Spotify wants to help you discover music, just like everyone else

Spotify has announced new features designed to help people "discover" music, because that's apparently something people have difficulty doing. MusicAlly explains how it works:

The new discovery features include a Follow tab to help users follow individual artists, celebrities, music experts and other users, and also a Discover tab designed to significantly improve Spotify’s recommendation features, suggesting new music based on users’ habits. Users will also be able to build their own “collections” on the service, adding albums to an online collection rather than having to save them to individual playlists.

So it's not really a tool to discover new music, just yet another way of shovelling more of the same at people.

"Hey, Coldplay fan - have you heard Keane? Hey, Oasis fan, have you heard Ocean Colour Shitting Scene?"

God help us all.

Meanwhile, the company claim they've not got five million people paying them for their service, and that they've written cheques for $500million - 70% of revenues - since they started. These are big numbers when viewed from this end of the street; it's only when that money gets split between hundred and thousands of rights holders that it sounds a bit less impressive.

And, in the latest round of digital refuseniks capitulating, they're bringing Metallica to Spotify. Yes, that's Lars Ulrich and Napster demon Sean Parker reconciled. It's not clear what good Metallica's ten year battle against modernity did them.

SXSW: The Black Keys not thrilled by Spotify

Patrick Carney of The Black Keys, speaking to an US radio station, doesn't seem to have gotten over the whole Napster deal yet.

Asked about Sean Parker's suggestion that Spotify would outstrip iTunes in a couple of years, Carney spluttered:

"He's an asshole. That guy has $2 billion that he made from figuring out ways to steal royalties from artists, and that's the bottom line. You can't really trust anybody like that."

It might be fair to point out that, towards the end, Napster was putting an awful lot of effort in trying to figure out how to actually pay royalties to bands but the record labels couldn't decide if they wanted to take over the business or close it down. And Spotify has found an elegant way of persuading people to pay for music, without which still more files might be sucked, unpaid, off the web. But, hey, why take a balanced view when there's a boogeyman?

"The idea of a streaming service, like Netflix for music, I'm totally not against it. It's just we won't put all of our music on it until there are enough subscribers for it to make sense."

In other words: we're not prepared to take a minor risk in order to help ensure it's a success; let other people stick their necks out. We'll just turn up when the cash is there.

"Trust me, Dan and I like to make money. If it was fair to the artist we would be involved in it. I honestly don't want to see Sean Parker succeed in anything. I imagine if Spotify becomes something that people are willing to pay for, then I'm sure iTunes will just create their own service, and they're actually fair to artists."

Ah, yes. The famously "fair to artists" iTunes. It's just that Apple pass the screwing-the-artist work onto the labels.

The labels. They've been creaming cash off artists for decades. But why rock the boat with them, eh, Patrick?

Sean Parker: Why would you sign for a label?

Sean Parker - who went from founding Napster to, erm, popping up at the only fairly creepy Bilderberg crypto-capitalist bunfight last year - was on-stage at this week's Web 2.0 summit, and amongst the names dropped and scores settled, he said this:

He also criticized record labels for their bureaucracy and inability to adapt, saying that thanks to digital distribution services like MySpace and Spotify, bands no longer need to pay a third party to get their music into the ears of the masses. At one point during the interview, Parker said, “I’m not actually sure why you would sign up with a record label. Unless you're desperate for money, or you're on skid-row, and you've got a heroin problem."

Not entirely sure even that's true - even when the majors were powerful, signing to a record label for the money would have been like a cow striking a deal with a butcher to secure her future.

It's questionable, though, if a man who has invested so strongly in Spotify might want to be quite so rude about record labels in public, though - whatever pipe the music of the future flows through, the majors do still control a big chunk of the archive. Pointing out to them that they're probably not going to be part of growing that archive is only going to make them want to jack up the value they drag out of what they do control.

[Thanks to Michael M]