My guilty music sharing past and a hopeful future with Spotify

Having been involved in file sharing from way back in the mIRC days I am particularly interested in the subject. I think that file sharing has completely changed the way that I listen to music. Before I started downloading music I would buy CDs (and a few cassettes) from artists that I heard on the radio or saw on MTV. Even though these were the days of “alternative” and the beginnings of “indie” music most of the music that I purchased was by fairly big, commercial bands. This was all I really had access to unless some friend's older sibling made him a mixed tape that got passed around. After I was introduced to file sharing I was suddenly able to listen to music without buying an entire album. I could dial up to AOL, search for a band on mIRC, leave the computer on all night and have a song or two downloaded by the morning. I even saved up some money and bought one of the first portable MP3 players. Suddenly a whole other world of music opened up to me. I learned that there was much, much better music available to me. I still bought albums, t-shirts and went to concerts, but they were very different bands than I had been to before.

Unfortunately this started to change as internet connections got faster, file sharing platforms got better and streaming music was easier to come by. As my digital music collection got bigger and my mp3 players capacities got progressively bigger and bigger, I bought less CDs. The fall of Napster temporarily put a dent in finding free music but it was quickly replaced by something else just like it. I still justified it by thinking that I was supporting smaller bands by downloading their music, seeing them live and occasionally buying a t-shirt or CD. Once torrents came along and sites like the much missed OiNK made downloading any album in its entirety amazingly fast and simple, I pretty much stopped buying music all together. I still felt guilty about it downloading all of this music but I would always blame the industry bigwigs for being too greedy and refusing to adapt.

Finally I have come across something that might be a game changer for the industry. I’m been using Spotify for the last few months and since then have entirely stopped illegally downloading music. Spotify is a streaming, standalone music client with millions of songs available for instant listening. Unlike pandora, you can choose exactly what song you want to listen to at any time. It is essentially like having iTunes with almost any song that you would ever want to listen to and it is legal (at least it is legal in the U.K., Sweden and a few other European countries). They make their money by having radio-style audio ads every three or four songs and graphic ads on the program while it is idle. They also offer a premium subscription for £10 a month with no ads and better sound quality. iPhone and Android applications for premium subscribers allow users to listen to music on mobile devices. I think that Spotify finally offers a fair tradeoff for music consumers who want to listen to music legally at a cost they are willing to pay: listening to ads for free or paying a monthly fee for ad-free music. Spotify is supposedly coming to the US and China this fall. I am really excited to see how Spotify does in bigger markets and hope that their monthly fee is a little lower than £10 a month here in the US.