Why Spotify Is Awesome

I'd read about Spotify and a few UK friends had told me how cool it was. Without examining why, my natural instinct was that streaming was annoying mostly due to inconsistencies no matter what the interweb speed. A short-term problem in the grand scheme of things, but a problem nonetheless. I suppose I felt that way based on attempting to stream Myspace pages unsuccessfully.

Meanwhile, a very trusty hard drive that stored my music (which is backed up elsewhere, but I mean like up-to-the-second additions) was clearly winding down in it's life. Thus, I picked up a Tb harddrive, assuming I could use the other two as back-ups and use the extra space for artist asset management. The hard drive makes my Mac crash (gasp!) and now even using my 200 gig Time Machine hard drive seems to give my computer trouble. Granted I should add another gig of RAM to my machine, but in the meantime, my stored music collection got scrambled some how for the second time this year. I have about 200 gigs of music on there and frequently add discographies to it. But the reality is, that's a lot of content. And all I want to do is have a wide variety of music accessible for work and fun, so pretty much all the time. But it's clearly becoming a pain and waste of time to do so in this form.

The amazing Katrina, who helps me out with Whitesmith NYC commented that it'd be nice to listen to something other than our artists, Edward Sharpe, The Yeah Yeah Yeah's, and The Beatles. I'm just lazy, even though there is loads of music at my fingertips, I just have to take the time to re-organize it again and haven't taken the time.

Well, today I was able to use Spotify. Music snob friends immediately said "yeah, but does it have EVERYTHING." No, of course not. Their catalogue doesn't have The Beatles, Oasis, and anyone or any rights holders who don't want to be on the service. Nor does it have Family Of The Year's live shows or Sydney Wayser's demos. But I do. I love those artists and have those files on multiple Apple devices and backups, including the machine I'm on right now. But Spotify does have a ton of music. And it streams flawlessly, has a sleek interface, correct info, and can be broken down into genre and era. I've had a blast listening to The Spencer David Group and The McCoys tonight while pouring through Sonny and Cher's album artwork.

Thus, I've spent my day and evening using Spotify. There are ads about every few songs. But it was pointed out to me initially, that because it is a UK program, the ads are all from England and are AMAZING. I mean seriously, today I heard one that had a very sensual theme and was from the UK energy department. There are visual ads as well, but I only noticed when I go back to the program to do something. Right now I obviously can't see them because I'm typing in blog land. It's even more fun than downloading discographies because there is artwork and info on the releases as well. NP, more Sonny and Cher. I love it.

Music snobs also need to chill when talking about preferring physical and/or intense high quality. No one is trying to take that away from you. If anything, physical packages are getting more frequent and artists are getting more directly involved with physical releases. I love the NIN box sets I've bought or seen this decade vs. my Downward Spiral CD from 1994.

When I was making dinner tonight (shout out to Williamsburg-Greenpoint CSA!), I was craving newish Oasis, which Spotify doesn't have (yet). So I just flipped over to my iTunes. Not that hard. It just makes me happy that a decade after the thrilling concept of Napster, enough people have finally been allowed to admit that it's a great idea. Eventually some sort of digital music in this form will just plain cover everything and this is a solid step in the right direction. In the meantime, props to Spotify for having Wibbling Rivalry in its collection, which is a recording of Liam and Noel Gallagher fighting in the 90's, that was released as a UK single and charted.

Eventually beyond that, I can't wait till a service like this integrates with what an individual owns and/or creates. ie my asset management system, random live stuff, and eventually eventually film and tv content all in one place/service. A system to upload/filter legit content directly would be amazing as well. I'm sure charging a fee a la Tunecore would do the trick.

A girl can dream.

Back to work?

Love,

Em Wizzle