Music Futures

Prompted by some questions about Spotify on Twitter, questions which sparked a heated debate that is still raging*, I thought I’d revisit my own music purchasing and usage habits and see where I sit in the consumer spectrum.

First things first then, I do purchase music mostly, these days, through iTunes. Mostly because it’s handy and I’m a total Apple fanboy (yeah, Windows SUCK!!). That last bit is a lie, of course, as my home PC runs Windows and I’m really enjoying using Windows 7 (something else I’ll be purchasing soon).

I digress.

I spent a long time digitally converting my CDs, and as they now reside in boxes in the loft I don’t see the need to purchase anything on physical media. I have bought a couple in the past few months, mainly band specific special releases though, so they aren’t available through iTunes. I’m sure there are other ways I could purchase music but for what I listen my system works for me.

Do I miss the act of going into a music shop, flipping through the stacks? Yes I do, but not so much that I’m losing sleep over it, although it’s easy to say that since my current office is miles from anywhere, whereas working in the city centre made access to places like Fopp an always entertaining lunchtime visit.

As for listening to music, well that mostly happens either at work (when time/task allow) or at home when I’m sitting at the PC or just generally faffing about upstairs. More recently I have started taking my iPod Shuffle to the gym.

So where does Spotify fit in all this? Well it should fit perfectly, at home at least (I’ve not tried but guessing company firewall restrictions would rule it out there). I do have it, I have an account yet, for some reason, I don’t use it. To be honest I’ve only used it a couple of times, and I do like the idea of sharing playlists with others but what about all that music that I have?

I LIKE all the music I have, well most of it**, except when it’s on shuffle of course, and whilst I am open to hearing new artists I only tend to use work as a backdrop so I’m not usually actively listening. With that in mind, it largely doesn’t matter where the music comes from, but I’m far more likely to put on something I know so I don’t HAVE to listen to it.

You know what I mean, right?

Perhaps I just need to give Spotify more of a try, perhaps I’m missing something fundamental but I really don’t see it as a game changer. Yet.

But then I said that about blogging, and Twitter so hey, what do I know?

* or perhaps just one or two polite replies, poetic license, innit
** the joys of a shared library of music and Last.fm listing tracks from Louise’s iPod, for the record I did not listen to Girls Aloud AT ALL that week

Comments

  1. I’m still stuck in a mental space where the physical object fascinates me. In practice I know I am mostly listening to digitised music, but I’m a bit erratic about losing visible objects to the loft. Has ITunes got that whole restricted downloading thing sorted yet? I haven’t even gotten close to Spotify…

    Agree though about liking all the music you have — we try and scale our collections back fairly regularly but it’s an uphill struggle. We have diverse tastes and as yet not everything has made it to the computer. And yet the iPod is near full… I really should have gone for the largest available.

  2. Sorry but this blog comes under the heading of ‘foreign language’ but when you said Spotify, I suddenly had a mental picture of you (the day I was a bad mother and sent you to school anyway) with the chickenpox…. Sorry again – lowering the tone as is my wont.

  3. I love Spotify.

    Mainly because I don’t have a stereo any more. I have the iPod dock in the lounge, so I play music in there – but nothing in the kitchen, where the laptop resides.

    And I’ve found it’s made me love music again by doing that true ‘browsing’ thing. And that ‘I wonder what this artist, who I read about in the old copy of Mojo in the toilet, sounds like’ thing. And the ‘best have a quick listen to what the kidz are digging these days’ thing.

    Interestingly, my dad, who’s almost eighty, loves it as well. Probably in slightly different ways.

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