As a previous Spotify Premium user, having sent precisely £100.89 Spotify’s way, you’d expect me to applaud these changes. Well I don’t. And I’m gonna tell you for why…

First off, let me get one thing off my chest…

The ridiculous 5 play limit

Seriously? If this was a limit per week or even per month I could understand that, but after hitting this limit 2 days after finding a new song that I absolutely love and now never allowed to listen to it on Spotify without coughing up for Unlimited or buying the track it left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. The part of this that really gets my back up is that Spotify’s blog post seems to suggest that people that hit this limit aren’t using the service correctly:

“the average user won’t reach the limit on plays for 7 out of 10 tracks, after a year of using Spotify.”

Interestingly, Spotify quite conveniently links with Last.fm, and as I don’t have regular MP3s scrobbled, let’s have a look at my top 20 most played tracks in the past year…

You actually have to keep going to my 168th most played song before you can find one that has been played less than 5 times, so if this had been applied last year, my top 167 songs would simply be unavailable on Spotify.

While I will concur that some of my listening habits are not quite “regular” (I’m not sure how I managed to listen to The Island Pt. II 43 times!) I know of plenty of people who will listen to the same songs quite often, sometimes twice or three times in a row if it’s a new song they love, and with Spotify’s playlist function, it becomes very easy to listen to the same song multiple times.

10 hour listening limit

It’s not enough. Seriously, 10 hours can be gobbled up pretty damn quick, I used to use Spotify at work, so in one day I could have potentially used up 80% of my montly listening quote. While I’m not asking for 200 hours a month to get me through work, I think they could have offered more than they are.

Pricing

Please don’t instantly shoot me down with “pay up or shut up” comments, as I did, for nearly a year. Why did I cancel? Simple: I didn’t think I got my money’s worth. £10 a month is a lot in this age of cost cutting and recessions, so when I actually analysed my usage of Spotify originally, I found that I just didn’t use the Premium services enough to justify the £10 a month cost. I would however consider Premium if it was at the current Unlimited price point of £5.

So what am I going to do without Spotify?

Use Grooveshark. I paid $30 for a year of Anywhere before the prices went up, but even with the prices at $9 a month it’s still nearly half the price of Spotify. Sure, the interface isn’t as slick, some tracks have a lower bitrate and the mobile app still needs a bit of work but it’s got a much more realistic price.

In closing

The door is always open Spotify, so if you decide to make your Premium service more competitive, I’ll be willing to re-join, but at the moment, as one of the early adopters, I feel a bit betrayed.

“Everyone Loves Music”. So long as you only want to listen to it 5 times.

I finally got round to moving this site onto its brand new server (with an updated version of WordPress) so I can finally resume my ramblings!

Congratulations are due methinks to Barack Obama for becoming the next US President. I will be in Washington, DC for the inauguration in January, very much looking forward to that! 76 days and counting!

I promise I’ll keep my blog up to date this time, but then how many times have you heard that eh?

James

Nothing but praise for BustedTees, they replied to my enquiries very quickly and were very polite (even said to have a good weekend!)

I went and bought “SHIFT Happens!!!1” and “Blow me“.

Very impressed with the T-shirts, and ‘shift happens’ particulary caused a stir at work with clients saying it was very apt.

I’d recommend them to a friend, so go forth and purchase! I think there’s some kind of sale on too!

James.

Yes, no-one cares.

Yes, I’m going to start blogging again. Starting when something interesting happens. I’ll post tomorrow about my experiences with Forza Motorsport 2, as it’s an awesome game!

James.

Weiran says:
lol i confuse myself

Sums it up really. Haha

NB: This is quite long, and it took me ages to write, so go on, read it as I put a lot of effort in!

Thursday, 11th January 2007

The day started relatively normally, with work until 5.30.

On the way to my mums, I had to use all the backroads I knew to avoid [W:Operation Stack] on the [W:M20 motorway] which was causing, to quote the Orange travel line: “15 miles of stationery traffic. Severe delays. Avoid.” and also causing knock-on effects to the A249 and pretty much any major road around. To my joy, it only took me an hour to get back, which is about on-par with a journey in normal traffic on the main roads.

I went up to Layzells at about 8.45pm with my brother to meet a bunch of mates, Weiran and Andy, Ollie, Cod to name a few. It was karaoke night. As the night progressed and the drinks began to flow, I got more confident, and FINALLY (after months of them not having it) I got to sing White and Nerdy by Weird Al Yankovic! Needless to say, I nailed it!

And what is a trip to Layzells karaoke without bustin’ out Nelly’s Grillz with Waz and Andy?

Friday, 12th January 2007

Happy birthday to meeee! Funny how 21 feels the same as 20, except if I was in America I could now legally get drunk! I WILL take advantage of this fact at some point .

I got all the presents on my previous post, along with a lovely silver bracelet thing from my brother, some lovely cufflinks from my gran and a bunch of cheques totalling £156 (I never realised how generous all my family were, time for thank you cards!). Chris and Jon at work also got me a card, which I wasn’t actually expecting, didn’t know you guys cared if you’re reading this!

Another surprise was the helium balloon (complete with ’21′ shaped confetti) that arrived in a box in the latter half of the day, thanks mum!!

Then it was off to Gatwick to pick up Phil from the Micra Sports Club and his friend ready for tomorrow’s antics. I should explain at this point it was Phil’s 20th on the Saturday too, so it was like an uber-joint-party!

