Comm296 – Anton Røthe

This week has been filled with exciting event. One among them was Storm the Wall! This is the largest intermural event in North America. It “is a 5-person team relay or individual event. Including a 225 yard swim (9 widths of the UBC Aquatic Centre pool), 450m sprint, 2.8km cycle and 1km run, after which the whole team “storms” the 12’ wall.” (Storm Webpage)

This event has taken place in the midle of campus, so nearly everyone here must have heard of it. It is a great event to get together and do something fun that is also athletic. This is only one of many Rec events, but is definately the biggest one, and is a great source of advertisement. The wall itself is full of sponsor advertsisements aimed at students. Most of all the clubs that participate market themselves. The Fraternities for example are proud of doing well in sports and this year Alpha Delta Phi, won the Triple Crown (a prestigeous prize) and most likely the sports trophy.

This is itself a great advertisement for next year’s recruitment. This can also be said about other clubs, such a s the ski and board club which aspire to be one of the biggest and coolest clubs at UBC.

I was thinking about this weeks blog, while listening to my favorite music program, and thought. Why not do some marketing on thier behalf.
Spotify – better than Itunes

Spotify is an online streaming program, much like Pandora or MOG, but this is a world of its own. It is a downloadable app for every system, including phones and ipods. You have all the music in the world in your pocket at all time. It works fairly similar to itunes store, except you pay a monthly fee to access all the music you want. Check out their website and blog:

http://www.spotify.com/int/premium-user/

http://www.spotify.com/int/blog/

3 reasons why Spotify is better than Itunes:

1: Playlists! not only are the playlists easy to make by drag and drop, much like itunes, but the playists are interactive. This means you can share your playlists with friends, make collaborative playlists so that everyone can work on the same playlist and add music, perfect for parties. You can also access your playlists and music on any computer or phone without having your music on a drive, like you need to with itunes.

2: Library! Spotify is run from a main server, which has deals with almost every record label, so any album or song you can find in the itunes store you can also fin in the spotify library. If for some reason the song you want is not in Spotify, you can add your entire itunes library to your account, so any song you have downloaded on your computer will also be available.

3: Offline! Now, itunes is allways offline in that your music is located on your computer, while with spotify you need an internett connection to gain access an listen to all the music in the world. They have solved this by enabling offline playlists. You can make all your playlists available offline and you can have unlimet music wherever you go.

Spotify is by far the best legal music player with fair prices out there, and it has everything Itunes has and much more! Only issue is that it does not exist in North America yet. They are trying to expand the service here, but with lots of resistance from Itunes.