Spotify, the music streaming service from Sweden and based in London has launched what is known as ‘a platform’ for third-party applications.  

This basically means that other sites that do something else really well, such as Last.fm who are pretty good at keeping track at what you listen to and suggesting similar stuff you might like, can put now their cleverness into the Spotify application itself.  

It seems like a pretty good move to me, it's a quick way to add functionality that users might be looking for without seeing them disappearing to other services never to return. This is also similar to the approach taken by social-media behemoth Facebook, and stuff like Farmville doesn't seem to have done them any harm.  

It is also massively ambitious. Making Facebook into a platform offered a pretty blank canvas. Developers could pretty much go anywhere and do anything (so they brought us animated cows and bartering for grain - brilliant!) but I can't help but feel that the scope for the Spotify platform is much smaller. While it makes sense for the company to try and become *the* destination for online music, particularly with the constant challenge from Apple's iTunes, I wonder if their focus wouldn't have been better placed at improving the overall user experience and the findability (awful word I know) of music. 

Don't get me wrong, I want Spotify to be successful, I'm a subscriber and have been for a long time. Partnering with Facebook is a great move; it should help music lovers who aren't necessarily aware of the service to find it. The problem will be converting this huge potential for growth into actual hard cash to keep the music industry satisfied.

Ever since young tech savy music lovers got their first taste of fast reliable internet connections the game changed for the record companies and basically anyone hoping to make money out of music. 

Spotify was one way of changing that, giving users the chance to listen to as much as they liked, as often as they liked, so long as they paid the monthly subscription fee.

So far so good, except to get us interested there is a free option too which you could listen to as often and as much as the paid for one. The only limitations were that you couldn't have it on your phone and every so often an advertisment would interrupt the music. 

Well it seems this might have been a bit too generous. The company announced on their blog today that free users who joined before November 1st 2010 will, from May 1st, have their free listening cut from 20 hours of music a month to 10 hours, with a limit of five plays per track. The changes will also apply to accounts of those who signed up after November 1st 2010 six months from when they joined. 

On the face of it, it's a pretty drastic cut for users of the free service. Reaction has been pretty tough with many users commenting on the annoucement blog post that they would be leaving Spotify. 

In my opinion, this is pretty over the top. I'm a big fan of Spotify and I really think it offers a promising model for music delivery. Their mobile client is especially slick and well designed. They clearly need more users to make the switch to premium, the latest figures I could find suggest a converstion rate of 3.57 percent. The question for the team is will this change encourage people to pay up or put them off altogether? 

Thanks to Adam Vincenzini I managed to use an invite code to mflow this week.

The service is the latest web creation to get the twitterati excited and I can see what all the fuss is about. The simple idea is to combine the social interaction of Twitter and Facebook with the music library of iTunes or Spotify. Now users of LastFM might say they've been doing something similar for ages and I am a big fan of that site too. Mflow does seem to do something different though, mainly I think because of the focus around following people. Last FM is all about building your own listening library but mflow seems to encourage more sharing of popular tunes.

There is another factor to the mflow experience which I haven't really explored yet and this is the idea that if someone buys a track that you recommended, then you get rewarded. As I've only been registered with the service since Friday and it is still in invite only beta it might take a while for this to really gain momentum.

Overall though, I'm really impressed with mflow so far, the design of the app is pretty slick and they've really embraced social media with a nice posterous blog, as well as presences on twitter, facebook and flickr. There a few features I would like to see, such as the ability to tweet what I'm listening to and for my tunes to be scrobbled to Last FM but it is early days and I'm sure these will come in due course. So I would definitely recommend giving mflow a go if you get the chance. I currently have five invites so if you would like to try it then drop me a message.

Thanks to Adam Vincenzini I managed to use an invite code to mflow this week.

The service is the latest web creation to get the twitterati excited and I can see what all the fuss is about. The simple idea is to combine the social interaction of Twitter and Facebook with the music library of iTunes or Spotify. Now users of LastFM might say they've been doing something similar for ages and I am a big fan of that site too. Mflow does seem to do something different though, mainly I think because of the focus around following people. Last FM is all about building your own listening library but mflow seems to encourage more sharing of popular tunes.

There is another factor to the mflow experience which I haven't really explored yet and this is the idea that if someone buys a track that you recommended, then you get rewarded. As I've only been registered with the service since Friday and it is still in invite only beta it might take a while for this to really gain momentum.

Overall though, I'm really impressed with mflow so far, the design of the app is pretty slick and they've really embraced social media with a nice posterous blog, as well as presences on twitter, facebook and flickr. There a few features I would like to see, such as the ability to tweet what I'm listening to and for my tunes to be scrobbled to Last FM but it is early days and I'm sure these will come in due course. So I would definitely recommend giving mflow a go if you get the chance. I currently have five invites so if you would like to try it then drop me a message.