I know a few people who are completely sold on streaming music services like Spotify. I tried Spotify, and enjoyed it, and would love to jump on board. I don’t have a big music collection, and the appeal of being able to listen to anything I want, legally, for a fee of just £10 a month is tempting. I almost signed-up, until I realised that I will be paying just £10 a month for the rest of my life.
I hope to live a healthy and strong life, which for me includes enjoying music, at least to the age of 80. I’m 30 now. At just £120 a year, that’s a total of just £6000.
And if during the next 50 years I decide to stop paying just £10 a month, all of that music is gone.
That’s as negative as I will get about streaming, because I can see how it’s a powerful service. If I was really into new music, it would be the right choice for me. It’s great how many record companies have got on board, and how easy it is to use. I could well be the future of the music industry, and in a couple of decades it might be what everyone is be doing.
But I’ve gone for a different approach. I’ve made a little spreadsheet which earmarks just £10 a month for what I’ve called my ‘music fund’. As you can see, I’ve been busy the last few months and haven’t had time to do my intial goal of buying one lossless1I’ve commited to buying only lossless audio, which future-proofs my collection. For more on lossless and why it will supercede mp3, check out this podcast. album per month:
If I do this for 50 years, I’ll have 600 albums. I probably won’t, and that’s where we hit the crux of the matter: I can stop paying into my music fund at any time but still get to keep what I’ve already invested.
This system is simple, slow, and I don’t get instant access to everything I would like. It takes me time to track down a lossless format, and some record labels aren’t even selling them.2I’m looking forward to the time that the iTunes store starts offering lossless audio, to fill-in these gaps. But something about this feels more solid, and I’m taking pleasure tracking down these files, and supporting the label directly.
September’s purchase:
I’m a Spotify subscriber and have been for over a year. Prior to Spotify, I had about 100GB of music, which was somewhere around 30,000 songs that I had collected over the prior 10-15 years, mostly pirated music, but a small amount was purchased. 10-15 years prior to that, my hard drive crashed and I lost my current 20,000-song collection. After that loss, I made sure to back things up. From that point on, having enough storage for all my music, and then backing up all that music, became a big chore and big worry. There was also the rather complicated management of 30,000 songs. When I upgraded my computer, or moved to a new computer, I had to find a way to safely move all my playlists, and all the music. I was always worried about losing it. It was this big, 100GB ‘thing’, this ‘weight’ that I carried with me in my life.
And then came Spotify. Of my 30,000 songs, about 25,000 of them were on Spotify. I could pay $10/month to not worry about backing up my music, to not worry about losing my playlists. I could pay $10/month to access anything I wanted, to search for something and then be playing it within seconds, to not think about migrating the music from one computer to the next. For $10/month, I had instant access to all my playlists and all my music from any device. Oh, and I can select any playlist for “offline” availability, so that an Internet connection is not required to play the music.
That’s worth $10/month to me. :)
Thanks very much for providing the counter viewpoint, Raam. It’s got me thinking about it again. I suppose that much of my post is about the issue of ownership, and if you’re willing to give that up (and it could be good to give it up), then Spotify immediatley becomes more appealing.
There’s also the issue of convenience. My music collection, although only a tenth the size of what yours was, still requires management (though I’ve created a great system based on star ratings, genres, and playlist which determined what gets synced to my iDevices), and mental effort required to think ‘do I like this enough to buy it? How will I buy it? What if I can’t find a lossless version’? Spotify removes all that.
I guess the real issue is whether I’m happy with the quality of the audio files. I’m about to invest £140 in a pair of headphones, and I’m not sure that throwing streamed tunes at them feels quite right.
I’m going to try Spotify premium for one month and will probably post an update at the end of that month.
Thanks again for the comment!
I look forward to reading your update! :)
Eventually, Raam, I wrote it: https://withkit.com/2015/the-value-of-not-owning-music/
Thanks for letting me know, Kit! :-) I left a comment over on that post.