BTW artists are getting money from Spotify and PRS through advertising, Spotify direct adverts towards certain types of people, eg if you listen to Hip Hop & Rap, you get advertisements for guns, lol, well not quite but you get the picture. Its’ a sophisticated advertising network that is able to charge a premium for its advertising space as it is so well targeted.

Which is probably why we cant get it free here, the business’s advertising are UK based and Spotify are trying to build up their customer base in the UK so they can charge even more for the advertising and add more music and attract more people.

Its a brilliant advertising platform, it gives people free music, advertisers the chance to reach certain people who don’t read newspapers etc, music artists get royalties and Spotify take a nice cut of the ad money.

http://Ireland-Advertising.com have more on the possibility of getting Spotify in Ireland if you want to get in contact with them. I asked when we can get it for free, but they said there were no plans to do that here yet, must be because there is so few of us here.

Btw, I’m an Irish user.

Godspeed!

I downloaded the latest version of the Nord Stage Operating System, which allows it to be used in conjunction with the Nord Stage Manager on my Mac. This means I can put the patches in whatever order I like on the Nord, which is nice, particularly if your setlist doesn’t change much from gig to gig. I then set the Nord patches in the order I like, and match them up on Mainstage, so when I switch to the correct patch on the Nord, voila! Mainstage changes too. I submix the two on my Roland Amp and use a simple M-Audio USB MIDI interface. I use various audio interfaces from M-Boxes to Apogees, depending on the gig. Quite often, I just use the audio out on the Mac! I even use Mainstage to display lyrics (I sing a lot of BVs), even when I’m not using any sounds from it. I also put instructions on the screen about songs I’m doing if I’m working with stuff I’m not familiar with (ie – key of song, tempo, maybe first lyric etc). So overall, it works very well.

Do you use them together? (ie, “…looking forward to my first gig with them both!”

If so how do you integrate them? Would you mind describing your setup?

Spotify allows you to travel with your free account for 2 weeks before restricting you. All you need is a friend physically in the UK to log-in once a fortnight. It instantly lets you continue listening!

Minor Snags… The account probably needs to be set up by your friend in the UK and they will need to know your username and pass to un-restrict your account every 2 weeks. Its not a problem for me as I see my mate on facebook chat all the time and tell him to do it. Its a 2 second job.

Hope this works for others!

While we are really happy that you are enthusiastically using Spotify, we are unfortunately going to have to restrict access to your free account. Spotify is currently available in six countries: Sweden, Norway,
Finland, Spain, France and the UK. We never intended to allow use of our service outside of those countries and we do not run any adverts on your account like we do in the launch countries.
For this reason we have to restrict your account, you will be able to log in to Spotify and view music and playlists but not listen to any music.

Bit of a bummer, I thought, but them’s the breaks