Spotify – Catchgroove discovers the modern age

I am a little slow – I just started to use Spotify (which I constantly mispronounce ending in an E vs. I – just to emphasize how much of a n00b I am).  WOW – this is the greatest thing since the wild west of the early Napster days.  Pretty much any song or album I want is available for ten bucks a month.  This is a streaming service vs. a download site like iTunes.  I really did not understand  how advanced steaming has become,  you can actually download music to a portable device and listen offline.

The sound is decent MP3 quality and not high quality digital or vinyl, but hey you are paying for convenience and access not quality. Most of the time I will be listening on crappy ear buds via my iPhone anyway.

It was pretty amazing to go through this past “Release Tuesday” and listen to a half-dozen releases – in my listening room, in the car and while running.  Normally I would only be able to afford one CD, but this week I enjoyed the all-inclusive-resort that is Spotify.  Turns out of the several albums I listened to mostly sucked and I only one of them would have been worth buying (Natalie Maines – Mother).

I will buy fewer CDs or records because of this, as I will likely sample things first on Spotify and then if I really like it I will get a physical copy.  emusic is out the door.  I had got frustrated with emusic because of the medium to low quality of the MP3s – if I am going to own something it needs to be at least CD quality if not better.  As much of collector of music I am, it does not really bother me that don’t own the music – if want to I can – but mainly what I have always wanted is to unlimited access to  new music at a reasonable cost.

I am sure I will be frustrated at times that I can’t find something – but I had that with emusic, iTunes and of course my local record store.  I am guessing there will be technical bugs, like the song “Miss Fantasy” from the new Fleetwood digital EP that will not play past the 1 minute mark on my iPhone (but works fine on my PC). The iPhone app’s search feature sucks, but hey for this kind of access to a music catalog for ten bucks a month it is hard to complain?

All and all – pretty damn amazing.