Spotify Invitation

Want a free Spotify invitation?  Continue reading… Don’t know about Spotify?  The FT recently reported that this little music start-up was valued at $250 million by several major investors.

Daniel Ek, one of the founders said in a TechCrunch interview:

“In July, we accounted for 35% of digital music revenues in Sweden. We have a million users in Sweden, out of a population of only nine million. And that’s the key to success: scale. In any freemium model, if you’re getting double digits or higher, you’re doing well. We’ll get there. We’re already growing at 50% month-on-month, doubling our revenue every two months.”

Spotify had a lot of buzz when I was living in Europe this past year.  It provided a huge library of searchable, playable, streaming, great-quality music.  Unfortunately, it’s still not available to use in the USA (though, there are some workarounds if you use a VPN).

Who wouldn’t want unlimited, searchable music?  Does this spell the end of “owning” music?  Lots of questions have been floating these last many months since Spotify was dubbed the “iTunes killer.”  Also, it’s only natural to compare the music industry and the movie industry.

So, here’s how to get a free Spotify invitation:

1. Leave a comment below about how you think Spotify is going to impact the way we listen to music and how this might also signal how we’ll be consuming other digital entertainment content like movies and TV in the future.
2. Give it a couple days and people will vote on the best comments.  I have 10 free invites to give away.

Really, I wrote this post because my old blog post on “How to Get a Free Spotify Invitation” gets hundreds of hits per day, still.  Judging by this, I can assume that Spotify is a topic that is growing in popularity.  In a post today, GigaOm called Spotify the new Napster.  Sort of.  They are still working out their revenue schemes.  SeldomSeenKid wrote:

Spotify’s Daniel Ek last night confirmed that Spotify is considering introducing different price points and that the percentage of premium members is not yet in double digits, and that 80% of Spotify users have stopped file sharing.

This makes me wonder if that last phrase is the single greatest selling point for content distributors.  Would you not download a movie if you could stream it cheaply and easily?  NetFlix is banking on that.

Spotify has been in development by a Swedish team since 2006.  The company Spotify was founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It’s headquartered in London and development continues in Stockholm boasts over a million regular users and an iPhone application.

“Next Napster” and “iTunes Killer”??  Discuss.

Viggo Mortensen in “The Road”

It’s a new kind of story, for sure.  “The Road” may not be easy to watch, but it’s unique.  It’s the story of a father and son traversing a bleak landscape after an unnamed catastrophe has destroyed almost all life on the planet.  The star, Viggo Mortensen, definitely gives a striking performance as the desperate father, protecting his son from starvation, cannibals (yep, cannibals!) and, the most feared enemy, despair.  It’s existential to an overwhelming degree.  One scene of starving, naked people locked in a cannibal’s basement is particularly horrifying.

The driving question throughout the film is: why choose to live if life is so desperate?  And why choose to be “one of the good guys?”  The brief moment of levity essentially consists of finally finding a storage room full of food (with some subtle product placement including Coca-Cola, Vitamin Water and Cheetos).

Viggo Mortensen has had supporting roles in movies from Witness (his first film role) and G.I. Jane.  He’s most famous for his role in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy as Aragorn.  He was the honored actor at the Telluride Film Festival this year.  His tribute celebrated his many skills and colorful biography; he grew up in Argentina, Denmark and New York and is an accomplished artist, musician, photographer, horseman, swordsman and actor.

Jared Parmenter wrote a really thorough, positive review.  I wasn’t so thrilled with the film.  Besides being difficult to watch, the ending seemed too happy and hopeful for such a bleak story. The film is subtly politicized by supposedly incorporating footage from abandoned highways in Pennsylvania, smoke from 9/11 and some of the empty shopping centers in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.

Because the Weinstein Company chose to unveil this film at Telluride, I won’t be surprised if they’re gunning for awards season after the festival circuit.

Writing tip for the day…

You do not need to leave your room.

Remain sitting at your table and listen.

Do not even listen, simply wait.

Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary.

The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked,

it has no choice, it will roll in ecstacy at your feet. 

– Franz Kafka

I don’t think Kafka intended this to read like a poem, but it could be.