Monday, August 11, 2008
Spotify: A musical shooting star
It is a dark and stormy night - which means I'm going to miss the annual Perseid meteor shower - which I blogged about last year. Frustrating as I was even planning to get up around 2am for some bleary-eyed stargazing.
Instead of watching celestial bodies burn up due to the friction as they enter the Earth's atmosphere, I've enjoyed the privilege for few months now of a login to the beta of Spotify's rather fabulous streaming online music service.
To say that Spotify is good would be like saying The Beatles were "quite successful". Spotify is awesome. Fabulous. Comprehensive and delightful. Detailed, content-rich and immensely satisfying. I just can't believe it took me so long to really discover it.
Here's the elevator pitch: think unlimited access to the entire iTunes library - streaming direct to your PC. Where do you start?
At first, I thought Spotify was just a web radio station. Oh no. That's the front end. I can't share any screenshots thanks to the license agreement - and NO WAY am I going to risk losing access. I can just say that it offers a series of musical genres and dates - you just choose as many, or as few as you want, and press play.
After indulging - actually, over-indulging my desire to hear wall-to-wall 70s funk, I've started exploring further: driven by a need to find out whether Plastic Bertrand's 1978 opus, Ca Plane Pour Moi, would be there? Check. A great start. I challenged Spotify to find The Dead Kennedys' "Too Drunk ..." - check. Colonel Abrams and Trapped? Which version? And how about the whole album while you're at it? Carl Orff's Carmina Burana? Check.
I dug around and finally managed to find a song that Spotify's doesn' have (yet): It's Gonna Happen by the Undertones - of course this IS on YouTube, and so you might argue that this is no better than YouTube's collection of music videos, but I disagree on two counts. First, audio quality. Second, streaming - I've never had even a millisecond's interruption with Spotify, even on a public wi-fi network. And third, I'm listening to It's Gonna Happen right now - but not watching. I noticed that Feargal looked frighteningly young and returned to this post.
The tipping point for Spotify was reading Rolling Stone's story on Kid Rock's worldwide success with the monster hit of the summer, All Summer Long. Despite the irony that Kid Rock is not releasing his tunes to iTunes (All Summer Long is also absent from Spotify), I immediately fired up Spotify on learning that the Kid had mashed TWO previous hits. I thought he'd just augmented Lynryd Skynryd's Sweet Home Alabama - having never consciously heard anything from Warren Zevon. Thanks to Rolling Stone, I learned that Kid Rock mixed it up with Warren's Werewolves Of London - and where to check this out? Yes, Spotify.
Instead of watching celestial bodies burn up due to the friction as they enter the Earth's atmosphere, I've enjoyed the privilege for few months now of a login to the beta of Spotify's rather fabulous streaming online music service.
To say that Spotify is good would be like saying The Beatles were "quite successful". Spotify is awesome. Fabulous. Comprehensive and delightful. Detailed, content-rich and immensely satisfying. I just can't believe it took me so long to really discover it.
Here's the elevator pitch: think unlimited access to the entire iTunes library - streaming direct to your PC. Where do you start?
At first, I thought Spotify was just a web radio station. Oh no. That's the front end. I can't share any screenshots thanks to the license agreement - and NO WAY am I going to risk losing access. I can just say that it offers a series of musical genres and dates - you just choose as many, or as few as you want, and press play.
After indulging - actually, over-indulging my desire to hear wall-to-wall 70s funk, I've started exploring further: driven by a need to find out whether Plastic Bertrand's 1978 opus, Ca Plane Pour Moi, would be there? Check. A great start. I challenged Spotify to find The Dead Kennedys' "Too Drunk ..." - check. Colonel Abrams and Trapped? Which version? And how about the whole album while you're at it? Carl Orff's Carmina Burana? Check.
I dug around and finally managed to find a song that Spotify's doesn' have (yet): It's Gonna Happen by the Undertones - of course this IS on YouTube, and so you might argue that this is no better than YouTube's collection of music videos, but I disagree on two counts. First, audio quality. Second, streaming - I've never had even a millisecond's interruption with Spotify, even on a public wi-fi network. And third, I'm listening to It's Gonna Happen right now - but not watching. I noticed that Feargal looked frighteningly young and returned to this post.
The tipping point for Spotify was reading Rolling Stone's story on Kid Rock's worldwide success with the monster hit of the summer, All Summer Long. Despite the irony that Kid Rock is not releasing his tunes to iTunes (All Summer Long is also absent from Spotify), I immediately fired up Spotify on learning that the Kid had mashed TWO previous hits. I thought he'd just augmented Lynryd Skynryd's Sweet Home Alabama - having never consciously heard anything from Warren Zevon. Thanks to Rolling Stone, I learned that Kid Rock mixed it up with Warren's Werewolves Of London - and where to check this out? Yes, Spotify.
Labels: music
# posted by Nesjo : 22:29
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