I've never trusted Spotify. Swathes of free music, interrupted by the occasional advert, sounds absolutely fantastic on paper. But if Spotify closes down, your main music collection (that you've spent countless years slowly building up through gradual discoveries) is gone, poof.
For those who enjoy listening to pop songs on the radio this won't matter - it's music obsessives like myself who not only consume music, but horde it like treasure, occasionally delving into its depths to appreciate a long-forgotten gem. Would I have got into Smashing Pumpkins if "Bullet With Butterfly Wings", downloaded years earlier, hadn't come up on shuffle?
Continuing with the treasure-hording analogy, Spotify is like being let loose in an endless sea of jewels and gold: there is as much as you want, but none of it ever feels like it's actually your own.
Which is why the new version of Spotify, being launched over the next few days, is so interesting. It allows you to add your own MP3s to the program, effectively turning it into an iTunes-style music library organiser - but with the killer feature of allowing free access to every song on the service.
With links to purchasing MP3 copies of each song attached to each streaming song, you could easily listen to an album for a few times before deciding whether or not it's worth paying for. It's a paradigm shift: instead of sticking your neck out and buying an album on the strength of a couple of singles, you get to try before you buy.
And Facebook integration simply tops it off, really. Friend lists are a no-brainer, and I can't wait to stuff my music recommendations down all my friends' throats.
The only thing holding me back from switching to Spotify as my full-time music player is the fact that it won't work on my faithful (non-touchscreen) iPod. Still, I can genuinely see Spotify as the future of the music industry. It's an ingenious business model - let's just hope that it can get through its teething troubles.
For me, the only reason I haven't deleted iTunes and gone all Spotify is the cost. I'm a big consumer of music too, and am a big advocate of free music (I buy albums, tix and merch, but if I can't download your album for free in the first instance, I'm not interested) and I am willing to pay for Spotify but I simply don't consume £10/month of music, ergo it's not good value for money for me. The new Spotify certainly has complicated things for me, for the better, but until Ek and the crew can get their hands untied by the disgraceful fat cats from the labels, it will never truly be accessible to the general public. And if it doesn't happen soon then they run the risk of running out of capital and going bust, and then we're back to Pirating Square One. I feel that, were this to happen, then the music industry deserves all that it gets - they are in this mess solely because of their own ignorance and greed and my only sympathy lies only with the average consumer. The 21st Century doesn't need labels, people simply don't want to pay as much for music as they have in the past. If you are good, you will be found, that is the beauty of the Internet! It's a metaphor for Natural Selection - adapt and be better than your rivals or dieee (Alright, Garson)!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, this totally turned into a load of bollocks (sorry!) but what I think you should do is write an entry on your views on this (if you care enough to have any). I'd be interested to know what you think!
Yeah, I guess I wrote this article with the assumption that no-one steals music, which is of course entirely untrue. Piracy, though, is a can of worms so massive that I want to make sure I have a big enough bowl to pour them into before I tackle it (does that metaphor work??). I still think a service with a monthly fee that allows you to download any track rather than just stream it would be my personal preference (and would certainly convince me to stop illegally downloading music), but it's unlikely any of the record companies would agree to it.
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