ABBA, The Cardigans, Ace of Base and Roxette to name just a few – there’s no doubt Swedes have always known how to pump out pop music. So, it should not be a wonder that, once again, it took the Swedes to show how to bring music to the masses in the form of Spotify.

However, in a modern home, the other problem with music is that today most people have their music inside their computer – which, more often than, is a laptop instead of a bulky desktop and anyway probably not stationed anywhere near one’s stereo setup. There are many solutions to this problem, Apple has its Airport Express but it only supports playback from iTunes out of the box. So, if you want to stream Spotify from a bigger set of speakers and without cables this is not a good solution.

For a long time, I was looking for such a solution – no additional cables or stuff to just play audio from my Mac to my living room. I did find a bunch, but most of them were complex and riddled with lots of strange limitations (like cost). I was sure that there had to be an easier way to enjoy Spotify further than 2 meters from my laptop. Many A/V manufacturers sidestep the issue by adding a WLAN, Ethernet and/or USB capability to their hardware, so one can play music out of a shared hard drive but this rules all streaming services, like Spotify, out.

Maybe in the future Spotify might be inside our radio tuners and televisions. The latter is possible already in Sweden and Finland, where you can get Spotify on your digital television thanks to the Swedish-Finnish ISP and mobile operator TeliaSonera. Changing my internet and cable operator just for Spotify sounded a bit too complex solution so that wasn’t for me. But it might be a nice setup for one’s parents – if they weren’t just fine with their CDs, probably. Is it really this difficult to just stream arbitrary audio from one’s laptop to speakers wirelessly?

So, more Swedes to the rescue. The good folks at the hi-fi spekaer company Audio Pro have come up with probably one of the simplest and cross-platform solutions with their wireless offering. But, it’s an USB dongle. Aren’t there enough wireless transmitters inside my MacBook Pro to do the job? Well, thanks to yet another Swedish company, Ericsson, and their Bluetooth technology (with AD2P-profile), streaming audio wirelessly should be simple. So, why not just add Bluetooth inside a radio and then things should work with no wires or restrictions, right?

However, this, like many other Bluetooth applications, hasn’t really caught on. Sony has some setups with Bluetooth, but I went with Audio Pro Radio One. Sure, it looks like any Tivoli Audio’s radio and Tivoli Audios are really nice, but the only “modern” one with any connectivity (and radio presets!) is NetWorks and that one costs an arm and a leg – and even that one can’t stream music from a computer in a simple way. Radio One, on the other hand can, because the smart folks at Audio Pro put a Bluetooth receiver in it.

And so, with Radio One, Spotify and a Mac things are quite straightforward. Because the Radio One acts like an ordinary output device which means you can stream any audio to it. No need for Airport Express or Airfoil, things work even simpler than that. Setting up a Windows-machine should be equally easy as long as you have correct Bluetooth-drivers that have the A2DP profile. Connecting your iPhone – or any other mobile phone with BT – to Radio One? Thanks to Bluetooth, really easy. However, because there’s no iPod or USB dock in Radio One, you’d better watch battery usage or use a stereo cable instead.

So, thanks to a bunch of ingenious Swedes, I can finally stream music from my laptop to my living room. The only limits are that Bluetooth’s range is relatively short and it does consume battery. But no artificial limits like with oh so many other solutions. Aren’t standards and simple solutions a fun thing?

A sidenote: Americans and other developing mobile countries take note, Bluetooth does not mean a wireless headset. Bluetooth can do a lot of pretty cool stuff, but unfortunately introduction of cheap mobile broadband and before that Nokia’s and then Apple’s reluctance to actually support any interesting profile (without crippling them beyond any recognition) on their handsets have meant that Bluetooth is not in the spotlight anymore and is mostly in hands-free headsets and wireless keyboards and mice.

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I feel that something like this does not need to be said, but Spotify a relatively new service here in the Netherlands and selected countries, while cool, is missing one key ingredient: suggesting new music to users that feels somehow related to what they want.

Spotify knows what users want. There are few songs that I haven’t been able to find on Spotify, which in itself is awesome. But it ends there. When I look for the “Baby got Back” song, which I tend to do, it plays EVERY song that has those terms in the title (luckily fewer than you might expect). Instead of saying, hey, it’s “Baby got Back,” it’s a 90s song, it’s a hip-hop song, it’s funny (to some), it just plays the list of whoever decided to use those terms in the title (no seriously, there’s only 72 tracks).

Why it doesn’t need to be said that such a feature needs to exist, is because it already has for some time. Starting with Amazon, which suggests products to you based on what other people with similar tastes like, to Pandora Radio, which unfortunately (grrrr!) doesn’t work outside the US anymore, to Last.fm, which also plays some funny regional games since CBS took it over, iTunes Genius, which rocks (though iTunes as a music-player is way too bloated), Netflix, another US-only service (I’m sensing a pattern here…), etc. etc.

It’s called collaborative filtering, it’s not a new thing and I don’t at all get why not all (music-)services have it. It leads to more user-engagement, it allows listeners to navigate a musical world that has become increasingly diverse and fast-moving, and it has drastically improved my music-listening experience.

So my question is: why doesn’t Spotify have collaborative filtering? Is it expensive to implement, does it require more data than Spotify has, is it an up-and-coming feature, or is it a hidden feature that I haven’t discovered yet? In any case, it is the No. One Reason why I don’t open Spotify as often as either of us would like.

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