Spotify: a free jukebox

From the moment that Spotify was released in the Netherlands, the number of users of this online music service has been increasing. Spotify is originally a Swedish music streaming service, which includes more than 10 million songs. You have to sign up for one of the three services (free, unlimited, or premium), and subsequently you can download the stream and listen to music. The main difference between de free-account and the other accounts is the fact that you can listen to music for free, though up to a maximum of 20 hours a month. Furthermore, in contrast with the unlimited-account and the premium-account, the free service includes some advertisements.

Spotify makes it possible for the users to stream music online, and every account offers specific opportunities; such as the possibility to download tracks and listen to music on a smartphone. Furthermore, people don’t need CD’s or MP3’s anymore to listen to music.
Even though Spotify depends on whether you have access to the Internet, the number of users has been increasing over the past year, due to the large amount of music.


However, some things about the free account are going to change on May 1st. After you signed up, you can still listen to music up to 20 hours a month. However, after half a year the maximum will decrease to only 10 hours a month. In addition, free users will only be able to play each track up to a total of five times. Nevertheless, the unlimited-account and premium-account are not going to change at all.

Spotify seems to be a good alternative for illegal music downloading, because many people are obviously willing to pay for the service when it doesn’t costs too much money. However, I wonder whether Spotify actually will be able to break down music piracy.

Twitter from space

Did you know that not only people on earth make use of Twitter to share messages and photo's? You see; also humans in space make use of this social network. In general, several astronauts frequently send tweets to their followers, in order to inform them. Nevertheless, there is a famous astronaut who not only sends messages, but who sends photographs to his followers as well. Soichi Noguchi is a Japanese astronaut who is aboard the space station. He frequently takes pictures of the earth, and sends these photographs back to earth via Twitter. I think that this is a fantastic benefit of Twitter, because Twitter gives people -like astronauts- the possibility to share wonderful pictures with the rest of the world. In this blog post I will give you an overview of a few breathtaking pictures of the earth, taken by Soichi Noguchi.

Take a look at this amazing picture of the Maldives:

He also shared an image of Haïti, after the earthquake:

Furthermore, he made this picture of the Amazon River:

Moreover, an image of the Mount Kilimanjaro:

In addition, a picture of Moscow:

A few days ago (on the 3th of April) he shared this image of the northern lights:

At last, he also made a picture of Amsterdam at night:

If you want to see more; you can find an overview of these pictures from Soichi Noguchi at this website. And of course at his Twitter account.