Matt Kiser

Now you can listen to SPIN.com. Literally. 

I’m incredibly excited to announce that we just soft launched the new SPIN.com streaming audio player. It’s a persistent, “toolbar” that puts the music first, sitting at the very top of SPIN.com and allows you to literally flip your experience from a read-first to a listen-first one. 

Right now you’ll find a tightly curated list of new music (albums, tracks, and playlists) you can stream for free, and more importantly legally. This follows our recent Spotify integration where you can now listen to more than 7,000 of our music reviews.

This is the way a music blog should be: combining magazine-grade editorial content with the ability to seamlessly and simultaneously listen to what you’re reading about. Zero friction. Zero interruptions.

I think TechCrunch said it best in their video demo of the player:

…SPIN is finally treating its website like a product instead of just another music news site. It will be a place to go to not just to learn about music, but to experience it.

We hope you like it as much as we do. There’s plenty more to come. Stay tuned.

Five things you need to know today in the world of music, technology and media:

1. Listen to over 7,000 SPIN.com album reviews with the Spotify Play Button
2. 8 Traits Your digital Leader Must Have
3. Resources for Entrepreneurial Journalists
4. Are we losing our respect for music?
5. New Media vs. Old: A False Dilemma
6. Bonus: How We Will Read: Clay Shirky

Productivity / Business:

iCloud: $20/year (10gb)
Dropbox: $100/year (50gb)
Evernote: $45/year
CloudHQ: $49/year
Basecamp (basic): $288/year
Google Apps for Business: $50/user/year
Arc : $29.99 + S3 bucket (.14/GB; $7mo for 50gb = $84/year)

Dropbox and Evernote are a must. CloudHQ sync’s all my Google Apps and Basecamp docs as files to Dropbox. This is incredibly handy for having access to all those documents as actual files on your iPad and iPhone. Arc is essentially TimeMachine in the cloud. It’s more reliable and safer than praying that a consumer-grade external hard drive is durable enough to withstands the test of time. 

Entertainment:

Spotify: $120/year
iTunes Match: $25/year
Netflix: $96/year
Hulu Plus: $96/year 
MLB.tv: $110/year

I use Spotify for new music exploration, playlisting, and sharing music with friends. iCloud/iTunes match for my deep music library that doesn’t exist on Spotify. Together I spend more on music per year than I did in the previous several combined. Go music industry! Woo!

Netflix, Hulu Plus and iTunes rentals cover all movies and TV shows entertainment. MLB.tv is the only way I could watch and/or listen to every San Francisco Giants game. I’m canceling my cable TV subscription.  

All told, I’d theoretically be paying $1083 for what I’d consider my ideal setup. I’m likely missing some things, but it surprised me how quickly this cracks $1k. 

I hate losing files. I also hate carrying around thumb drives and portable external hard drives. In an age when we’re able to blast humans into space for months at a time, it’s ridiculous to think we can’t keep a friggin’ file from going *poof*. I’ve been lugging a bajillion pound (fact.) Dell laptop around the past five years because I had no clear path to backing up whatever files were contained on it.

So, inspired by VC extraordinaire Fred Wilson’s post on how he moved to the cloud, here’s how I did it and how you can, too. It’s a little scary at first, but trust me, you’ll thank me later. And you won’t lose any files. Keep in mind that successfully migrating to the cloud is about creating a workflow you’re comfortable with. So if these processes don’t work for you, improvise as necessary. 

Step 1: The Tools

You need the right set of tools to make this work. Thankfully these are all free. Go register for accounts with Dropbox, Evernote, Instapaper, cloudHQ and If This Then That. I’ll wait here. 

Ok, good. You’ll probably want to go get yourself a 1Password license as well. And, Google Chrome (taking a leap of faith and assuming you already have a Gmail account…)

Step 2: Getting Setup

Ok, so first things first. Let’s consolidate some data. If you’re like me, you probably have a work and personal computer and have used Safari, Firefox and Chrome throughout the years on each machine. Your data is probably scattered. You’ll want setup Firefox sync and suck all your bookmarks from your other machines over to your current one. Same with Safari (does Safari even have a sync? I have no clue. Use Chrome.). Once your bookmarks and passwords are all sync’d open up Chrome. Go ahead and import bookmarks and passwords from all your browsers into Chrome. The reason we’re using Chrome is that Chrome Sync is superior to Firefox and Safari syncs (again, I have no idea if Safari lets you sync across multiple computers or not. iCloud?) since it brings along extensions to any computer you’re logged into. 

Alright, you will now only use Chrome on all computers. It might take a few hours of idle time for all your bookmarks to populate across browser installs you have on different machines, but once it does you’ll never have an issue with finding bookmarks. You bookmark something at work, and it’s instantly at your home. Magic. 

