A New Way to Listen

When it comes to music we all go about getting it in different ways, some more ethical than others. Some of us buy our music, a lot of us don't buy our music. Some of us use Pandora, some swear by satellite radio. There seem to be endless ways to purchase, download, or simply listen to individual albums or tracks from artists, but there has yet to be a winning solution in my eyes, especially for the personalized music compilation.

 

I have always had a love hate relationship with this process and this has been the case for years. I still remember sitting anxiously by my stereo in my bedroom, cassette tape in place, finger on ‘record’, waiting for any one of my favorite songs to come on the radio. I'd be there all night, but the result of a mixtape always seemed worth it to me. I can also remember sitting in front of the family computer after school, searching and then patiently waiting while Kazaa attempted to download my request. More often than not I ended up with the wrong track and a new virus, but I always managed to make a great mix CD. Then there was iTunes, which at the time, seemed like a revolutionary way to organize and play music, but users were still required to come up with a way to get it into their library. Sure there was the iTunes store, but for .99 a piece, it sometimes seemed hard to rationalize buying songs to complete an album, especially when there were other (cheaper) ways.

 

For the last ten years, despite some of its restrictions, iTunes has really been the go-to program for playing and organizing music files. But not anymore. Introducing, Spotify: the newest game-changer in the world of storing, playing, and sharing music. For those of you hearing about this for the first time, Spotify is a music streaming service that offers up access to a library of approximately 15 million tracks. 15 million. When was the last time you had 15 million tracks at your fingertips, all available for download? By downloading the Spotify desktop client, you can search easily by artist, album, or track and add songs to your library, without waiting for them to download. Spotify also has the ability to host your local files.

 

Like iTunes, Spotify allows users to customize their listening experience through the creation of playlists and Spotify will even import existing iTunes playlists. All songs added to your Spotify library and playlists are always played live, which makes them safe from a fried hard-drive. Users can also drag playlists to emails and IM windows, sharing them instantaneously with friends. By following the link, friends or recipients can then access the playlist via the desktop client, and add or remove tracks that are automatically updated. At the moment, Spotify is invite-only, but lucky for us invites are easier to come-by than they may seem.

 

I can confidently say that Spotify has provided us a very new and improved way to listen to music, and unless they retaliate, iTunes may soon share the same fate as my mixtapes.