by Calvin Robinson on October 27, 2009.

I have been a member of Grooveshark since they first launched, so this post is in no way biased towards Spotify, regardless of the fact that Spotify has been the subject of 4/5 posts lately.

Grooveshark started out as something really interesting. It was a peer-to-peer music sharing platform with a difference – legality. You had a little system-tray widget installed on your computer, which would gradually upload your enitre music library to Grooveshark’s servers. Users could then purchase these tracks from Grooveshark, who would give you a cut (we’re talking pennies here), and pay the royalties, making the whole thing quasi-legal.

However somewhere along the lines the business model switched.

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by Calvin Robinson on September 18, 2009.

After listening to Daniel Ek speak at Glasshouse last night, I’m predicting the end of the music industry as we know it.

Just imagine in a few years, if Spotify becomes ‘the way’ that people listen to music. Everyone around the world listens and shares music via Spotify – which is very possible. For years we’ve relied on mp3s and CDs. Let’s face it, nobody buys physical media any more, and with services like Spotify, piracy is becoming less of an issue.

The music industry has failed to modernise. They failed to provide people with what we want: easy access to music, on any device of our chosing. They tried to tie us down and it will be the death of them.

Now, back to Spotify ruling the world. Once Spotify become popular enough, I predict they’ll start going directly to artists, more and more, to arrange royalty deals. Of course is Spotify are dealing directly with artists, this cuts out the evil middle man – the record labels.

Spotify (and/or similar music services) could be the end of the music industry as we know it. By killing off the record labels completely, they make music about music again. Give control back to the artists. After all, record labels are not needed for distribution any more.

Of course there’s still the issue of marketing (which is about the only service record labels seem to offer these days), which will also solve it’s self in due course.

I look forward to a time with no Record Labels and in turn, no RIAA!

by Calvin Robinson on July 10, 2009.

So last night was The Europas – an award ceremony for Europe’s finest Internet Start-ups, hosted by TechCrunch UK. I have to say this was easily the best Tech-scene event I’ve been to. There were so many interesting people to talk to, the awards were greats, and of course the sponsored bar was better than a kick in the teeth!

I’m still quite hungover actually, so I’ll write up a more in depth review of the actual event on Sporkings.com over the weekend. But for now here’s my experience; What a night! I spoke to so many people, about so many cool projects, namely;

The nice guys (and girls) from MindCandy.com,
Paul Walsh, the Irish opportunist himself.
It was great to see Nikhil Shah again, he’s doing big things with new startup mixcould.
Nick Ferris Photography (your site is down! where can I see all those photos?)
Miranda, Jon, Tash and Sandy from the soon to be launched odbody.com, Huddle, Clio Collins, Said, Amazee, comufy, Morgan Stanley, ViCommerce (Gemany), econsultancy.com, Google, Spotify, Seraphim, hub.india, Infocomm, and of course Robert Scoble and Rocky Barbanica – I bumped into these guys on Monday, just outside our office. Farringdon’s a small place.

There were so many other internet peoples I can’t possible list everyone. Plus alcohol seems to affect the memory – who knew!

Speaking of bad memory, I cannot recall what time the actual event itself ended, but there was a very packed after-party across the road at ‘The Hide’. I remember backing up Jasper from oneDrum when some drunken guy was wanting to pick a fight lol. Something to do with Jasper greeting the drunken guy as ‘baldy’. Then once the after-party dispearsed, Ruk and I ended up at the odbody.com appartment, where we ate cheese on crumpets (yes, we’re British!) from a roof-top apartment with views of the London Eye – dangerously high after that many units.

I also remember getting a decent discount on cab ride to Oxford St due to being able to have a Germany conversation with the taxi driver. That’s entrepreneurship right there, lol.

The beautiful @rassami has setup a new venture off the back on The Europas, with co-organiser @petrajohansson . So watch this space for more interesting events in the London Tech-scene, hopefully in the not-too distant future. More start-ups launching off the back of start-up events, got to love it.

For everyone I met last night, it was really good to meet you. Even @yiannopoulos, but I’ll so no more on that one