Spotify
#1
http://www.spotify.com/us/hello-america/fb_comb/
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#2
I have Spotify here but have only used it a few times. While I think the concept is good, it is a bit late in the game as far as I am concerned.

The whole music arena in terms of online stuff is moving toward the web-centric end where you listen to it via your browser or some plugin. Take Pandora, Grooveshark and Last.FM for example, they all stream the music you want on demand (Pandora is a different creature however, just takes what you want to hear and plays something similar so you can discover new music). Of course, they all have their own little phone apps to play with them as well.

I see Spotify coming into the market a little too late in the game in terms of adding yet another music player/storage system for the cloud (internet). Google even came out with their Google Music which is in private beta (I got in that one), yet I am afraid to go there because IMHO, Google already knows TOO much about me. Neutral

I used to grab music all the time from Napster (When I had a Windows System), on their $15/month plan where you could get as much as you want, and had license to play it for up to 30 days then the protection would kick in and expire the song unless you renewed it. I found it refreshing to have the music switched out. Over the years, I have evolved into more of an online music player mentality. With the hundreds of thousands of live radio stations online, you can find anything you want to listen to at any time. (Holiday Music too!). For those times when I want to hear a specific artist, or song, I can just dial it into Grooveshark or Spotify (I do use it sometimes).

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#3
Heaven forbid Google find out what music you like too. Smiling

I was just googling some bomb making information the other day. I figure it's good for all of us to mix in a little of that stuff. Some of it might even prove useful. (For instance, who knew you could make a timer out of wet bean seeds?) Smiling
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#4
Ponder - BE CAREFUL!


Quote:House Panel Votes to Require ISPs to Keep Customer Records
A House committee passes a bill that would require ISPs to retain customer IP information for a year as a way to combat child pornography.
By Grant Gross
Jul 28, 2011 3:00 PM

A U.S. House of Representatives committee has voted to approve legislation that would require Internet service providers to retain customer IP data for 12 months in the name of combating child pornography.

The Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act would require ISPs to retain all customer IP addresses so that law enforcement agents can use the information to investigate online child pornography. Law enforcement agents would gain access to the IP information with subpoenas they issue, not court-ordered warrants.

The House Judiciary Committee voted 19-10 Thursday to approve the bill over the privacy concerns of several committee members. Most Republicans voted for the bill, and most Democrats voted against it.

The bill is "an outrageous expansion of the power of the federal government," said Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat.

Several Democrats raised concerns that federal law enforcement agents would use the IP data for investigating a wide range of crimes, not just child pornography. Critics also suggested that the data rules would open up the customer data to subpoenas in civil lawsuits and would be a costly burden to small ISPs.

Lofgren offered several amendments focused on softening the data collection requirements in the bill, which now heads to the full House for a vote. A Lofgren amendment to strike the data retention requirements failed by a 15-8 vote.

Also failing was an amendment by Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat, to allocate US$45 million a year to pay for more than 200 additional federal investigators and prosecutors dedicated to child pornography cases. Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and bill sponsor, argued that Scott's amendment didn't address how the government would pay for the extra investigators.

One Lofgren amendment would have renamed the bill the Keep Every Americans' Digital Data for Submission to the Federal Government Without a Warrant Act. The bill uses child pornography as a "stalking horse for this massive expansion of federal powers" long requested by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to fight a variety of crimes, she said.

The amendment failed, with Smith arguing the amendment "trivializes" the fight against child pornography.

Smith's original bill would have required ISPs to retain IP addresses for 18 months, but an amendment he offered cut the time to 12 months.

Supporters of the bill argued that law enforcement agents need new tools to fight child pornography online.

"Some Internet service providers currently retain these [IP] addresses for business purposes," Smith said. "But the period of retention varies widely among providers, from a few days to a few months. The lack of uniform data retention impedes the investigation of Internet crimes."

The number of child pornography cases in the U.S. has grown by 150 percent a year over the past decade, Smith said.

"The child pornography industry has exploded," Ernie Allen, the president and CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said during a hearing earlier this month. "New technologies such as smartphones, digital cameras and webcams have made it easier for offenders to produce, access and trade images. More robust storage devices enable offenders to collect unprecedented volumes of images."

