Ripple

I think of our lives as ripples spreading out as we pass briefly through this world - interacting with other ripples, for better or worse. As the ripples spread long after we have dropped beneath the surface, we should strive to send out positive energy, love, humanity.

I have heard the future...

I am always skeptical when someone claims "this will change your life" but I have heard the future and it's name is Spotify!

Actually it hasn't changed my life but it has completely changed the way I listen to music and music is a big part of my life. I have written before about my iPod and the difference between what critics feared that device would do to our way of listening and my own experience but this latest development, and its only software, has already impacted my listening more and faster.

For the uninitiated, what is Spotify?

Spotify is a treasure chest of all the albums you ever wanted to listen to but never had the money or the opportunity to. Well nearly all - they are adding 10,00 tracks a day and are approaching 50% of all recoded music! And its legal! And its FREE!

As long as you have Broadband, you can find the entire back catalogue of most musicians right up to their current releases and listen to it on your computer whilst browsing their biography and crosslinking to their influences and unlike YouTube, unless you have a truly slow connection, there will be no stopping and starting. Amazing! What's the catch?

If you want to listen to Spotify for free then you have to listen to some ads though I have to say they are nowhere near as frequent or annoying as commercial TV can be and since many of the ads are for current music anyway, they don't unduly disturb the flow. If you don't want the ads you can subscribe to the sevice for £9.99 (UK). You can even be ad free for a day so that you can set up a party playlist which plays without interuptions.

Spotify could be set to be the model for the way we access all that media that record companies and film studios have been trying to protect from the piracy of the Download Generation. It allows you to listen to but not to own all that music and of course the record companies hope that having listened, you will want to carry that music around with you on whatever small miracle of technology you use to listen to music or to keep on your computer even when not connected to the internet. One of the next big consumer hardware crazes to hit the shelves once the recession is over and we all start borrowing and spending again like lemmings, is likely to be The Media Centre. One small set top box will store all your music, films and photos and play them through your TV and stereo This is the much hyped convergence in action. Media centres are really computers and at present you still need to connect them to your existing computer to load them up with say, your CD collection or your family photos. In the future, the whole idea of buying a physical CD and cluttering your shelves with them will become less attractive and Spotify is like bringing your very own listening post into your own home but without the headphones that who knows who has worn and with half the world's recorded music to choose from! If listening on Spotify and then buying stops illegal downloading, cuts out the physical product and makes the music cheaper then everybody wins except perhaps the record stores. But then they said bookshops, especially small ones, would go out of business when supermarkets sold cheap books but the opposite is true, the internet has allowed small specialist bookshops to trade rare books to niche customers all over the world. Using Spotify you can click on ads to purchase current music but you can also delve into the older albums of your favourite musicians and if owning that piece of vinyl and its sleeve artwork is important to you - it'll be out there somewhere in some High Fidelity like shop or other...

So how has Spotify changed my listening? I don't have a lot of money to spend on music except at birthdays and Christmas and I won't go down the road of illegal file downloading so a lot of my new music has been in thee form of free CD's with Uncut and Mojo magazines. Call me a cheapskate but this habit has also broadened my musical taste and filled in gaps in my knowledge of the development of music and musicians and Spotify extends this process. I can go through back issues of the magazines and no longer need to wonder what the albums being reviewed might sound like. I'm like a kid in a candy store! So I will buy CD's with my Christmas money and I will still buy the magazines unless that is, they converge with Spotify and make it an even richer experience - now there's a thought! 

posted by: Frewin at 08:07 | link | comments (1) |