Dear Spotify, Walter Loves Music Too, But Would Also Love To SHARE Music.

I’ve given some thought to Spotify over the past few days, and here are some of my thoughts.

Perhaps I’m wrong and Spotify has gone social after all. But not in the spheres where I move and socialize. And I have tried to spark some collaboration and social behavior without success. These thoughts build upon the assumption that Spotify HASN’T gone social. Yet.

Spotify should theoretically have everything needed to go social. They have all the prerequisites – great content, rudimentary sharing and very high usability. But:

Spotify has been communicated in a general way. “Everybody loves music” is… well… a bit bland. Sure we do love music, but iTunes could say the same thing, or Gibson, or whatever. The use of the word “Everybody” is also unfortunate. It’s not about you, it’s about “Everybody”. It doesn’t give me any hint of what the service is all about. Luckily it’s a very intuitive use interface. For a music PLAYER that is, not for a musical social tool. There is nothing intuitive about going social using Spotify. It’s as if Twitter would have said “Everybody loves writing”. I would say that the killer app having a centralized server is not to have a huge music collection. Most people don’t know how to find the right music anyway. Spotify is theoretically a long-tail idea, but I doubt that it has sparked long-tail behavior for this very reason. No. The killer app of having a centralized server is that it has made music truly shareable. No sending of megabytes of songs required. No use of bad sound quality YouTube-clips required. Just share the link and go. Spotify is not about listening to music, it’s about communicating music. And this is the one major point where I think Spotify has gone wrong (as I have also said many times in the past).

The most common description I get of Spotify is “it’s like iTunes, but with everything on it”. And that’s the intuitive impression you get of the service at first. And that’s where people stop. Right-clicking to retrieve a link and posting it on your blog isn’t the first thing people think of upon opening Spotify. It’s not obvious enough. Perhaps a share button should be placed by everything that can be shared. I’m thinking something along the lines of a pop-up like the iBeginshare-plugin for WordPress (that you can see at the bottom of this post. But prettier of course. This one is darn ugly, though useful).

And why do I think that this would make a difference? Well – it’s just to much of a hassle to right-click, copy a link, and paste it somewhere. Call me lazy, but this is how we all are on the internet. I would rarely share blogposts if it wasn’t for the one-click share action in Google Reader. But this just makes it super easy and streamlined.

So, my first advice to Spotify would be this:
A share-button with a customizable pop-up which is by default equipped with Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, MySpace, and, most importantly in the long term, a “post to Feed”-option where “feed” can be any number of feeds that you may choose to create. These feeds can then be subscribed to by anybody. Easy piecy. And it would trigger creativity.

This would be a good start. Now tell me where to send the invoice.

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Tagged as: creativity, Facebook, Google, Idea, Internet, MySpace, Philosophy, Psychology & Strategy, press, service, Spotify, The Social Web, Twitter, Wordpress, Writing, YouTube