After this we spent the rest of the night playing Pro Evo Soccer 6 on my 360, and I found out Phil has some mad skills at that game. The challenge to beat him was on! More on that later, but for now we move on to…

Saturday, 13th January 2007

Happy birthday to Phiiiil! Hehe. I remember being 20, it felt so grown up to be leaving those teenage years behind, they’ve stuck with you since year 8 at school so it seems very much like the end of an era when within a minute they’re all gone.

Woke up at about midday after a late night Pro Evo session, had a shower, then played a load more Pro Evo. I was originally supposed to go to the Co-Operative bank in Croydon to deposit my cheques into my Smile.co.uk account but they’d closed by the time I was human! Damn. I still haven’t put them in!

More Pro Evo…. Until about 4pm when Andy and Weiran arrive… Then more Pro Evo! Oh, and more drinks (for them anyway, I’m driving us to Upper Warlingham train station!).

We set off for the train station at about 7.45pm 7.52pm, and miss the 8.00pm train we were supposed to catch to London, so we hang around until 8.30pm for the next one. Thanks for writing ‘cock’ in the steam in my car windows guys!

Arrive at Farringdon for about 9.30pm and bang straight into the Wetherspoons nearby for a quick half hour drinking session to prep us for the night (because drinks in Turnmills are criminally expensive – £4.80 for a Wkd!) 2 pitchers of vodka+Red Bull and 2 shots of Sambuca and we’re ready for Turnmills!

Now, what’s the best way to explain the next 8 hours of dancing, and the pinnacle of the whole weekend…

F * * K I N G A W E S O M E ! !

Right, moving on… No, not really! Although I won’t discuss the specifics of boogying for 8 hours (yes I said boogying Stevie B!) let’s just say the music was absolutely awesome, hats off to all the DJs!

An interesting thing I discovered while there too is that you can get Nitrous Oxide in balloon form, and it is quite interesting, basically you laugh at everything and your body goes all tingly for about a minute. Best £2 I ever spent. It’s legal by the way, it’s just dentists laughing gas!

Here’s the obligatory drunk, hazy photos that you expect from a club that provides a smoke machine in the main room…

All in all, an awesome night, and I want to go again very soon! Smartie Partie throw one hell of a Turnmills event!

Sunday, 14th January 2007

Set off from Turnmills at about 6am, only to learn that the tube station doesn’t open until 8am… Of course! It’s a Sunday! ****!

Luckily Weiran knew of a 24 hour diner, called Tinseltown that’s only about a 10 min walk from Farringdon Tube Station, I’d recommend checking it out, the food there is amazing! Huge portions too!

We then returned to the tube station, paid for our tickets, then wandered onto the platform, only to glance up at the monitor and discover that there would be “…no trains operating across London until 8.15am” and even then all trains would terminate and begin at London Blackfriars!!
So that prompted a 30 min walk to Blackfriars and then a 30 min wait for a train! Finally got on the train and got to East Croydon station only to discover the train to Upper Warlingham wouldn’t be arriving for another 40 minutes! So that prompted another wait in a freezing cold waiting room which for the latter half of we shared with some drunk guy whose first words upon spotting us was “You lot have been out on the piss then”. Charming! He then proceed to say all sorts of random, hilarious, racist things, such as asking Weiran for a number 51! And to top it all off, when Phil spoke (he’s from near Manchester) this guy went “Way aii man! You from Newcastle”. What a legend.

We finally got home at about 11am, slept for about 3 hours, played a bunch more Pro Evo, Weiran and Andy left, I took Phil and his mate to Gatwick and went to sleep.

There we go. If you’ve got this far down, then I’m very impressed, you must be a true friend, and I thank you for reading! If you want more like this, then come out on the 12th January 2008 for my 22nd!!

James

By the way, I did beat Phil at Pro Evo in the end, 2-0! Woohoo!!

So hopefully I should be getting some of the following for my birthday:

So, in order, that’s an Accurist Skeleton watch, a Buffalo 500GB external hard drive, The Gospel According to Chris Moyles and a 1GB stick of RAM.

I also treated myself to this today:

(That last one should with me by this coming Monday or Tuesday!)

I might post before my birthday, but I doubt it lol

James

Christmas was pretty good to me! I got a few Xbox 360 games, some DVDs, and with a voucher I went out and bought an HP Photosmart M627 7MP camera! The result of which is a slight addiction to photos, hence my Flickr account going Pro and the size of it exploding!

New Year’s (and the run up to) was amazing! I went out on the Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday! Party animal!!

Anyway, We’re into 2007 now so I will wish you all the best for the new year and here’s to another year of Calamity James!

James

Yes, that’s right, in typical man style I haven’t got all my presents yet for Christmas so I’m taking half of Friday off to head off into the urban wilderness that is London with my cousin.

“You must be mad!” – I hear you exclaim! Not as mad as you’d think actually, London actually isn’t that bad for shopping last minute, I did it last year on the 23rd with said cousin and we got so much done that day you would not believe! I think it’s down to the sheer volume of shops concentrated in Central London, no matter how many people there are, there’s never enough to fill them up to an unpleasant level!

Aside from Friday’s shop-o-rama, there is a Christmas party at Layzells this Saturday that is gonna rock the big one I think! Ladies, I’m available as a dance partner – no squabbling, there’s plenty to go around!

After an unusually long post from me, I’m off to finish the last 15 minutes of my second-to-last day at work this year!

Bye for now!
James