpiness within the music industry who spend millions lobbying, litigating and bullying people into believing that digital music is killing the business I say arse.  Times have changed, technology has opened up new and in my opinion better distribution channels (and creative ones for that matter) BUT people’s desire for entertainment hasn’t so stop bitching and get on with offering what people want.

Right then, now all I want is Songbird to include a Spotify client, Last.FM scrobbler, iPod & Nokia S60 media player plugins and finally a quick link Amazon and I’d be really really really happy.