You get what you pay for, right? That’s what the old wives say. But then, old wives clearly don’t use Spotify.
If you’re yet to treat your ears to Spotify, it’s a free music service streaming more than eight million songs direct to your desktop. They’re complete tunes, ready to be dumped into playlists, replayed as much as you like or shared with other Spotify users. The only catch is the odd advert. And I mean odd. They crop up less than once an hour if, like me, you listen almost constantly throughout the day.
If you’re incredibly advert adverse you can subscribe for a tenner a month, or £100 for a year, and never hear another ad. Aural nirvana, right? Wrong. It seems even all the music you can stuff in your ears, completely free still isn’t pleasing some people.
At least, it’s not pleasing Daily Telegraph columnist Milo Yiannopoulos. Dishing up a diatribe against Spotify, he writes: “I’m not inclined to pay for Spotify, and I don’t know how many other people are” arguing that the ads are annoying (presumably he’s never tuned into a commercial radio station), but that paying for the service “breaks the first and only Golden Rule of the Web – ie, everything on the internet is supposed to be free. Music, movies, pornography…”
Of course, it’s complete twaddle. But it raises an interesting point. At 26 years old I’ve realised I’m probably the last generation for whom being able to say I’ve spent more of my life listening to music through a computer than any other medium is a bit of an oddity. Anyone younger has never known a world without MP3s and file sharing, iPods and online streaming. Milo’s point highlights that, to several large swathes of the online populus, free music is an absolute. A given. An obvious fact of life.
In short, the music industry has spent so long twiddling its thumbs that pirates and piracy have become the norm. Spotify, the first serious alternative to penny-pinching or loose moraled music fans is simply too late. The web has the spirit of file sharing deeply ingraned in its collective psyche, and it’s not coming out.
So what’s the answer? As always with paid-for web services, I suspect the key is in providing added value. It’s unlikely Spotify will make a fortune from annoying its audience into coughing up while offering little more than the tunes themselves. It’s far more likely listeners will go elsewhere. For the music industry, that’s almost certainly a bad thing, as “elsewhere” will likely be a BitTorrent tracker or file sharing network.
Luckily, Spotify is making moves in the right direction already. Last week it launched an API, allowing developers to build its services into their own apps. To use the API’s functions, however, users of those 3rd party apps will need to be Spotify subscribers.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Spotify has effectively passed the buck, and left the bulk of the head-scratching to developers. It’s only a matter of time before someone cooks up a killer app that combines Spotify’s streaming service with added extras that finally prize cash from the public’s wallet. There’s even a chance other companies will absorb the £100 per user fee, and use Spotify to bulk up their own offerings.
It’s still early days, but Spotify is far from finished changing the face of online music. But until the real changes take hold, let’s hope Spotify’s ad-supported model is enough to keep paying the rent.