iTunes, Sirius Seem Antiquated After Spotify iPhone Trial

After an initial test of Spotify back in August, I said the product was the best streaming music service I had ever tried. While I still listen to much of my music through the dozens of gigabytes I have in my iTunes library, Spotify makes searching for practically anything or finding new tracks I haven't yet purchased very simple. After meeting with Shak of Spotify last week at LeWeb, I was given early access to Spotify's iPhone application - still not yet approved here in the United States - and my experience with it has me rethinking my traditional marriage to purchased and downloaded music. While there has been a lot of recent talk about Apple's purchase of LaLa and their future plans with the service, Spotify has me seriously thinking if I even need a stored music library at all.


Search and Find Artists, Tracks on Spotify for iPhone
As I told you back in June, I subscribed to Sirius XM satellite radio after the company debuted its iPhone application. Combined with my iTunes library, I have a solid archive of music I've purchased, and access to new music through Sirius' stations. Now that I have Spotify on both the desktop and the iPhone, I haven't found a need for Sirius, and I have even avoided opening iTunes, which has become far too bloated for me, slowing down my computer as it loads my ever-growing database.


Some of the Great Tracks (and art) on Spotify for iPhone
As you might expect, the iPhone version of Spotify mirrors that of its desktop sibling. Its two core sections are Playlists, both those you have made and friends' who you are following, and Search, which will find you Tracks, Albums and Artists that match your search criteria.

Click on any song in the search results, and it will start playing, streamed onto the iPhone. Hooking it up via my audio cable to the car stereo gave me excellent sound, as good, if not better, than Sirius has. Selecting an artist displays their albums on Spotify. You can choose an album and have it shuffle the songs, or start from the top.


Spotify Playlists Are Available and Sync to the iPhone
As one needs to log in to their Spotify account to gain access to music, the application synchronizes the playlists you have made or follow on the iPhone as well. This means that if you have selected any number of tracks and made them part of your personal playlist on the desktop application, the iPhone knows about it. And most interestingly, you can set up the application to use one or more of these playlists in an "Offline" mode, which will store the tracks to disk instead of streaming them over the air and hogging your bandwidth. While you are streaming, the app displays in green. If you are "offline", the background is blue, reminding you of your current state.

One of the selling points of the iTunes/iPhone phenomenon is that you can take all of your music with you anywhere you go. But as my own personal music library has expanded, now reaching 6,500 songs, comprising 41 Gigabytes and 26 days worth of tunes, Apple doesn't even make an iPhone large enough to do so, forcing me to synchronize a subset of my content. Even if it could, it's not as if the iPhone battery could last long enough to play every song once. That leaves only convenience as a benefit to having all of one's music with them when they are on the go, as well as possibly the feeling of self-satisfaction from knowing you paid for the individual tracks. Also beneficial to iTunes? Your own manufactured playlists, of course. But Spotify does that too. And with the speed at which you can search for tracks and find them anytime, it's close to that proverbial "any song on demand at any time" panacea we have always wanted.

My laptop, which I have been using for more than two years, after I bought it in September of 2007, often feels like it is getting a little long in the tooth. Apps don't boot up as quickly as they once did. The spinning wheel of death is a frequent visitor. Launching iTunes and its 40 gigabyte library isn't exactly something I am as fond of as I once was. With more and more applications moving to the cloud, Spotify seems well positioned to replace iTunes for me, if I ever were to take the plunge. The sheer geek pleasure of driving around town while streaming Spotify's hand-made playlists through the car stereo has been great, and the sound quality is excellent. The world of music has changed, and I am thinking differently about the value of music ownership and music access in general.

As mentioned in my last post on Spotify, the service, very popular in Europe, is looking to make its way to the US for more than just the select few using it now, in early 2010. The iPhone application is already being used outside of the US, and should arrive here around the same time. It has already changed the game for me, and I bet it will for many others once it debuts officially.

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FTC Disclosure: I have gained free access to Spotify premium, as well as access to the iPhone app prior to its US debut, without cost.

