I’ve always spent money on music – tapes, vinyl, CDs…i’m an album hoarder. I buy albums that I really rate and like to own the physical copy.

I favour owning physical copies for two reasons; Firstly for my own collection, I like the idea of dusting them all off when i’m a grumpy old man and showing people what ‘real’ music once sounded like. Secondly, because I used to think I owed the artist at least that in cash. But…now the industry has changed – music is no longer where the money is, artists earn most of their big bucks from touring, live shows and endorsements…blah blah blah.

If I go digital it’s a choice between two: iTunes Vs Spotify. If I brought music through iTunes I would obviously own the music but then have the added issue of storing it.

At the moment i’m leaning towards shelling out £10 a month on a Spotify premium account. That’s the equivalent of about one CD I suppose. The benefits of this being…

• Unlimited listening access to tonnes of music
• I can create loads of playlists and easily link to them
• I can fill my iPhone with music and make it available offline
• It’s much quicker and easier to manage and find new music
• I can listen to my music on whatever machine I log my account into
• I don’t have the ass ache of syncing my iPod and storing all the music files on a computer that I don’t own (I use my work laptop atm)

Anyone else made a decison on this recently? What do you think?

Image by kristoffintosh

This is something that we’ve all been raving about in the office in the last few months. For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet here’s a short summary.

Spotify is probably the largest thing that has happened to the music industry in a long time, brought to us by some intelligent Swedes, it’s a pretty big deal. Co founded by Martin Lorentzon (co founder of Tradedoubler, digital marketing agency) and Daniel Ek.

It’s basically a peer to peer music sharing service that allows almost instant listening with minimal streaming of almost any artist or album that you can think of (apart from Oasis).

It’s still in beta but is available to most people in western Europe. I think they have plans to roll it out in the US and Canada soon. It’s not possible to download the music from the service and is perfectly legal.

It’s not just another Limewire, Kazaa or Napster. It differs to these illegal peer to peer file sharing services in the fact that you can’t download dircetly from Spotify. Instead, you have a link to one of their preferred partners where you can buy the music legally.

Along with Last FM and Myspace this is another great way to find out about new music that you may want to buy, or just a good way to listen whilst on-line. The free service makes its money by from advertising serving up short 2 minutes adverts every 30minutes or so. You can purchase a premium version that is uninterrupted. It’s not too annoying though.

Another nice feature is the ability to create collaborative playlists, you can get together with your mates and put compile them. We quite often have a ‘Friday tunes’ playlists in the office that anyone can submit music to play in if they’re a friend of the user.

I heard they’re in the process of creating a Spotify application for iPhone which will also be a nice touch, similar to that of Last FM’s.

Many would argue that buying music is no longer the product of the industry, this new platform supports purchasing material more so than others, providing links to buy the music from partners whilst promoting the artists to potentially thousands in a new channel.

Download and register here

Watch it hit the mainstream and go large…