As many people can attest to, specially if you are a Generation X’er, I used to buy vinyl records when I was a teenager. Yes, they were fragile, could get scratched easily and if you played them too many times, they would become unusable.
But for me, vinyls represent the long form of an artist’s vision. You would listen to each side in its entirety, just like reading a novel, each song had a place in the story, like a chapter. I would specially like to hear my albums late at night, when everyone was asleep, using a pair of huge leather headphones my dad used to own. I would close my eyes and really listen to the music.
After years of licensing battles, Spotify, a music service that comes from London and has been available there for a long time, finally launched this week in the U.S. After struggling a bit for an invitation, I was finally let in. And all I can say is that I was like a child again, seeing all my vinyl records in front of me, but this time in digital format.
The Battle for Legal Music
When Napster came out it was a revelation. You could potentially build a library of all your favorite music, but the effort at times was really hard. A lot of times albums weren’t complete, or the quality of the music wasn’t very good. Sometimes the songs weren’t even the songs, but some teenager’s joke.
And of course, it was all illegal.
A few years passed and Apple came out with iTunes. This time it was okay to get the albums, because you were paying for them, so they had to be legal, right? Unfortunately, it was more like a lease. Apple had a lock on all songs so that you were limited to have it in a small number of Apple devices and don’t even think you could share it with any of your friends. Also their catalogue was tiny and it was very hard to get any of those old records.
Lately my hopes were put on Google Music. But after negotiations with labels fell through, Google Music was no more and no less than a music library in the cloud. But it was your music, so you had to upload your whole library, and of course without the capacity of looking for songs outside of your library.
A music tool that finally gets it right
Spotifiy (which Napster’s original founder brought to life in the U.S.), gets all the previous points right.
First and foremost, their library is huge. Yes, there’ll be the indie lovers cry of despair that their records are not in Spotify, but for the vast majority of music fans you will find all the records from your childhood to the latest Arctic Monkeys. And everything is hyperlinked, so you can jump from artist to albums to recommendations… you will lose yourself grabbing as much of this content initially as a hungry man who’s let in on a free banquet.
But then you’ll discover some other nice things. For one, Spotify is a desktop app, not a web portal, which I love, because that means I get a fast response for any action and can manage better my offline content. The first time you download the application, Spotify will identify, using advanced song recognition, what it is exactly that you have in your computer, then it will match with its own cloud content, and at the end you will have a beautiful creature that’s half your library and half Spotify’s library. But it’s a complete creature nonetheless.
Then you’ll see how spot on its social aspect is done. Its integrated with Facebook, so you’ll be able to start off with that social graph, but then can start augmenting that with other Spotify users across other social networks (you can find me here). Sharing playlists and recommending music is a one-touch experience. All playlists, albums, artists and songs have a unique Spotify URL that you can share, tweet or email to other Spotify users. After you use Spotify’s social layer, you won’t be able to look at Ping ever again.
Finally you will appreciate the mobile app that lets you decide which playlists or albums you want to have on your cellphone and which you want to stream, as long as you have internet connectivity. It’s all very intuitive. If you have an Android and an iPod like I did, you’ll just ditch the iPhone.
The future of albums
In an interview with Om Malik, Daniel Ek, Spotify’s founder, says the following:
The reason we had an album with 10-14 songs was because of the physical limitations of the format. It was the same with vinyl records. On digital there is no physical limitation so the very idea of what is an album can be different. Now an artist can release one song every two weeks. Or she can create an audio-visual experience around the song. I want Spotify to become a platform around music so artists can innovate around Spotify. And at the same time music listeners can vote with their hands and attention and become involved in the creation of the music experience itself.
I can certainly see that vision becoming a reality. It’s just a matter of time before artists start thinking in terms of long-form music again, and not selling songs as one-hit wonders, the market that iTunes has been killing them with.
I look forward again to putting those big leather headphones and listening to a story, and not just random chapters.
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