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Soderstrom: I'm Gustav Soderstrom,
and I'm here to demo Spotify for Android.
So Spotify is a streaming music application
that lets you access basically any song in the world
just as if it was on your desktop.
So basically you can just pick a song, play it,
and if you like it you add it to your playlist,
and you keep building these playlists.
You don't actually have to download music,
which also means you can share music very easily.
So let me show you quickly.
Here's a Spotify client for Mac.
I'll just type in K.
Search for any track that starts with a K.
Let's see...
So I'll type anything from maybe Superchick.
I can see, you know, all the albums that Superchick ever did.
They're in Spotify.
Now I can listen to a song here, like "Courage," for example.
[Superchick's "Courage" plays]
You can see it started very fast.
I can seek within the song.
Go to another place in the song.
I can switch songs.
Like that.
So it's almost as fast as if you had
all the music in the world on your desktop.
And this application is available,
not in the U.S. yet, but it's available in Europe.
And let me just pause the music for you.
You can use it for free; it's an ad-funded version.
That means you will hear ads, like, every 20 minutes.
Audio ads, actually, and visual ads.
Now, by far the most common request from our users is,
you know, they think this is great, they use it a lot,
but they want--
they want the music in their mobile, right?
So this just doesn't cover all the use cases.
So what we did was we sat down and we--
instead of just quickly building
a streaming application for mobile,
which would have been sort of the easy way out,
we just sat down and figured out, you know,
what should mobile music really be like?
And what we came to was a few things.
So there were two things we wanted to do.
Of course we wanted to give you access to any song in the world
at any time, anywhere.
And we do that.
If you have a good, you know, 3G, Edge, or Wi-Fi connection,
you can just search for a song and stream it wherever you are.
But there was another use case, you know, the use case--
You're in the subway, you're on a train,
you're in an airplane, or you're roaming,
where, you know, this just wouldn't be very useful, right?
So what we did,
which is unlike most other streaming applications,
is we also allow--
We built a synchronization paradigm,
which means that you get the same playlists
on the Android phone that you get on the PC, right?
Of course.
And you can stream it, but you can also highlight playlists
on the Android phone for download.
And actually it downloads these playlists
locally to the memory card; it encrypts them,
and then you can listen to them in flight mode, right?
And you get, like, 10, 12 hours' worth of battery life
because it's actually local on the device.
It doesn't use the Network.
And what happens is if you do changes
to these playlists on your desktop,
as soon as the device comes back into connectivity,
you know, wifi, 3G, et cetera,
it's just gonna synchronize silently these changes,
and download all the new tracks, right?
So let me show you that, actually.
So this is the Spotify client for Android.
Now, as I said, obviously I can go into search here.
I'll type in, maybe, you know, L.
Search for any song with an L.
So...
Actually, I like this one. L'Amour Toujours.
So I click it, and you see it starts really fast, actually.
I can do seek within a track like this,
and just let it go.
And it continues from there.
I guess you can't hear it very well.
But it is streaming.
I can just go to the next one in the list.
You can see it's almost as fast as the desktop client, actually.
So we have that use case
if you happen to have decent connectivity.
Now what I think is really cool, and a defining feature,
is actually this use case.
So you see my playlists here.
And if you look at the desktop down here,
you can see the same playlists here.
So what I'll do now, if you film the phone, there,
you can see, for example, like the Gustav playlist there.
Actually on the desktop, I'm gonna move that around--
and you can keep filming the phone--
I'm gonna move the Gustav list up top.
And you can see it just pops up there.
And now, actually,
I'm gonna change the name of the Gustav playlist.
I'll just type in, like, maybe...
I'll just type in some crap.
And you can see it updates to that.
So it really is wirelessly synchronized, right?
So this is connected to the cloud,
and the phone is connected to the cloud.
So the other thing you'll notice here,
there's a button saying "Offline Sync"
And if I press that button, you can see I have checkboxes.
So I've already checked a few, here, like a good chef.
I pre-prepared a few playlists here.
They are locally synced to the memory card, right?
So what happens now--
If I add a song to one of these lists
that are checked for offline sync--
So I'll go to my PC here.
I'll...
I'll do a search for whatever. I'll find a song here.
Let's see if I find something interesting.
So I'll take this song--
A Front 242 song, which I like,
and I'll drag it and drop it under this playlist.
Actually, I dragged it in the other playlist.
I'll drop it in the top playlist.
And I drop it now.
And what you can see happen here now
is it got a push message that there was a change,
and it starts downloading it.
And this happens in the background,
when the phone is in your pocket, right?
So it takes a few seconds to download.
I can--In the meantime, you know,
I can actually go and play other music.
I can go around the application.
I can go and check out what's new.
These are recent albums that we launched.
I can actually play music in other playlists.
Just to show you the speed of this.
And what happens is, you know...
Yeah, you have settings and stuff here as well.
Now...
So now it's finished.
You have 14 songs instead of 13.
So what I can do now, which is really cool--
I'll just go into airplane mode here.
And you can see here it's not connected anymore.
And I can still play these songs.
So I'll go in here,
and I'll play this Front 242 song
that we just added, right?
And I can go back and forth through this playlist.
Just as, you know--
Just as your regular mp3 player.
So it's kind of the best of two worlds.
It's the best of streaming,
but it's also the best of the synchronization paradigm.
The big difference is, you know, unlike your current mp3 player,
you don't have to carry your laptop and USB cable with you.
You can leave that at home.
'Cause it doesn't sync towards your computer,
it syncs towards the cloud, which is a big difference.
So a few things about Android.
The reason we chose to develop for Android was...
It's--Instead of everyone else,
it's an open platform that we like.
We did some investigation,
'cause actually this application requires a lot of performance.
It--you know, it downloads music in the background
at maybe 10 megabits per second if your wifi is good.
It encrypts that to your memory card.
At the same time, you're streaming music
that should not be interrupted.
At the same time you want to have
smooth scrolling through long lists.
It's quite a challenge to do.
So we investigated Android,
and were really pleased with the performance it got,
so we decided to do this for Android.
And what we've done, which is pretty--
pretty unique for this project,
is we actually used our C++ core libraries,
using a native development kit that is open source
that Google released a few weeks ago.
So we built the UI in Java,
but the core library is actually C++--
the core performance libraries,
so all the encryption and all the playback and all that stuff,
which is why we got such a good performance.
So the other thing that I like about Android,
which is pretty obvious,
it allows you to play in the background,
so it really gives you the full use case of this device,
and it transitions nicely between, you know, wifi and 3G.
So it really supports-- supports the--
the use case of the application when it did really well.
cameraman: Excellent.
Well, thank you, Gustav.
That was a great demo,
and a lovely explanation of the Spotify application.
Soderstrom: Thank you.
cameraman: All the best. Enjoy the conference.
Soderstrom: Thank you.