In addition to the data retention rules, the bill would make it a crime to facilitate financial transactions for child pornography, with a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The bill would give the U.S. Marshals Service new subpoena power in sex offender cases and increase prison sentences for some child pornography offenses.

Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantGross. Grant's e-mail address is grant_gross@idg.com.

http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article...table.html

Long story short, what you do and where you go now can be used against you even if you are just curious about stuff.

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#5
Fortunately I don't have any curiosity about child pornography. Smiling
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#6
here in China...All music from google is free to download..
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#7
If only our country was free, like China... Smiling
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#8
(08-08-2011, 08:02 PM)PonderThis Wrote: If only our country was free, like China... Smiling


You kidding me? I've heard you simply can't get Egg-Foo-Yong anyplace in China.

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#9
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenberton...-in-music/
Spotify's Daniel Ek: The Most Important Man In Music


This article appears in the January 16th, 2012 issue of FORBES magazine.

Spotify’s Daniel Ek created a free, Facebook-enabled platform that could save the recording industry from piracy–and iTunes.

It’s a typically damp, dark November afternoon in Stockholm, and Daniel Ek is ill. Over the past month the 28-year-old chief executive of Spotify has worn himself down jetting from his Swedish base to San Francisco, New York, Denmark, the Netherlands and France to visit his expanding sales force and launch his music service in one or another of the dozen countries it now operates in.




But there’s no rest for the weary. Next week he’s scheduled to return to New York to unveil Spotify’s new platform in front of his first-ever press conference—a platform that he admits still isn’t ready for a public debut. “I should be home in bed,” sighs Ek, his voice weak and scratchy, “but we need to get this thing perfect.” So the bald, barrel-chested Ek zips his white hoodie to his chin, swaps tea for his morning cup of coffee—the first of six he throws down in a typical day—and heads into an office that resembles a university library during finals. The pool table has been traded for more IKEA desks, and gray daybeds offer a place to nap between all-nighters. Forgoing his large office, which he mostly uses as a meeting room, Ek plops himself down at an open desk. Around him, a dozen engineers from nearly as many countries, united by their geek-chic uniforms—skinny jeans, printed T-shirts and cardigans—frantically bang out code on their silver MacBooks.

All this frenetic energy reflects the strange new reality of the music business. More than New York or L.A. or Nashville, this rented office space along Stockholm’s Birger Jarlsgatan has become the most important place in music, with Ek now standing as the industry’s most important player. Superstar bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers—formed the year Ek was born—now trek to Sweden to kiss the ring; he sits shotgun in vintage cars with Neil Young (his iPhone boasts a picture of them cruising in a white 1959 Lincoln Continental); he texts breezily with Bono. “Both my (maternal) grandparents were in the music industry,” shrugs Ek, “so I’m fairly grounded about the whole thing.”

The music industry has been waiting more than a decade for Ek. Or more specifically, someone—anyone—who could build something (a) more enticing to consumers than piracy while (b) providing a sustainable revenue model. In the 1990s Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker essentially broke the recording industry with their short-lived illegal download site, Napster, which Ek describes as “the Internet experience that changed me the most.” It was fast and free and limitless—through the site Ek discovered his two favorite bands, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin—and he became one of the 18-to-30-year-olds now considered a lost generation: Those who don’t believe you need to pay for music.

In building his iTunes juggernaut out of the wreckage, Steve Jobs subsequently proved that the cure could be almost as destructive as the disease. By training consumers to buy singles, rather than the CDs that had been the industry’s lifeblood, and taking an outsize cut of the action, Apple stoked the continuing ­spiral. Recording industry revenue, a healthy $56.7 billion in 1999, according to IbisWorld, clocked in at about $30 billion in 2011.

Enter a third disrupter, Ek. In the current tech landscape, where Google provides the search, Facebook the identity and Amazon the retail, Ek wants Spotify to supply the soundtrack. As he describes it: “We’re bringing music to the party.” Which explains what’s keeping his sleep-addled engineers on a 24-hour cycle: Rather than a mere music player—albeit one with a revolutionary model that allows legal access to almost every song you’ve ever heard of, on demand, for free—Spotify aims to create an entire music ecosystem.
cont.....
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#10
I've been listening to Spotify the last few weeks. I like it a lot.
Has anyone else opted in?
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