Reid Dossinger

Giving the Spotify/Tumblr integration a whirl

Today, when I went over to post something on my music Tumblr (maybe NSFW depending on how your W feels about swearing), I was surprised to see that the interface for audio posts had changed a bit. Instead of upload, search and URL tabs, they just had a search, and said that it could search for Soundcloud OR Spotify. I did a “Whaaaaa!?” and went to look at when Spotify and Tumblr had hooked up. Today as it turns out.

So, being the curious guy I am, I posted a song using the Spotify posting mechanism, and I can’t say I’m too impressed. I should have known from the beginning that the streaming would only work if you have Spotify open, and sure enough, you have to have Spotify open.

The idea for Spotify is that they’ll become THE streaming service of choice, which is okay, but requiring an external application that you have to keep open all the time seems a little bit backwards, like if we were moving to installing Flash rather than figuring out how to do it with HTML.

I still prefer Soundcloud and will look to that for my music posting needs. It’s absolutely the way to go: it can be much more easily integrated with websites than YouTube audio or now Spotify. If only the Soundcloud people would get a larger library by officially license audio from the labels in the way Spotify does it, rather than requiring people to upload music themselves, usually “illegally”…

Facebook launches new “Listen With Friends” feature

I haven’t gotten this feature in Facebook yet, but I’m intrigued. Yes, it’s the same basic idea of turntable.fm, but like with so many other products that Facebook rips off and bakes into their product, it has the massive advantage of having all your friends right there, rather than having to convince people to sign on to a new service.

I loved turntable.fm, but found it to require a pretty good amount of time and attention to DJ (not really something you can do in the background while you work). The “Listen Along” function means that if a friend is just listening to a single album, you can listen along to that. None of having to find and queue up songs, which, granted, is a lot of fun, but only if you have the time for it.

Finally, this is an even bigger plus for Spotify and other services that are plugged into Facebook not only in that it’ll make people listen more, but there will likely be a lot more people like me who turn the sharing to Facebook back on. It’s not just annoying now: it’s actually fun.