Carole King was one of pop music’s greatest and most prolific writers long before she found international fame with 1971′s Tapestry. King had already written hits such as Will You Love Me Tomorrow?, The Loco-motion, Take Good Care Of My Baby, One Fine Day, Up On The Roof, I’m Into Something Good and Pleasant Valley Sunday, often working with co-writer Gerry Goffin.
Tapestry was King’s second solo album, and it was a huge hit. King wrote or co-wrote all of the tracks, and included some of her favourite songs that had previously been recorded by other artists.
Eight of the album’s 12 tracks were hit singles – It’s Too Late, I Feel The Earth Move, So Far Away and Smackwater Jack for King, Will You Love Me Tomorrow for The Shirelles, (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman for Aretha Franklin, You’ve Got A Friend for James Taylor and Where you lead for Barbra Streisand.
The album itself for number one in the US for 15 consecutive weeks – a record for a female artist – but only hit number 3 in the UK. The Legacy version on Spotify also features live versions of 11 of the 12 tracks.
Last.fm, the music recommendation service, has integrated ‘Play on Spotify’ links. The two services have long been working together, with Spotify offering the option to ‘scrobble’ tracks to Last.fm in order to build up your recommendation profile. Now, alongside information and video clips, users will be shown a link to listen to the track on Spotify.
The partnership with Spotify applies in the UK, France, Spain and most of Scandinavia, and Last.fm is also partnering with Hype Machine worldwide, and with MOG in the US. We7 and VEVO will be added soon, and users will see links appropriate to their territory.
At the same time as adding links to partner sites, Last.fm is retiring it’s on-demand streaming service. The popular radio service is not affected.
This looks like a positive move for users. Although we lose Last.fm’s streaming service, it couldn’t compete with Spotify’s. At the same time, Last.fm’s recommendation service is streets ahead of anything Spotify offers, so a continued partnership between the two sites is something to be applauded.
A couple of weeks ago, Spotify launched its iPhone app v0.4, and after a couple of teething troubles, during which it was quickly upgraded to v0.4.1, it now looks stable enough to offer a quick review.
First up, for those who are new to Spotify for iPhone, here’s a run-down of what it does – which is basically pretty much everything the desktop client does. You’ve got instant streaming of the full catalogue over Wi-Fi and 3G, the ability to store 3,333 tracks in offline playlists, and fast syncing between mobile and desktop. Essentially, Spotify for mobile puts the entire Spotify catalogue into your pocket, making it instantly available in very high quality. So what does v0.4.1 add?
New features include the much-requested Last.fm scrobbling – a long-standing feature on the desktop client, and a refreshed look. A major addition is iPod integration, which uses tracks already stored in the iPhone’s iPod in Spotify playlists, saving memory and sync time. Also new is the ability to stream at low bandwidth (98kbs) when without a Wi-Fi signal. The new Starred feature allows you to star and save favourite albums and tracks.
The are also other small tweaks, such as the fact that the volume slider has been replaced by the iPhone’s master volume control, a restore feature that means the app restarts where it left off, and the ability to share tracks and open Spotify links direct from the browser and other apps.
Unfortunately, v0.4 was buggy, in some cases causing the app to hang or crash. To Spotify’s credit, they were quick to release v0.4.1, which fixes some of the problems. Some users are apparently still having problems with the iPod integration feature causing crashes. v0.4.1 allows this feature to be turned off until the bug can be properly fixed. I’ve not experienced this bug, but I have found a couple of other annoyances.
A major gripe is that, presumably due to the iPod integration, after updating you lose all of your offline content, and need to sync it all again. Depending on how many offline playlists you have this can take many hours. It was most likely necessary to accommodate the new features, but there should probably have been a warning issued before installation.
Secondly, it is still annoyingly difficult to add albums or tracks into new playlists. (For the record, you need to go to Playlists, click Edit, click ‘+’, create a new playlist, then search for the album or track to add.) It’s much easier to do this on the Symbian Spotify app.
Thirdly, the app seems slightly slower to respond. This could be because it seems to be constantly syncing offline content, but I’ll keep an eye on it and report back.
Another much-requested feature was the ability to listen to Spotify in the background while using other iPhone functions. Unfortunately Apple still don’t allow third party apps to do this, so v0.4.1 doesn’t offer a change. However, the word is that Apple’s forthcoming 4.0 iPhone OS will allow multitasking, and hopefully Spotify will be quick to update the app as a result.
Overall, although slightly flawed, Spotify for iPhone v0.4.1 remains an essential application, effectively rendering the iPod (and iTunes) obsolete. It’s free to download from the App Store, but you’ll need a Spotify Premium account to use it, which costs £9.99 a month.
Carole King was one of pop music’s greatest and most prolific writers long before she found international fame with 1971′s Tapestry. King had already written hits such as Will You Love Me Tomorrow?, The Loco-motion, Take Good Care Of My Baby, One Fine Day, Up On The Roof, I’m Into Something Good and Pleasant Valley Sunday, often working with co-writer Gerry Goffin.
