Today on The Amazing Afternoon Show we introduce to you Spotisfaction! Co founder Dave tells us a bit more about it in his guest blog, exclusively for Amazing Radio
“Out of a desire to do something other than sit around and rot, the men known as David Prowse and Thom Lavelle decided to sit around and rot whilst swapping Spotify playlists and blogging about them…”
Spotisfaction is, at its heart, a community-driven playlist sharing site. Our aim is to recreate the passion and love that went into crafting the perfect mixtape for your friends and loved ones, in the days when the cassette reigned king. We encourage people to create Spotify playlists, write a little about their standout tracks or the reason for including them, and submit them to us. We then share these playlists with the rest of our viewers, giving people a platform to get their lovingly-crafted playlists the visibility they deserve.
We formed in February of this year, and since then have posted more than 80 individual playlists. The original intention for the site was to create a place where us and our friends could store our playlists – a repository for great music, so to speak. However, when we started getting more and more readers, we decided to expand on that original idea.
The site has been really well received, we have our own Facebook and Twitter pages, and we’ve really enjoyed setting up a small community. Spotify has been so fantastically executed as a piece of technology that it lends itself well to blogging, so in addition to our user-generated playlists, we have recruited a team of editors and contributors from across the UK who regularly post news, reviews and blogs all tied into Spotify. We’re even covering the festivals this summer, and our Glastonbury review is online right now.
The growth of Spotify has really been phenomenal. When Facebook was tied into the latest version, and the social, collaborative nature of Spotify went through the roof, we could see where this could go: there was the potential to be one of the first sites to provide music news, reviews and blogs, where all it’s content was linked to instantly listenable, legal material. We think that this could be one of the first independent internet blogs that ties all of it’s content to an entirely free, entirely legal and legitimate music streaming service.
Digital technology has been a massive boon to new artists. A new band can now upload their tunes to a miriad of sites. These sites give them the chance to get their music heard quickly and easily and for very little cost, and there is no understating the importance of this digital revolution. Musicians are, like never before, in control of their own exposure. It means that new bands can dare to experiment with their sound and come up with new ideas, instead of sticking to the tried and true in order to gain a record deal. Creativity, unabridged.
While the recording industry has been reticent at best to embrace digital technology, it’s clear that this is the way consumption en-masse is heading. There is, of course, a large audience and consumer base for hard products – vinyl, for example, will remain a constant seller for years to come – but technology has moved far enough now that instant access is the way people want to consume culture in the modern era. It’s up the the entrepreneurs and innovators in the record industry to work out how to continue to run a profitable model through changes in their consumers listening habits.
We want to help push this new way of listening, and so Spotisfaction exists to share our love of music through the most successful platform for it at the moment – Spotify.
Hear Dave Prowse and Thom Lavelle chatting to The Afternoon Show presenter Kyle Wilkinson between 3 and 4pm today, on Amazing Radio.
