Hands on with Spotify for mobile devices

Spotify, one of the most popular music streaming services in Europe and other regions, today launched in the U.S. as expected. Spotify offers a massive catalog of music for free, but adds features in two paid monthly subscription tiers: Unlimited for $4.99 and Premium for $9.99. Reinforcing the shift away from desktop computing, mobile users will have to ante up for the Premium plan to enjoy Spotify on the go, available on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Symbian, and webOS devices.

Here’s a breakdown of the other features in the service tiers, including offline mode to store tracks and advertising-free playback:

The removal of ads is nice, as is truly unlimited streaming, assuming you don’t have bandwidth caps to contend with, but to me, the big feature is Spotify playback on mobiles. And another Premium feature dovetails nicely with the supported handsets: Playlists can be used offline, allowing for music from Spotify’s catalog to be stored locally and played back without using precious mobile broadband. A great strategy for this feature would be to have the software synchronize offline playlists while on a Wi-Fi network. In fact, on the Android version of Spotify, I see options to sync music over Wi-Fi, 3G or both.

Aside from the offline storage, Spotify can help manage mobile broadband use through a playback quality setting. Low-bandwidth mode won’t sound quite as good, but uses a 96 kbps data stream; high bandwidth boosts the audio quality as well as the bandwidth due to a 160 kbps music stream. Such mobile data use can add up quickly: See our recent post on what a gigabyte is for mobile users to get an idea of how much data these types of services use.

On handsets, I haven’t yet found a feature that’s available in the Windows or Mac Spotify client that’s missing for mobiles. It’s easy to create Playlists, search for albums, tracks or artists, play locally stored tracks (yes, Spotify will play back music you’ve purchased and store on your handset) or share tunes with friends. There’s an option to shoot track information to Last.fm, Facebook, Twitter or via email. If you have friends on Spotify, you can even share your current track with them directly and a news feed in the app shows what your Spotify friends are listening to, provided they’ve enabled sharing and take advantage of it. If you’d rather hide your addiction to ABBA, you’ll want to see how to manage Spotify’s sharing settings.

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I have found two limitations when using Spotify on a smartphone, however. First, not all tracks are playable, although I can’t tell how many are limited specifically to the desktop client. A good example is The Legend of Johnny Cash. When searching for this album, it doesn’t appear in the mobile search results, but does show and is playable in the desktop client. That’s likely due to Spotify’s licensing agreements with music labels and it also brings up the second limitation: You can’t play music simultaneously on different handsets and desktop clients.

That means Spotify won’t allow you to listen to music on your smartphone while your family is trying to do the same on a desktop at home. As soon as I hit the play button in Spotify’s iOS client, for example, the desktop client stopped playing. For now then, it’s one account per person unless Spotify can devise some type of family plan.

Some may compare Spotify to Microsoft’s Zune Pass service, which supports music streaming to phones, local downloads and playback of millions of tracks in a similar subscription approach. Zune Pass costs $14.99 per month, which includes users to download and keep 10 tracks per month. But the biggest drawback I see compared to Spotify is the mobile platform limitation. If you want to subscribe to Zune Pass, you can only use a Windows Phone or the older Microsoft Zune digital audio players.

With support for multiple platforms, hooks into Facebook and wireless streaming playback in addition to offline music storage, Spotify plays all the right notes for mobile music lovers. I’ve long been adding to my music library through Amazon’s MP3 store, which offers daily deals as low as $1.99 for an album. But I haven’t yet bought Colbie Caillat’s new $9.49 album that arrived earlier this week. For just a few cents more, I’ve already heard the full album twice on Spotify and plenty of other songs too, so the new service has me rethinking my mobile music plans.

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Get your hands off that contact info, says Facebook

The battle over who controls the information in your social graph — and specifically, who controls the email addresses of your contacts — continues to ramp up. Just a week after shutting down a Chrome extension that let you pull that information out of Facebook, the social network has flipped the kill switch on another service from Open-Xchange that provided a similar export capability. Although the company says its service abided by all the terms of the Facebook public API, it has become the latest victim of Facebook’s ongoing attempts to maintain control over the contact info of its users.

The shutdown of Open-Xchange’s address-book-exporting service makes the issue even more obvious, since it’s a more straightforward offering than the Chrome extension developed by Mohamed Mansour. The programmer launched the extension last fall as a way of allowing users to move their contacts out of Facebook, after Google changed the terms of its API in order to highlight the social network’s refusal to allow users to export that data. But Mansour’s solution effectively just scraped the Facebook site — rather than using the approved API to access the data — and that’s expressly forbidden by the company, making it easier to justify the shutdown of the service.

Open-Xchange’s service, however, isn’t a scraper at all. It uses the social network’s approved API, and according to a press release from the company — which makes an open-source email server and collaboration system — it obeyed all the various restrictions that Facebook places on dealing with user data. According to an email from Facebook sent to the German company, however, the address book application was disabled because it allowed users to export email addresses of their contacts without the approval of each of those users. The Facebook email said:

You cannot use a user’s friend list outside of your application, even if a user consents to such use, but you can use connections between users who have both connected to your application.

