sallyrenshaw – add me on spotify and lets share playlists

ponykitty – add me on last.fm too if you like.

1. Big(ish) music catalogue

Spotify contains over 8 millions musc tracks including artists from the big labels like Universal, EMI, Sony etc. Of course the traditional ‘difficult’ bands don’t show up. The Spotify software has an option to import music files, so you can still listen to these non-available bands with Spotify if you get their music from other sources. Its handy as it imports all of your local files from your Media Player of choice or iTunes (bleurgh) so you can include tracks from that treasured handmade CD that a struggling strangecore band sold you at the show where there was only ten people.

People might turn their noses up at the fact that their mates band isn’t on Spotify yet, but if you sit back and think about it from a bands perspective you don’t really want to be giving away your music for next to nothing unless you have a lot of people dying to listen to it. The more popular you are as an artist, the more beneficial Spotify will be to you and the more money will be filtered towards you. Its really not a good idea to have your album on Spotify if only 30 people are going to listen to it in a month. I’m not sure how much money you will receive from Spotify (my boyfriend and I have tried to research this for funsies to no avail) but I can estimate that is really not worth the time and effort that you could instead put into tempting people to actually buy your album. The ‘fairness’ of this business model has been questioned, with it being claimed that Spotify favours major and ‘bigger indie’ labels as they possess equity in the company. Some smaller labels receive ‘no minimum per stream’ and only get a 50% share of ad revenue on a pro-rata basis’ (read the article from last year here)

I think a good way for smaller bands to gain interest using Spotify is to be included on a record label compilation CD, if a user listens to one track with their spotify pass and they think its rad then they are more likely to purchase the album from this band and then they can import that into their Spotify playlist. There you go – Spotify can be used to please the chart toppers as well as the independant bands, and you as a user feel like you are doing a good deed by supporting the little guy and not giving much to the bigger labels.

2. It’s (almost) free!

Yeah a lot of people have been whining about the fact that you cant listen to Spotify for free anymore. I’m personally glad that you can’t. The free option was good for Spotify to promote their service for a while and gain interest but its not particularly good for the music industry to just GIS BORT everything relying on a few ads (I know, we all miss Jonaton). For a tenner a month i can listen to everything I want, which is bloody great if you ask me.

3. Clutterfree

I remember the days of spending at least 5 times more than this a month in sweaty record stores only to buy cds that i would burn onto a hard drive and then leave to gather dust taking up valuable bookcase space. These days, I’ve banned all CD’s (and DVD’s for that matter) from my bookcase. I’ve burned them onto the ‘puter and shunned them all to the storage room. Oh I know that we all miss album art and reading the dedications and thankyous in the back of CD cases, but thats why I still buy special editions of the albums I love, screenprinted gig posters, t shirts etc. I just don’t have a shelf full of impulse buy cd purchases.

4. Social Networking

Since they made it possible to import Facebook friends Spotify has become not just a media player but a tool used for showing off your excellent taste, sharing and discovery (and it’s legal!). Users can view each other’s listening habits, view/subscribe to each other’s playlists and even recommend music to friends via the ‘inbox’ feature, which also allows attached messages to be added for context.

5. Last.fm Intergration

I always find myself debating with people whether Last.fm is better than Spotify. While Last.fm offers many of the features that Spotify does, it is nowhere near as convenient in terms of availability of music. However, Last.fm’s all inclusive and user-generated nature means that as soon as a certain piece of music is listened to, it is registered – providing the same people fix the tags and information. This has grand implications for the service Last.fm provides in terms of recommendations, an area which as yet, Spotify has failed to equal. It could be argued though, that with Last.fm intergration, anything beyond the basic recommendations provided by Spotify is just around the corner. I think that spotify could take some great tips from last.fm, possibly integrating with a popular games console so that you could use spotify through your TV like Last.fm with the XBox. I use Last.fm primarily to keep track of my music taste, I’m a sucker for stats so I’m really glad that I can scrobble from Spotify and see what I’m listening to via the cool things on the Last.fm playground. I don’t like to use Last.fm radio as I don’t like that you can only choose an artist and not a particular song or listen to a whole album.

