Today is the day many of us have been impatiently waiting for; Spotify has launched in Ireland. There will now be no need to set up UK proxies or give fake addresses or use any of the other workabouts many (including myself) have been taking advantage of for the last couple of years. Irish users are now welcome to open an account for free (with ads) or for a relatively small fee (no ads & various other advantages). The ads do get really annoying so at a fiver a month, I’d expect to see a lot of people taking up the Spotify Unlimited package. Figures for the Spotify Premium package (€10/month) will be interesting to watch as it includes unlimited streaming on mobile devices, essentially untethering the user from their computer completely.
Spotify’s service is pretty attractive, offering something like 18 million tracks, all easily searchable, organised into artists, albums, genres, etc. It is essentially the endless record collection that many have dreamed about, though there is obviously an awful lot of fringe stuff that isn’t on there. For that, Youtube remains unbeatable. On top of that, there are playlists, which are a great way to discover new music and listen to a wide variety of stuff quite quickly. Lists can be updated so they don’t grow stale if you don’t want them to, can be contributed to collaboratively, shared, embedded, whatever. Playlists are great.
The obvious downside to Spotify comes from the controversially low royalty payments that artists receive, something which Eoghan from the Point Of Everything brought up this morning with the question, “Isn’t Spotify evil?”.
While it would be pointless to compare Spotify royalties directly with album sale royalties in terms of what the artist deserves to get, the service does provide something in between the purchased album and the radio. It combines the streamed nature of all radio, with the searchability of iTunes or a stack of records. However, the payments an artists receives from Spotify here are (presumably) going to be much less than they will receive from radio play here. Again, that makes sense considering each Spotify play goes out to an audience of one while something on 2FM will go out to potentially hundreds of thousands of people.
The artists who are pissed off at the rates they receive have a point, it really is nothing at all, but on the other hand, there is a need for a new set of metrics because digital streaming subscription services are still really in their infancy and this is new territory for everyone. Spotify hasn’t managed to turn a profit, yet, but it is becoming totally dominant in the market and its business model needs to be fair to both listeners and to those deliver their product, i.e. musicians.
The less obvious (or at least less empirical) downside of Spotify’s service is the same one that dogs all digital music; the lack of physical and emotional connection to what you’re hearing. This article in the New Yorker (hat tip to On The Record for that) sums up the point of many listeners who feel that the value is taken out of the art, even as it becomes ever more accessible and fluid. The crux of the argument is “the Internet frees up cultural treasures while simultaneously eroding the mechanisms that endow them with value”, which is something that is hard to disagree with but important to question.
When you buy a record, what are you buying it for? Theoretically you’re buying it for the music but, for a lot of people, there’s more to it than that. You’re buying it because you want it in your life, physically, in your house, in your room, on a shelf somewhere. You want to be impressed by its corporeal substance, hence the effort put into artwork and presentation, which can add greatly to a record’s desirability. It’s rarely all about the music, though perhaps these days we are getting to a stage where it can be.
The original iPods had no room for displaying artwork, so you just had to make do with a track name and whatever was going on in your ears. The music essentially became ephemeral again, stripped of any real world presence as 1000 CDs magically fit in your pocket. This trend has been somewhat stemmed on the surface by shiny artwork displays on iPhones and all that but it doesn’t really change the fact that the music itself is what matters; the artwork, packaging, credits, etc, are all relegated to the background or removed entirely.
So will people be able to develop significant emotional relationships with music that they come across on Spotify? I should hope so, as people have been doing that without the help of artwork or anything else since recorded music began. I know I’ve never held some of the albums I’ve loved most, never even seen them IRL. All it takes really is a new set of metrics, what is worth what and to whom? We’re a long way from any kind of conclusions but services like Spotify open up a new listening paradigm, where new connections and new types of connections are possible. Now, if only they could figure out how to pay the artists a little more…
