I am really not exactly sure how it could happen, that I haven’t signed up to Spotify earlier. For 10 € per month they let me stream almost 90% of all the music I’ve ever wanted to hear + I can store music on my mobile for offline use for 30 days. – All of this in 320kbps vorbis quality (= very good)
This almost sounds too good to be true: I am aware that there might be problems such as bad compensation for musicians, the possibility that the service might stop some day and that there will be nothing tangible that I will be left with when that moment comes, but the great time I’ve had listening to awesome music.
We are all left to wonder what the future of the music business will bring. Still I believe that this kind of service is the future some way or other.
How do you access your music? CDs from your local store, CDs via amazon or ebay, an online service such as Spotify, sharing with friends, FM or internet radio or – heaven forbid – illegal downloads?
Whatever it is: the most important thing is to not forget to go to concerts and listen to whatever music gets you in the mood: LIVE!
Not sure if I get your question. What exactly happened that makes you wonder?
Spotify is around for a couple of years now, but I still haven’t signed up – until now. Now that I am using it, I wonder how I could live without it for so many years ;)
the performance of the software and the service is really great! I was very excited about it, when i first installed it. The time before listening to spotify I used http://www.grooveshark.com – there you can stream also the music you want to listen to, but you don’t find that much songs, and all they offer is a laggy browser interface. spotify is written in Qt and works great – it’s really addictive!
After some weeks of using spotify the annoying adds got more and more – and I’m not comfortable with paying for a music-SERVICE. Either I pay for music, and i have files which i can put anywhere I want, or i stream it and don’t pay for it!
So it came, that i uninstalled spotfy from my PC.
I think they make you addictive to their service – you don’t have anything left, if you once stop the payments, nothing is yours. But perhaps you put much effort into playlists or similar things. It’s not yours – it’s just a rental.
Another thing is, that you cannot use this service without a facebook-account – at least in Austria.
On the search for an other way to get to music I found http://www.bandcamp.com – which is a really interesting site. Steaming music in high quality, download it, if you want to, and pay for it, if you want to! The only thing, that is missing is a good desktop application, performs like spotify.
Alos retroshare would be a good possibility to share music among friends. It’s completely encrypted, and you can build darknets – and this way of sharing is even legal! But I experienced, that it isn’t that easy to motivate some friends to put some effort into a software, which uses encryption with public and private key – and therefore isn’t very user friendly to an average music-listener.
After all, I came back again to grooveshark, and sometimes also using youtube. All in all not that satisfiying.
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