Twitter and Spotify Reviews

In a blog post back in November I mentioned I had signed myself up to both Twitter and Spotify. It's been about 6 months now so I thought I'd give my feedback on my experiences with both here. Both are already well-established online fixtures so I am interested in recording my experiences and thoughts about them. 

To be honest, I was expecting to get along with both of them a lot more than I did.
Let's start with Spotify. Spotify offer a free music streaming service through their downloadable application. You have the same access to their music library if you're a free user, the only drawback being the insertion of a couple of advertisements in between every other song and a weekly tariff of songs that you can listen to. Reach that tariff and you have to wait a week for it to refresh and continue listening. Back in November I decided to sign up for a monthly subscription at £4.99 a month to get unlimited playtime and a removal of the advertisements, which aren't too bad but can become a bit of a distraction if you're really into your music and don't want anything to break up the pace of an album or playlist.

I cancelled my subscription after one month. Why? My main problem was with the choice of music. Although the home page of Spotify boasts having a an extensive library of 'over 10 million tracks', bands such as The Beatles and Led Zeppelin are substituted with sub-par tribute groups - perhaps a lame attempt by Spotify to satisfy the disappointment of the fans to these pillars of pop and rock music. A lot of other big bands are curiously absent from my own experiences with the search tool. As I'm into a lot of underground heavy metal and electronic music, I was disappointed to see that a lot of my favourite bands didn't feature at all, and if they did, it was in a severely reduced capacity, maybe featuring just one album or track. I got a little fatigued with searching and drawing up blanks for music that I really wanted to listen to, so Spotify fell into disuse and I just knocked it on the head, and haven't come back to it since.

"No Beatles? What?!"

That's not to say that Spotify was all that bad. I liked the way it integrated the last.fm scrobbler into its own music player, so last.fm nuts like myself (a member for over 5 years) can log anything we listen to onto our profiles. It also features a facebook tab that can be accessed when you log your details on Spotify to look at playlists compiled by your friends as well as their favourite tracks, which is fun for a few moments at least. There were some great artists available when you found them, some even with their entire back catalogues (including live albums, exclusive tracks from compilations, etc.) available to listen to. But it just didn't go far enough to replace my old set-up of using my existing music collection in conjunction with last.fm, which can be used both to browse and explore new bands and to keep up with your old favourites. It didn't establish itself as a credible alternative, and that's why I gave up on it so swiftly.

Sorry Spotify. It's probably the fact that bands refuse permission to have their material used on there which is damaging it the most and probably explains why it's been making such large losses in the past year or so. It just can't satisfy everybody, especially me.

Twitter. I both love and hate Twitter in equal measure. It's nonsense in 140 characters at a time. I don't know why some people feel the compulsion to react about TV shows or football matches or what they did this morning (nothing) by posting on Twitter, but they do and do so in vast numbers as well. HUGE numbers, for Pete's sake. Even more people insist on reiterating something they've heard from another Twitter account, turning the whole website into a game of Chinese Whispers with several million players all playing at once. The establishment of a live 'trending' system only makes matters worse - people will do anything to see a certain person or phrase enshrined as a trend, if even only for a few minutes. And with every trending topic, there's a wealth of people who will post to let everyone else know that they have no idea why that particular person/place/event is trending! Good going, champs. The celebrities, too, who will do anything to boost their status through the website, literally anything. 99% of all 'tweets' could probably be disregarded and trashed as an utter waste of power and webspace. And don't even get me going about hashtags - I used to think they were cool until Twitter.

Despite ALL of these complaints, I still use it. I don't tweet much, if only to lamely peddle this blog and occasionally reply to people asking questions on their pages (Such as the actor who will be playing Samwell Tarly in the upcoming HBO 'Game of Thrones'  TV series, and Simon King, one of the best wildlife photographers ever). I even have my own pathetic Twitter feed embedded to the right of this entry, for what it's worth. Interestingly I have almost none of my friends on facebook following my feed at all, or vica versa. Although most of my friends don't have Twitter feeds anyway, I don't think I'd be all that compelled to follow them. I don't think Twitter is best adapted for keeping up with friends as much as it is with businesses, media outlets, public figures or celebrities. There's virtually no features to let you interact with them aside from a basic tweet, so your communications with them have to be fairly short unless you want to take on the ponderous task of writing one message through multiple tweets, otherwise known as an e-mail for idiots.

To use Twitter correctly has a lot to do with finding the right people and sources of information. I'm connected to a lot of media outlets on Twitter, such as The Independent, The Guardian, BBC News and The Huffington Post. Each of these are pretty handy connections to have, as they often highlight interesting stories from the day which I might have missed. I have a local of local authorities and businesses added for the same reason. I have a lot of rail companies added as they post updates on any delays or cancellations to services on the rail network. This is useful because Twitter is probably the only website that could keep up to speed with the number of issues hitting the railways every day, so it's always nice to know if I'm going to be sitting around in the purgatory that is Nuneaton train station before I decide to head off on a journey back home to Stafford. And some Twitter feeds, such as shitmydadsays and Stephen Colbert's, are just plain funny to read - it's amazing to see what some people can do with just 140 characters, if they really try. There's a lot of potential in the website, if only people got out of the habit to only think after they've tweeted. Twoted, Twatted. Whatever. I will continue to use it on-and-off to see how it develops. But it's lasted longer than Spotify, which is promising at least!

tl:dr Spotify bad.Twitter good but with some reservations.