Spotify revolutionizes music listening

This is not a tutorial, but I just have to write about this…

I’m a music lover. I’ve been listening, playing and composing music since elementary school. For many years I’ve been sad about the situation of the music industry as a whole. Big companies seem to be ripping off both the artists and the consumers with their pricing, and at the same time they have refused to develop new business models, stubbornly sticking to CD sales and hoping for the Internet and MP3s to just go away. Moreover, sending an army of lawyers after their best customers and greatest music consumers is not only bad business, but plain stupid. Attempts to limit civil rights in a global scale and to collect money with tax like unjustified payments from everybody have made people angry, despite of their love to music and great artists. As a result, many of us have stopped buying music at all to boycott these methods. I’m one of them. I don’t want to support what they are doing to people and to our culture. Not with my money.

And you know what? It seems to be working. At least I like to belive that. We have lost many years in this fight without actually getting anywhere, but now I’ve been sensing that there is indeed a little bit of light in the end of the tunnel. Big content is beginning to realize that they need to switch from denial to adaptation, or face consequences of falling business models as CD sales continue to decline year after year. They have started to give up of ridiculous demands for draconian DRM solutions, and instead licensing their content to various start-ups who are creating new kinds of online stores. iTunes first proved that selling music online is viable, and montly payments for streaming music has been clearly accepted by the big record labels as a new business model.

So things are changing indeed. It is now possible to buy music online from many fiercly competing stores, like iTunes and Amazon – although these are still available in only a limited number of countries, which many seem to forget. However, so far the user experience of these shops, DRM, bad audio quality, and closed file formats have effectively prevented many from fully embracing legal online music and actually becoming a paying customer. This includes myself. And what is even more important, it has been easier to download good quality files from, say, The Pirate Bay – for free. For now, it should be obvious to everybody that free music is here to stay, either legally or illegally, like it or not.

So how do you compete with free? You create something that is better than the free alternative. And what that could possibly be? You have to add some real value to it. You have to do something on behalf of the users, serve them better. Something even a huge number of enthusiastic volunteers sharing all their files cannot or won’t do. You bring organization into a chaos. You make all the content available from one shop. And if you make it right, you’ve got a killer.

Imagine a single online store with all the world’s music from today’s hits to previous century’s evergreens. All well categorized. Cover art and biographies included. Everything searchable and linked. Ad supported or small payment, your choice. Learning your personal taste of music, and recommending more. Sleek user interface. Fast. Hazzle free software, supporting all relevant listening devices. Did I say fast? This is the Google of music, if you will. But it is all a dream that never comes true, right? Not necessarily. Actually you might as well take the opposite stand: with a little bit of time, could this *not* happen? There is a huge need for it, and the Internet tends to make these kind of dreams come true…

And you know what? Right now, there are many start-ups already building this. One of them is Spotify. I heard good things about them online, although mainstream media has not picked the news yet. I guess this is because they are still in beta testing phase. And its not available in the US, yet.

I decided to check it out yesterday. There have been many attempts to make streaming music from the cloud a big hit, but so far there has been a clear difference in user experience between these services and ripped MP3s on your hard disk, the latter being much more quicker and convenient to use. I was somewhat skeptical whether Spotify would be any different.

It is.

First, they are offering the client software for Windows and Mac but also explain how to use it in Linux. Moreover, iPhone and S60 phone versions are already under development. It’s a single store with more than 6 million tracks, and getting 10000 more each week. It’s well organized. Basically everything is a link. It’s got cover art, reviews, biographies. It has powerful and very fast search feature, and search results are well presented. Of course it learns your taste, and recommends more music – you wouldn’t expect any less. It’s got radio mode, and support for last.fm scrobbling as well. User interface is simple, and does its job. It just works, right out of the box.

This is all nice, but the thing that really made the difference for me, was the speed of their streaming solution, which is based on both servers and peer-to-peer networking. When I hit Play, or skip tracks, or browse through the albums, the music begins to play instantly. No buffering delays. It feels like that all this content is on my hard disk. And then again, it is not – just a small cache is. So they have somehow managed to get the best from the both worlds: it feels like I’ve got all the world’s music on my very own computer, yet they are not there taking up all the space.

Why is this so important? Let’s go back in time a little. In my youth, I listened to C cassettes and copied them from my friends. Then I started to buy CDs and invest money to music. I grew up into the idea of having a collection of music in my shelf, as cassettes and later as CDs. Then the Internet and MP3s came. I continued my old behaviour of creating a personal collection of MP3 files, and I got a lot of them, mainly by copying files from friends. Most of them do not actually match with my musical taste, but I didn’t want to delete the files, because they were part of my collection, you know. So I just changed the concept from physical media archive to file system archive. And I loved MP3s, because it was so easy to begin to listen to any of the albums by just selecting the file. I though this was as good as it could ever get.

After using Spotify, I have now realized that at the same time, I have always hated my MP3 file archive. No, not because of sound quality. I hate it because of the need to manage the archive. If I buy a CD, I need to rip it. Myself. On my own time. I need to hunt down an album cover picture and resize it. I have to organize the files properly into my archive. I have to copy the files from one computer to another and to my phone too, to be able to listen them where I want to. I have to take care of backups, to not lose my precious collection and all the work that I have put in creating and managing it… You know, the truth is, I have too much MP3s and too little time and energy to archive them properly. My collection has become a burden to me. There’s just too many of them, but yet how could I throw any of them away? Besides, deciding which ones to delete would take time too. So most of them just sit on my hard disk, unorganized, not being listened to. And yes, that does bother me. I enjoy order.

After playing around with Spotify a few hours, it suddenly hit me. I have now found a digital archive of more than 6 million tracks available on my computer, and using them via Spotify player is no different than if they were actually on my hard disk. I don’t need the files. I don’t need the files. I don’t need the files! No, I don’t even want the files anymore. For me, MP3s are dead. Music as files on my hardisk is dead. Music is now in the cloud. Someone else takes care of putting the music there, keeping it organized, and making backups. My job is to look for music that I enjoy, and listen to it. I like that.

Of course, Spotify is not (yet) perfect. I cannot (yet) find all the music there. I cannot (yet) use my Nokia N95 to listen to music from Spotify. I cannot (yet) buy separate tracks as files (not available in my country). But you already get free access if you accept advertisements. With 10 euros per month you get it all and more without ads. I’m totally in. And I like it so much, that I don’t mind at all paying 10 euros a month or 99 euros per year. That’s like 5 new top chart CDs, and this is much better than that, because now I’ve got them all. You could argue that if I stop paying, I lose it all. But the anwers is no – I would only get downgraded to the ad supported account. And why would I want to quit the service? I don’t expect to myself to stop loving music. I just can’t wait to get the S60 version to my phone, then I’m fully satisfied.