Christian “qriz” Nord - Sep 3, 2009
I am actually not so worried about the fact that if/when Spotify goes away so does my playlists. My way of consuming music has changed dramatically and I do not really care that I do not own it - as in having the particular file stored on my NAS. I consume so much more music and with much more variety. The little thing that Spotify has solved so neatly is the mobility aspect that iTunes provided. It will not take long before the Spotify mobile branch will expand to include ring-tones and the one favorite mobile platform (Android) will have an enabler in place for supporting Spotify hosted ring-tones, alarm sounds, you name it. Interestingly - I am just curious as to who will then provide the next audio streaming service. How do we then ensure interoperability (yes, I’m a standards guy of sorts) between the different audio clouds.
I’m not sure what you are comparing Spotify to? I pay for 12 albums a year and get to listen to how many albums I want, whenever I want, in a great player for my computer or phone, in a quality that’s more than “ok”. For a music consumer like me (probably closing in on 600 albums a year) this is a bargain. Wherever I am, I always have my playlists and my music available, online or offline, and at the cost of virtually no hard drive space at all. Maybe you didn’t buy 12 albums a year before Spotify, but then you either didn’t listen to music at all, or you listened to it illegally. You can’t compare Spotify to illegal alternatives. As a commercial service, Spotify is “good enough”. And that’s a first and that’s why we love it.
@Andreas Thanks for your comment, I wasn’t aware that my own position was unclear. I’ll elaborate: I’m comparing with simply buying music for digital download from services like iTunes and Amazon. DRM-free, making it possible for me to listen to the music on whichever device I happen to use at the moment (for example, streaming to a Playstation 3 in another room). I also then have the possibility to create my own ringtones from the music, control whichever music player I use through remote controls and stream the music to several rooms at once (something iTunes does a lot better than Airfoil, which is the alternative I have with Spotify. Other solutions exist, but they cannot work with Spotify since there’s no API). This is what I compare Spotify with, which is only available on few devices (computer plus select mobile platforms - and even then it requires network access to log in which users travelling abroad likely won’t appreciate the roaming charges for) and doesn’t allow any third party device control. I understand, however, that someone who manages to listen to two new full albums a day have other preferences ;) Myself I’m more of the one-new-album-a-month kind of person. Maybe that’s a minority view. In the end, I cannot replace my earlier music consumtion with Spotify (much of the music I have is simply not available there). What has happened is that I have added another service, DRM-infested, for 99 SEK a month. The blog post was about that being eerily similar to some very non-popular views having been voiced before by the media industry and which resulted in public outcry. As a matter of fact, the proposed “broadband tax” for media piracy would have resulted in legalized filesharing - and Spotify would easily have been outcompeted by a modern version of Napster or Audio Galaxy ;)