In other words, in order to behave the way that Open-Xchange intended — by allowing users to import and consolidate their address books from different services and social networks — the German company’s service would have to require that everyone in a user’s Facebook contact list also join the service and authorize the export of that information. In the company’s news release, Open-Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna railed against Facebook’s control over a user’s data, saying:

If you want to see what a future looks like where a single company controls YOUR personal data for its own profit, this is a glimpse. Clearly, Facebook management does not want you to have the ability to take your personal information outside their walls to, say, Google+ and will do everything in their power to stop you, including violating their own terms and conditions.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for a comment and will update this post if we get one, but what the social network’s behavior in this case — and the case of the Chrome extension — makes clear is that the company believes it needs the approval of each user before it allows anyone to export their email addresses. As we noted in our post about the Chrome extension, Facebook executives have repeatedly said that they believe each user owns their email and other contact information, and that while it might be okay for email programs such as Gmail to allow export of those addresses, Facebook doesn’t believe that it should do this — and some supporters, including media analyst and author Jeff Jarvis, agree that they should not provide this info for privacy-related reasons.

What Facebook still hasn’t explained, however, is that users can easily export all of the email addresses and other information from their contacts by using a Yahoo email account. In fact, the Yahoo importer allows you to use Facebook Connect, so the whole process takes about three clicks. And iPhone users can also import and sync all of the Facebook data for their contacts, creating a single unified address book — in other words, exactly the same thing that Open-Xchange was trying to provide. Why are these other methods allowed when the Germany company’s export feature is blocked? That isn’t clear.

What is clear is that Facebook sees that contact information as a crucial resource that it needs to maintain control over, either because it doesn’t want to give new networks such as Google+ a leg up in gaining new users, or because it foresees some kind of privacy backlash if it allows widespread export of users’ email addresses. But Google — which has launched a full-fledged data export tool called Google Takeout, the product of an internal team called the Data Liberation Front — is unlikely to give up the fight.

Which raises the question: Do you mind if a user that you are connected to through Facebook exports your email address to use in another service such as Google+? Let us know in the comments.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Rupert Ganzer

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Hands on with Amazon Cloud Player for iPad

When Amazon began offering MP3 song downloads without digital rights management (DRM) back in late 2007, I quickly jumped on the bandwagon. Even as an iPhone owner at the time, I ceased buying my music from iTunes, which later dropped DRM. Amazon continued to lead the way in mobile music this year by introducing its Cloud Player software for Android devices and integrating its music store with the online storage service. Amazon’s Cloud Player website can stream stored music as well, but until now, it hasn’t worked well on Apple’s iPad.

Amazon changed that yesterday with the introduction of Cloud Player support for the iPad browser. While you’d think the website might work for other iOS devices, too, it really doesn’t based on trying it on my iPod touch. Using the iPad, however, brings a solid, but basic, music streaming experience. Hitting the http://www.amazon.com/cloudplayer link on my iPad brings up a clean two-paned interface: categorized music and playlists on the left, and track details on the right. Both of these areas are scrollable, so you can view long lists of albums, tracks or playlists. The web-based app works in either portrait or landscape mode.

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Simple controls run along the bottom of the web page. You can play, pause, or skip/rewind tracks with touch buttons or enable random and repeat playback. The currently playing song appears, along with a progress meter for scrubbing or skipping around the song. Unlike a native music application however, you scrub through the song by dragging the progress button. Instead, you have to tap on the meter to jump to a specific point in the song.

Creating a new playlist is simple, as is adding songs or whole albums to an existing playlist. There’s also a link at the top right to buy the MP3 album from Amazon, but that seems silly to me: If you already own the song or album and have it stored on Amazon’s servers, why would you need a link to the album in Amazon’s MP store? The only benefit I can see is for people looking to see additional artist or album information, although this could be handy for those that own just a few tracks and want to complete an album.

For all intents and purposes, outside of the track scrubbing, the Amazon Cloud Player site on iPad simulates a basic music application reasonably well. The music quality sounds no different from when I stream my tunes on a desktop browser, and thanks to iOS multitasking, I can use other apps on my iPad while streaming music over the web. I have noticed that the service runs best if it retains the focus, however. When using another app, the music tends to stop after a song or two. A quick return to the web page nudges the stream to start up right away: something I hope is addressed in the future.

In contrast to the service in a desktop browser or the native Amazon MP3 app for Android, there’s no function to either upload music or download music for local storage in the iPad web version. I’ll stick to using iTunes for that as needed, but for now, I’m happy to enjoy my Amazon stored music on the iPad. And although in 2007, I felt very “locked in” to Apple’s hardware when it came to music and media, thanks to Amazon, I feel I have some real options today.

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