All in a mondegreen name

I was browsing Quora and I noticed this terrific answer about how Spotify got its name, posted by Daniel Ek – CEO of Spotify.

“This again takes us back to my flat that I had out in the suburbs of Stockholm. Martin and I were sitting in different rooms shouting ideas back and forth of company names. We were even using jargon generators and stuff. Out of the blue Martin shouted a name that I misheard as Spotify.”

This reminded me of how the great rock anthem - “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly got its name.

The drummer Ron Bushy was listening to the track through headphones, and could not clearly distinguish what Doug Ingle answered when Ron asked him for the title of the song (which was originally “In-the-Garden-of-Eden”). An alternate explanation, as given in the liner notes of the 1995 re-release of the In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida album, is that Ingle was drunk and/or high when he first told Bushy the title, and Bushy wrote it down. Bushy then showed Ingle what he had written, and the slurred title stuck.

Brilliant huh.

More brilliant is that there is a name for this -

“A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result near homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. It most commonly is applied to a line in a poem or a lyric in a song.”

A casual look through Quora finds more gems.

Origin of the name “Google”

Sean and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name – something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word “googolplex,” and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, “googol” (both words refer to specific large numbers). Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as “google.com,” which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name “google.com” for himself and Sergey (the domain name registration record dates from September 15, 1997).

I would love to know any more. Fascinating.

spotify.fm

Would you like to listen to music a friend is playing, at the same time as them?

With spotify.fm you now can.

It is an experiment in musical serendipity.

Sometimes the best way to find new things is to just follow someone else.

No clever systems. Just people.

When a friend plays a track you love, you want to punch the air and send them a thank you. It’s brilliant.

Near realtime shared experiences are fab.

Heavily inspired by Olinda by Berg.

More detail

The app is basically a mashup of the last.fm and Spotify.

I find the list of friends playing music (scrobbled by last.fm) and then when the friend is selected, I find the track with the Spotify Metadata API.

I then launch the spotify specific URL and spotify plays it. I refresh the webpage at the end of the song to get the new track.

This is obviously very experimental and very buggy – just highlighting a feature spotify *should* have.

Future developments / Bugs

Ads get in the way and cause the timings to go bezerk.

People can load their own music into spotify – which you cannot play.

Some tracks are only available to premium subscribers or people in certain countries.

I would like to make it a chrome plugin or a desktop app

Thanks to the opensource community as I’m using a Last.FM API class and a tweaked Spotify Metadata API wrapper.

The code is very buggy. It’ll be up on github soon.

I would love someone at last.fm to get in touch as I could speed things up if they tweaked their API for me.

Thanks to @iamdanw, @mikesten and @willsh for testing it and giving me some top feedback.