For an in-depth analysis of Spotify, I’d recommend reading this review.
Within half an hour of paying $9.99 for Spotify Premium, I started to wonder why I have a 64 gigabyte iPad and 32 gigabyte iPhone. I wondered why, for years, I spent all of this time curating my iTunes library where I categorized songs, copied album artwork from Amazon, scanned song titles on GraceNote and payed $10 a year for TuneUp to ensure all of my albums are properly labeled with the exact year and genre. My playlists were perfect and I made it a life long journey (of the past 10 years) to acquire each and every song from my favorite groups like Death Cab, Bright Eyes and Jack Johnson. I scoured the web for live mixes and B-sides and then realized that, in one instant, I was missing 20 songs from the Bright Eyes Catalogue that were right there in front of me on Spotify. Not only did I find my “perfect discography” was imperfect, but I realized I had a few song titles wrong and that 10 of my friends also like this group, friends who I could have sworn were into punk rock / heavy metal. Then, after hour 1 of using Spotify, I moved the iPod app on my iPhone to the 2nd page of my springboard and replace it with Spotify. I was sold.
Spotify was a product available only in certain European countries. I have seen it in use by co-workers based in Amsterdam and friends who live most of the year in London. I read about Spotify from the moment I arrived in San Francisco so many years ago on my 1st generation iPhone and was still reading about it the month I left San Francisco for New Hampshire but, this time, reading about it on my iPad. It’s a service that was worth the wait despite that wait being 3 years. I’m happy that Spotify took so long to arrive in the US because, the Spotify that is available today is polished and ready and, nearly every one of my European friends are already there. I connected my account to Facebook and saw 200 people already using the service and sharing out their playlists. I subscribed to a few of those playlists and have already discovered new music.
There is an issue where I was absolutely certain would affect my experience and that’s the problem of Spotify being a streaming music service over the web. It’s a cloud music service but, that’s only an issue for those who pay nothing or $5 a month. For those of us who spend $10 a month, Spotify allows you to take tracks, playlists, artists and collections “offline” via one single slider that’s available on the Spotify desktop and mobile apps. This one slider downloads the music to the local device and enables offline listening. This makes Spotify work on an iPod touch, iPod classic or Mac when you don’t have an Internet connection. I live in the woods so it makes sense that I won’t have service at all times. The fact that I can take most of the music “offline” is incredible. On my computers, this isn’t so much of an issue except for those times where I intentionally work from a cafe that doesn’t have wifi to increase my work output. However, in those times, I’ve always had an iPod with me and now that iPod will have my music on it for offline use.
For any of your friends that are so excited about Spotify Free, ask them if they live in an area with good mobile cell coverage and they probably do. Most of the US (also most of the people who will ever use Spotify) doesn’t have good cell coverage. For us, we are forced to use the Premium membership.
There’s one additional thing about Spotify that has me excited. it has me more excited than having iTunes for the last 8 years. Sean Parker (Founder of Napster) wrote this on the subject of Spotify:
Today represents the realization of a dream. I have waited a decade for a music service that could rekindle my excitement about music, the same feeling I had during the brief period of Napster’s existence, when music was freely sharable across the world. Since then I have dreamt of a service capable of recreating that magic while empowering artists to reap the economic benefits of selling their art.
Spotify is that service—the one that I have been waiting for.
Since Napster the recorded music business has been steadily declining and, until now, there has been no light at the end of the tunnel. Today’s historic announcement marks the reversal of this downward trend and the beginning of a return to growth in the recorded music business.
Spotify promises to get people excited about music again, resulting in the start of a new golden age of music—one in which more people will discover and listen to more music than ever before. Spotify removes the barriers to sharing music with friends so that music can move freely through the social graph, accumulating fans organically. Given the hyper-efficient distribution power of this new model, the great music of our era will rise to top, finding its natural audience. This means that more artists will find success, more fans will discover those artists, and everyone will make more money selling music than is believed to be possible today. The rusty gears of the record business will loosen and turn again.
Since Spotify takes music viral, listening to music online is about to become a social experience–just like it’s always been in the real world. By bringing music into the social media world, discovering and listening to new music will change forever. While Spotify can be downloaded and used for free on the desktop, users of Spotify will need to purchase content when they want to take music with them “on the go” via their iPod or iPhone. In this sense, Spotify is the answer to piracy: migrating millions of piracy-based music fans to a legitimate platform where their consumption of music can be monetized and the artists who dedicate their lives to creating music can finally get paid.
…and now there’s THAT angle. Why hasn’t iTunes done this? Why doesn’t iTunes ring to us as the service that saved the music industry? I look at it this way. iTunes came at a time when the physical media was on the decline. Every year, CD and Tape media declines further and further. When the MP3 player (both software and hardware) rose to power, the physical media industry wasn’t ready. Ripping CDs wasn’t fast or easy. It took half an hour to rip one to your computer and that was after the half hour drive to the record store and after paying $18 for one. CDs still sell for more than it costs to buy an album on iTunes. iTunes saved the CD, it didn’t save the music industry.
Spotify is the first service that I see saving the music industry. Pandora was a damn good stepping stone. I’ll continue to pay yearly for Pandora because the discovery isn’t social, it’s an algorithm and a damn good one. Spotify has taken the next step by making the music discovery process far easier because you can play whatever you want (where Pandora doesn’t allow you to do that beyond just “similar to this artist”) and then, while playing music you own or like, you can discover friends that also like that music and see what they also like or see similar tracks or artists to that one. It’s almost magical that I can do this and use it on an unlimited basis for $10 a month.
The reason iTunes didn’t save the music industry is because, for years, FM and AM Radio saved the music industry. MTV and VH1 Saved the music industrty. These mediums are dead now. FM radio isn’t synonymous with “variety” and MTV is where you go to find shitty teen reality dramas. It’s not where you go to see what’s hot right now. Maybe your college has an independent FM station where you do discover new music but not everyone has that.
iTunes mad buying music SO MUCH BETTER in a time when downloading music illegally was SO MUCH BETTER than the alternative at the time (buying and ripping CDs at a high cost and high time sink. Alright, Thanks Apple for making the purchase and digitizing of music so much better. I really appreciate it but I still want the FM radio and MTV to help me find more music organically.
Spotify doesn’t just do that (like Pandora did), it then enables me to discover that music and instantly play it on any device I own without ads for the price that’s 40% cheaper than going out and buying the CD or the equivalent of one album via iTunes. $9.99 for all you can eat music with discovery with social without ads and anywhere you want.
Some will state that Microsoft’s Zune system did this. I LOVED the concept and delivery of zune but DRM + Microsoft only (Windows) + Only one kind of hardware (Zune) + a poor music selection + limited social made this NOT the ideal solution at all. Frankly, it made the solution total shit. Many will argue that Apple’s ecosystem was far worse than Microsoft’s. Sure. I say Apple & Microsoft presented the same offering with only a few key differences. Spotify says, “you’re both losers. Check this out.”
iTunes Cloud won’t kill Spotify. I’m already at 1600 words or I’d go into that as well. Let’s wait for iTunes Cloud to come out before we weigh too much on what it will or won’t kill. Let’s just say, Spotify is safe from iTunes cloud for now.
Spotify is worth the Free to $9.99 a month. I just bought a year subscription to it. You should too.