Opinions: The Hero and Spotify

Over Christmas I was given respite from the noise of family. I felt a wave of nostalgia as I took up the offer to trial the HTC Hero with Spotify from 3. I created offline playlists of tunes I used to love in the 90's and the Noughties. Despite what you might think, it's not the music I feel the need to reminisce over, instead it's the technology at work.

Spotify might be a cool new concept when it comes to convincing the Big 4 record labels that it's ok for people to stream music for free, but look beyond that at why those people love Spotify and maybe you'll see the same community of playlist collaborators I was once a part of, but using WinAmp and ShoutCast like an online radio station.

My spare time in secondary school was mostly spent talking to anonymous friends on IRC channels. I'd managed to get online with the help of my geek peers by circumventing the school's web filters. This was a time when "geek" didn't mean owning products made by Apple, drain pipe jeans, and over-using the word "chic" as it seems to now - back then, a good day was one that a geek wasn't stuffed roughly into a locker.

I digress. Music was a competition: who could collect the largest number of MP3 files, who could occupy the largest chunk of hard disk space, and who could produce the best .m3u playlist.

At college and university, how I consumed music was focused entirely around deafening myself with headphones to sufficiently simulate the damage to my hearing that the previous night's clubbing had undoubtedly caused.

With Spotify we are encouraged to create and share playlists - I feel like the online collaboration and competition I once enjoyed has returned. But 3's sterling effort to get Spotify on the network has meant much more: all those years of experiencing music have been blended and I can now crack out the headphones and listen to playlists created and shared by others offline.

Oh and let's not forget Spotify parties - my new favourite shared experience of a pre-determined playlist. I'm yet to hear of Spotify being used in a night club...

I found this playlist on Twitter, and it's been a thrill to follow the additions that people have made over time. Along with two other playlists, each of around 50 songs, I decided to take the music offline on the Hero for car journeys and was surprised to find that 1.1GB was used by Spotify on the handset's microSD card. I guess those files are fairly heavily compressed and encrypted, but attempting to take them apart for use on other devices seems like a bit of an insult to a platform I'm loving.

I had quite a fright when I first loaded the options for Offline Playlists as I hadn't realised there was an option to sync over wifi; over 3G that quantity of data was set to take hours to download. Actually though, for quickly adding one tune to an offline playlist the 3G connection isn't too shabby and in terms of speed-to-listening this approach certainly beats trying to stream the song.

It didn't occur at the time to check whether or not the artist information and album art was also being stored locally, but I'm not sure anyone would see the point in knowing - this information sets you up to buy the music, but why buy the track when you're already listening through headphones offline?

Actually the implications of Spotify on 3 are quite interesting. Aside from CD packs of the brain-damage-inducing live sets I purchase, Spotify completely removes all want and need to purchase music. With the Hero on 3, Spotify membership is paid for as part of the phone contract. To most people this will probably seem like Spotify membership is free, so they're buying a phone contract that gives them free access to almost any song ever produced.

The dinosaurs of the music industry are so screwed.

I didn't notice that, I'll keep an eye out for it if/when I grab my own Hero. I'm holding out for the new Samsung Android phone which @colinmccarthy pointed out.

Have you tried any of the ROMs for Android, or putting apps on the microSD card instead of the phone itself? I've heard apps run much faster. There's a Google Code Wiki for Android ROMs and I found some articles about manually partitioning the handset and microSD on AndroidandMe.com

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