6. Mobile Use

As is the case for most services now, there are now Spotify app’s for portable devices. This means that users can play music on demand and on the go. The offline playlists are brilliant for this. You just decide which playlist that you want to use whilst you are at home or at the office and with a wifi connection, download them and then you have them when you are stuck without the interwebz. As a user of the iPhone app, I think that it is extremely well designed, and easy to use. I don’t know what the app is like on an Android or HTC device but I hope its good! on a Windows 7 phone, the Spotify app is apparently ‘coming soon’… maybe Windows are trying to get as many people to sign up for the Zune pass before they allow spotify on that device? I don’t know. (more…)

Finally finished art materials organisation.

I have thrown away around 50% of my little things and collected bits of stuff. Seeing as my main tool nowadays is my wacom tablet and computer there is just no point in keeping unused clutter.

Here are my ‘essentials’ though that I couldnt bear to throw out. It was pretty satisfying to make sure all of my pencils were sharpened nicely and that there wasn’t any sharpies mixed in with the regular felt tips. Yes I’m a loser. Getting all ready to move to my new flat and I’m excited :)

This is my favourite pattern of all of the ones that I have done, I used to have it on my twitter page and personal blog for a while but now you can enjoy it too!

This work was for my degree show project. I wanted to challenge the aggressive and violent nature of criminals that intimidates us by using inspiration from the arts and craft movement. I created a series of serial killer portraits and one large illustration depicting the story of the famous Dr. Crippen.

This work was featured in my exhibition at the Coningsby Gallery in London in november 2011.

In november 2010 I was part of a group show at the Coningsby Gallery in London. The exhibition was to showcase the highlights of work by the 2010 illustration and animation graduates and featured pieces from my craft and criminality project.

You can read an artsthread review of the exhibition here.

http://blog.artsthread.com/2010/11/reunion-manchester-school-of-art-illustration-animation-ba-show/

Win Htein is a record distributer based in London run by the most charming couple – Will and Lucy. The brief was to design them a logo that MUST include a cat. What is not to like about this brief?

If there is one thing I hate its really bad icon design, and despite being an illustrator primarily, I am not really a fan of the ‘hand drawn’ scribble style social media icons that are available on every crappy web design site. Oh also those ones that are made to look like they are ‘grunge’, and the ones on torn off pieces of paper. Bleurgh.

Don’t even get me started on all of those terrible cartoon bulge eyed twitter birds that are out there.

With this in mind I decided to create my own library of social media and generic icons. I use them mostly as a reference for when I’m doing my web design and need to grab an icon quickly, and it also keeps things consistent across all of my UI designs. I’m constantly updating this so the icons are the most relevant and useful.

here are a few examples of icons that I have designed for web design. Maybe if you ask me nicely I can share them with you.

TechSpy is a social tech news site that is part of the NewsBoiler network. I was asked to create a design for a tshirt for them to give away to users who had won competitions.

www.techspy.com

I did all of these foody illos for the delightful band Tellison. They are bundled together and bound in a really nice Cook Book, ‘The Tellison Collection of Cocktails and Cooking’. The book with be available soon with purchase of their upcoming single. Some of these designs will also be printed as limited edition tees so keep your eye on the tellison website for news of when you can get your grubby paws on them.

Tellison are a band from Hammersmith in West London in Britain near France. There are four of them. They are boys. They play Fender Telecasters and Jazz Basses and Gibson Melody Makers and 1960s Ludwig drums. They care a lot and practice a lot. They met during an earthquake on the Isle of Arran.

They’ve toured relentlessly and without cease and shared stages with bands like Biffy Clyro, Noah and the Whale, Tubelord, Hot Club de Paris, Johnny Foreigner and many many more. They dig digital watches, buffet-style food and inventing new cocktails.