Spotify

What better way to start this blog by telling about what I have been doing for the past three hours, at no cost?

Spotify is a streaming music service that has an intuitive interface and has been technically flawless in three hours of listening so far. In short, it makes it seem as if I own a couple million songs on my hard drive. No, let's be honest, Spotify's search is faster than running Spotlight in Finder on my clogged hard drive.

A couple big artists are missing (in the Beatles' case I wasn't bothered because the range of covers and karaoke tracks was so horrifyingly big and entertaining). But almost everything else is there in some form. (And you would think if Their Satanic Majesties Request by the Rolling Stones is up there, as it is, that the Beatles will shortly release Sgt. Pepper?!) It was a little hard to find Estonian artists, but that is to be expected. The newer ones are represented and many classic pop stars will have a track or two from a compilation or anthology.

It's free possibly because it's in a limited-country invitation-only (thanks Andres!) pilot phase. Or at least I would imagine it's a huge loss leader and when Spotify makes its appearance in US, it will end up costing something. Or are the record companies folding and selling as long as they can get anything at all? There are advertising messages on Spotify, but it is definitely on the unobtrusive side -- I'm so used to clicking the close box on irrelevant popups that I don't even know if I register anything anymore. Which is of course is probably not what advertisers who keep the web free want to hear.

Still, it seems like the pendulum is swinging back in the right direction -- artists and audience -- and even iTunes may have a David on their hands.

On a side note, I chose "Rikk's Picks" as my username on the same day that Spotify announced it had added most of the Dick's Picks line of remastered Grateful Dead shows. I'm not that big a Deadhead, but that was my nickname back at a job I had during the Napster era where we would take turns DJ-ing the office's music selection and cluttering up the hard drive with SHN files. (I had also misunderstood Spotify to be primarily a playlist sharing feature -- I would not have believed it could stream just about anything.)

The interesting thing about Dick's Picks was that, despite the band's policy of allowing the public to tape shows, legal issues forced any soundboard tapes of concerts that were selected by Dick Latvala to be removed from servers for legal reasons. That was frustrating, but now it's a moot point with Spotify, at least for me.