Setup Dropbox on all your computers. Drag the Instapaper bookmarklet to your Chrome toolbar. Install the Evernote clipper extension. While you’re at it, might as well make a copy of your Google data and put that in Dropbox for safe keeping. 

Step 3: Social

It’s super lovely that we have all these services out there that let you essentially scrapbook your life. It’s super not lovely that they’re scattered across a few different services. Wouldn’t it be nice to collect all those photos in one spot without lifting a finger? Yeah, same here. 

I solved this problem for myself by using If This Then That, a nifty tool that let’s you create triggers to — surprise — do something when something else happens. I created a few tasks that automatically take my Facebook, Foursquare, and Instagram photos and puts them in Dropbox folders with all the metadata and date info still attached. Get the ones I created here:

• Facebook Photos Sent To Dropbox
• Facebook Photos I Am Tagged In Sent To Dropbox
• Instagram Photos Sent To Dropbox
• Foursquare Photos Sent To Dropbox
• Links I Tweet Sent To Evernote

I also setup a few tasks in IFTTT to take RSS feeds and dump them to Evernote as well. The best example is having my Instapaper items sent as they’re saved to Evernote. Love Instapaper, but having my links saved in Evernote gives me more control over them in the future. You can use IFTTT for just about any service worth it’s salt, so poke around and setup what you need. The goal is to consolidate what you’re doing everywhere else into as few places as possible. 

Step 4: Setup 1Password

I recently got turned onto this nifty app. It stores all your username and password information for all the sites out there, then allows you to retrieve those and autofill using a single password. You can extend this further by storing your credit card and other sensitive information (like address) with it. It takes a leap of faith, but once you’re comfortable with it, you can safely use hard-to-guess passwords on all the sites you visit, and they even have a way for you to access all your information remotely. I’ve setup my account on all computers and devices using this method:

• Automatic Syncing Using Dropbox
• How To Configure Dropbox Syncing

Step 5: Music and Movies/TV 

I love Apple. But I’m not putting my music in their iCloud. I actually use Spotify. However, I’ve sync’d my two iTunes libraries (work and personal) to Google Music. I THEN DELETED MY ENTIRE MUSIC LIBRARY ON ALL COMPUTERS. I’m able to stream this anywhere, anytime. It’s a great companion to Spotify, which already has sync’d up my iTunes libraries. I don’t watch a lot of movies, but if I did I’d probably use some combination of Hulu/Netflix/iTunes paired with AppleTV. The streaming/renting aspect wins out over storing gigabytes of pointless data… Seriously?

UPDATE: I’m giving iTunes Match a try. So far, so good. I revived my libraries via Time Machine and have sync’d both personal and home libraries. I can now grab anything from any device. I imagine I’m going to use iTunes now for the things I care about that are not on Spotify (i.e. fill in the holes with the Adele’s and Black Keys of the world who refuse streaming services). Spotify will remain my chief tool for simply consuming, sharing and discovering music and playlists. I’m thinking Google Music will stay there as a nice backup if I’m neither at a computer with Spotify, or if I’ve lost my iPhone (gasp!). It runs in the background so it’s not much of a concern to me if it’s used, or not. 

Step 6: Putting It All Together

Still with me? Good. So this is how I work… I use Gmail for email and for to-do’s using the Tasks feature. Google Docs for all my writing and spreadsheet needs. I do a one-way sync from Google Docs to my Dropbox using cloudHQ. This makes my docs available on all my devices for quick access. Google Calendar for calendering.

Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Foursquare keeps me social, and all the photos are saved straight to Dropbox, automatically. I bookmark destinations in Chrome and use Instapaper to save articles for reading later (both on computer and iPhone/iPad), while I clip things I’m researching or collecting information about using the Evernote clipper extension (recipes are great for this sort of thing!). When I can’t use Spotify, I’ll use Google Music.

1Password works on all my devices and keeps me secure. 

I plan to export my Google data once a year. And every month or two I’ll export my Instapaper (I really don’t know why I do that since it’s also saved in Evernote…). I dump this into Dropbox, too. 

I lean on Dropbox pretty heavily. However, just because I have a 150gb hard drive doesn’t mean I need that much Dropbox space. I get by on 50gb. Seriously. Once you remove storing music and movie files from the equation, you open up a ton of possibilities. 

I didn’t discuss them, but I use Basecamp for project management and Google Analytics for, well, analytics. 

There you have it. A pretty straight-forward approach to moving your life to the cloud and having near data ubiquity across all your computers and devices. And, like Fred Wilson said, ”The sense of freedom that exists when you know your applications and files are available from any device with an internet connection and a browser is amazing. I feel lighter already.”

Enjoy.