Spotify still has one big step to overcome, songs must be playable on portable devices. Spotify for Windows Mobile and the Nokia platform would be a really nice thing…

1: CD’s are designed for greater dynamic ranges than Vinyl. However, loads of recordings are mastered to death with compression and limiting these days. Such destruction of good music must end. Check out http://turnmeup.org/ for more information on this. But it’s certainly not the CD-format that’s suppressing the dynamics.

Although I enjoy services like spotify, last.fm and similar, they lack the technical quality of a cd – for now. As our internet-speeds increase, this might even out. But then, of course, maybe we’ll strive for blu-ray discs with multiple channel music? (Or maybe that’s already on the market? I don’t know, and for now, I like my cd’s). The big question is if, and subsequently, when will bandwith catch up with the data size of high quality media? Until that happens, I see a market for a physical product like the CD. (Did i hear anyone propose spotify with flac-compression?) We already have loads of web-tv services exceeding the bandwidth needed by a flac-stream, so I can’t see why it shouldn’t happen anytime soon.

2: I don’t see why the less known bands would suffer from this. Are these bands any easier to get hold of in you average record store today? But still. This is a difficult matter. But already I see powerful possibilities in Spotify, by i.e. making it possible listening to “similar artists” and so on. Such services might actually make consumers aware of bands they’d never hear hanging around at their local record store (if that store would still exist, that is). It’s obvious that most of bands these days has to do a lot of touring to get by. But I still think getting played on spotify or whatever will generate more money than kids downloading the songs at soulseek instead. (At least that’s what I’d like to believe).

An implementation with myspace with similar funding rights as those signed on labels could possibly spotify’s solution to the unsigned bands? Oh. all the thoughts. You inspired med, and I was carried away.

1. How come noone talks about quality? As I understand Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis 160Kbit, right? That’s pretty far from cd quality not to speak of vinyl with its dynamic range. Compressed audio is acually similar to compressed images and I don’t think people would like the idea of “from now on you can only view jpg:s at 640×480 pixels never being able to print a decent paper copy”.

2. How are the small artists supposed to make a living? (someone touched this matter above). People who are filesharing all work for free too? The major artists are not the issue, the small ones are. The ones not under contract with major and semi major record companies who record and promote under own label.

I would very much like these 2 issues to be solved.

Hey, team up with Steve Jobs and make the iphone go spotify.
That way we could throw away all of our other hardware crap and consolidate into one happy product. For a while, anyhow.

cheers