Tonight:
9°c
Is Spotify ruining music? I ask not as a representative of the record industry, nor as a Luddite who craves a return to shellac.
I ask as a music fan — the very person this revolutionary website is supposed to benefit.
Launched in the UK in February by two young Swedes, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, Spotify is a much-hyped streaming service that contains just about every pop song you can think of (if it's not by The Beatles) available for free at the click of a mouse; the adverts you must listen to every 20 minutes or so are the only price you pay.
Ek and Lorentzon hope to persuade Apple to make the service available as an iPhone application, meaning those with that particular contraption can enjoy all the music in the world ever, wherever they happen to be.
So Spotify is a miracle, an infinite jukebox, a musical encyclopedia, an instant house party.
But having been an “early adopter” — meaning I too have spent a couple of amusing evenings playing “Oh my God, do you remember this!” with friends, and even more time staring blankly at the screen — I have given up on it.
I have unhooked my computer from my sound system and used the auxilliary input to plug in my creaky old record player instead.
I own about 20 records, mostly nicked from parents.
Choosing between a battered Kind of Blue and a scratched Rubber Soul is somehow a more empowering decision.
It is not simply that vinyl offers a more tactile pleasure. It is more that everything at the touch of a button presents such a tyranny of choice, such an attention-span-trashing sugar-rush of information, that it takes the pleasure out of the music itself.
No sooner is one song lined up than someone else in the room deems it unsatisfactory: “Yeah, yeah, you think that Kanye remix is something? Check this out!” And so on.
When MP3 players took root in the early 2000s, the trend naturally shifted away from CD albums to individual songs, plucked from all genres and shuffled together.
This wasn't such a bad thing. We have seen a return of the single as pop's prime currency, and there has been a notable cross-fertilisation between genres.
But now that first burst of creativity has been expended, pop risks becoming something that provides instant gratification and nothing more.
Spotify takes this one step further — it is no longer something you invest in at all, financially, or emotionally.
Some commentators have hailed this as a return to an era when songs were passed from performer to performer, free as the air they were sung into.
Which is a nice idea but then again our forebears did not have to pay £200 plus £35 a month line-rental for the air, and, since Spotify trades in recorded artefacts rather than abstract melodies, short of encouraging diversity and deviation it merely allows the canonical version of any given song to become more popular still.
At this stage, I am resigned to being a lone voice of dissent.
But I'm sure I'm not the only one who will now miss, at the very least, the pleasures of not knowing.
As a teenager, I remember spending years trying to hear a Nirvana B-side named Marigold, traipsing to the massive HMV in Oxford Street, rifling through friends' tape collections in search of it.
In that time, it acquired monumental proportions in my musical imagination — a symphony in grunge! The lost chord itself!
I looked it up on Spotify yesterday. It sounded OK. A little dated, maybe. The point is, I preferred the version in my head.
Reader views (2)
Am I the only person out there who can hear the absolutely ghastly distortion inflicted on the music by the digital "lossy" compression in MP3 and similar files?
CDs offer close to perfect reproduction. LPs create some distortion and dust or small scratches cause crackles, but neither is musically offensive.
When are they going to let us digitally download an un-mangled CD or CD track? Until then, I'll just say "no" to music downloads.
- Nigel, London
"pop risks becoming something that provides instant gratification and nothing more"
Er...isn't that what it's always done?
You sound like you may be ready for an immeasurably deeper and more enduring musical experience: classical music. My moment of truth came as I got to know Stravinsky's Firebird suite on a CD. Haven't looked back since
- Ivan, London