Videos: Talking About Advertising, Social Media in Business

A few weeks ago, I sat down with good friend Sunshine Mugrabi, and she picked my brain on a number of topics, ranging from the best ways for businesses to leverage social media, to my thoughts on relevancy, social networks, advertising on blogs and Web services. After some editing (which makes it sound like I am talking only with myself), she posted both videos in a pair of posts on her site. (Part One and Part Two)

While I am just going to have to ignore the non-glorious look I have in the paused frames of both videos, some of the content might actually be relevant to you. So check them out if you like. You can find Sunshine on her blog, and on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/sunshinemug

Louis Gray on Advertising from Sunshine Mugrabi on Vimeo.

Louis Gray on Participating in Social Media from Sunshine Mugrabi on Vimeo.

Companies That Set the Market's Agenda Win

When I was very young, I remember hearing the debate in advertising of whether you should mention your main competition by name, or simply allude to them, such as saying "the leading cola brand", or "the leading paper towel", when comparing your product to theirs. While I've often been told you should never introduce your competition into the conversation when with a potential client, the vagueness of alluding to the competition actually has the reverse effect - getting the viewer or reader to think in their mind of just who that leader is, instead of taking in your message - defeating your sneakiness.

If you are a frequent consumer of news or advertising, you can see who is also being smart in terms of setting the agenda by which other competitors are measured, or putting them on the defensive. As a big Apple fan, it is very easy for me to see when Cupertino is pushing the agenda, and when they are not. When they are not, the situation is always much worse. But for any company, if they can set the agenda, and the stage, forcing competition to play by their rules, they have a significant advantage.

The iPhone Agenda: Thousands and Thousands of Apps

First, take a look at the iPhone's success and message:

The phrase "There's an app for that" and the climbing total number of applications has had Apple in a happy place - blowing past 100,000 individual programs. By setting the focus on how many total applications, the handfuls available for the Palm Pre, and the admittedly rapid growing ten thousand from Android seem relatively small. Apple set the stage in terms of how smartphones were measured, not just in terms of forcing a touchscreen, but also in the yardstick being the application store itself.

So long as Apple keeps the lead in total applications, other companies are going to be in a defensive posture when talking about how many programs they offer, or trying to suggest that most people only need a few, or that they have higher quality. It's not a good message.

Verizon's Agenda: Our 3G Coverage Is Better

But look how Verizon changed the game, and threw AT&T under the bus:

After months and months of hearing "There's an App for That", Verizon got sick of it, and started their "There's a Map for That" campaign, saying that Verizon's 3G service is much more widely available than is AT&T. Even if most pundits say that AT&T's 3G service is faster than that of Verizon, the image that remains with people is one full map for Verizon, and a sparsely dotted one for AT&T. AT&T's response to Verizon has been lackluster, not just because they were thrown together quickly, but because they were fought on Verizon's turf, by their rules.

Apple has even had to jump in to bail out their ball and chain network buddy, by trying to highlight the use of the iPhone for voice and Internet at the same time. But the whole time, we're thinking of those darn maps. Point to Verizon.

I'm a Mac, and You're a PC

Sticking with Apple for a bit, the company's Mac vs. PC commercials, as long in the tooth as they are, have set the agenda for how PC users are perceived and how Mac users are perceived, for better or for worse.

Microsoft tried to fight back, on Apple's turf, with it's "I'm a PC" ad line, but that was largely panned and ineffective, because they were unable to wrest control away from Cupertino's mindset.

It wasn't until Microsoft was able to turn the conversation away from "I'm a PC" and to "Lauren" with her low budget to push a different agenda around price that Apple was caught on the defensive.

Setting the agenda is important for any company to promote their agenda. If you are Google, you might once have said your search index is bigger, due to its billions of indexed pages, and that was why you are better - forcing competition to try and show how large their own index was, and coming up short. If you are Facebook, you will highlight your vast population of users, in the hundreds of millions, making competitors fade in comparison.

Will Android Force a New Agenda?

The battle for an agenda is especially interesting in markets that are unsettled, or at a point of change. In addition to the Verizon vs. AT&T battle mentioned before, we are at a very interesting point in the smartphone battles, with Google pushing Android into the market with Motorola's Droid, HTC's Eris and the rumored Google branded phone (coming soon). Droid has tried to make a mark on Apple by saying it "Does" things that Apple's iPhone cannot, but there hasn't yet been a cohesive approach by all Google-powered handsets to promote whatever their agenda will be. Will it be on openness in software? Will it be on openness in terms of supported voice and data carriers? Will there be a killer app that is on Android and not the iPhone at all? And if you are Microsoft or Symbian, or God forbid, Palm... what do you do? You can't win on total apps or touch, or openness, so do you make a new agenda, or call it quits?

