The Butt Ugly Weblog

Spotify <3

A friend sent me an invite to Spotify, which is essentially a service where you can listen to any music you want. You can't download it, but as long as you are connected, you can listen to whatever they have in store - and they've got a LOT of stuff. You get to create your own playlists, and share them with others.

To me, Spotify is exactly how the music experience on the internet should work. For a long time, one of the arguments why piracy is so rampant is that the user experience of the legal download places is so crappy. Even when the user experience is tolerable (like on iTunes), the stuff that you get sold is mostly encumbered with DRM, which is just another fancy way of saying that you don't actually buy anything, you license a right to listen to the music for some time, but you pay for it per song. But they still make it look like you had actually bought something like a CD, which you can e.g. legally sell onwards.

Spotify sells you a monthly subscription for all the music they have. So the question of who owns the bits is moot, and so is the question of DRM too. Spotify makes music like water in an apartment block - you buy a subscription, and you get it from the tap. You drink it, you bathe in it, but in general, you don't hoard it.

Spotify is the first service that really gives you a better experience than Pirate Bay. You can, of course, still go apeshit about their player interface and how much better Amarok is, and that they don't support Linux, but for the most part, Spotify is really a trouble-free way of listening to music. It's not perfect, but I think it's the first one to light the way.

And now that they've enabled scrobbling to last.fm, it's even so much better :-) (Via Arctic Startup). I wouldn't still call my iTunes obsolete (since someone needs to sync my podcasts to my iPod, and Apple is really trying to make sure only they can do that - gagh, that's a good reason to start weaning myself from Apple stuff. My next media player is very unlikely to be an iPod, for that reason.)