I've seen the agenda game play out at previous jobs, and seen colleagues struggle to try and meet the criteria set by the competition - fighting a never-ending battle of certifications and partnerships or benchmarks. While we (and others) spun in place trying to catch up to others' previous mark, the competition nimbly pushed ahead with the new agenda, and changed the game again. It would make more sense to find out, for each of us, what your benefits are and how you can present the agenda to win.

Icerocket's Blog Search, Twitter Search Tough to Top

With all the recent news around Bing and Google making deals with Twitter to gain a foothold in the world of real-time search, not much has been said about the often frustrating world of blog search, and not a peep has been made about Icerocket, a company I'd myself largely neglected until a few months ago, having mentally relegated it to the Technorati-like category of Web 2.0 dustbins. But very quietly, Icerocket has built out what I believe to be the best blog search out there, and its Twitter search is quite potent as well. I have been using it exclusively to find links to my blog, and its relevancy blows Google Blog Search out of the water, barring any upgrades from Mountain View.

Aside from an October post from Doc Searls, Icerocket's improvements have practically been invisible. But it's a disservice to the site, which has easy to find RSS feeds for any search, total number of positive hits in the database by URL, and improvements on the standard Twitter search that include the "smack your forehead and say 'duh'" additions of retweeting and replying to any successful search result, which Twitter's search engine lacks today.

In years past, most bloggers have turned to Technorati or Google Blog Search to find relevant posts. Google Blog Search does a great job finding keywords, and until the most recent revamp, Technorati did the best job in finding which sites were linking your way. (In March, I even said Technorati was trumping Google for blog reactions) The October update to Technorati (covered here) added some interesting twists, but the "reactions" function that I liked has pretty much become impossible to use, or disappeared.

Icerocket, which CrunchBase reports gained its first funding round way back in 2004, from Mark Cuban, has not gotten some of the buzz that other real-time search companies, including Collecta, Topsy and OneRiot, have, but its results are top-notch. Like any good blogger, I've bookmarked a search on the site to find links my way, and more often than not, Google's Blog Search doesn't find them for me in the database.

Compare for yourself: Google Blog Search vs. Icerocket Blog Search


Recent Links to the Blog, Via Icerocket

Icerocket does more than just find the most answers. It highlights the ranking of the domain being searched in its database (mine has hovered just below 2,000), and shows the rank of linking blogs - a simple way to assume "Authority", including the total number of references these downstream blogs have. Also, helpfully, the results are sorted by date! Not bad. Google Blog Search won't do that. Icerocket also lets you display total results for a specific post, by URL.


Some Notable Blogs' Rankings in Icerocket


More than 20 Blogs Linked to My Recent FTC Badges Post

Similarly, Icerocket thumps Twitter Search for the same results.

Compare for yourself: Twitter Search to that of Icerocket Twitter Search


Some Twitter Results from Icerocket's Search

Icerocket's Twitter search results are the same as those presented by the microblogging giant, but in addition to the standard responses, you see the number of people following those mentioning a keyword, you see more results on one page, and have the smart additions of "Reply" and "RT" at the end of each result, having you one step away from making an action on the search. In contrast, to do so on Twitter Search, you would need to click the timestamp of the specific update, and then, from that window, hit reply or retweet.

You can even tell Icerocket to show all tweets, just those containing links, or those without links. Also helpful? A cool tool that shows common followers on Twitter of selected users, up to four, saying who follows all of those specified, and who all four follow. (Here's an example with @dewitt, @louisgray, @arrington and @jenna.)


Want to See Who Follows Who? Try Icerocket.

Just about the only thing Icerocket is not doing when it comes to Twitter search results is having the newest flow in from the top to present the illusion of real time. Instead, to get the newest answers, you still have to refresh. It's a small price to pay for a single site that offers great blog search and Twitter search results in one. I've switched. I just wonder if Icerocket, considered an older property, can have new users recognize its new life.