Inspired by coffee, nourished by...

Words by me in Jmag!

Mine are the pieces on Tap Tap Revenge and Hunter Gatherer. That’s right, all 12 words of them!

Download the pages here.

“In a world where everyone loves music,” chirps the voiceover accompanying the cutesy video that greets you when you arrive at Spotify.com, “first came vinyl, then the cassette tape, the compact d-d-d-disc and the mp3 player. Which brings us to the present day. Introducing Spotify…Whatever you want, whenever you want it. Instant. Simple. Free.” And even better than that, legal.

Yes, 2009 could well be the year the world decides that online streaming is the best way to consume music in the digital era. After all, why waste your hard earned cash on CDs and DRM-riddled downloads, when you could be streaming the exact same music for free (or close to it) through your computer or even your mobile? What only a few years ago might have seemed a pipe dream is finally a reality.And Stockholm-based Spotify is well positioned to stake an early claim for control of this burgeoning market.

All the major labels are signed up meaning that the music library is already impressive. Arcade Fire, Bjork, Clapton, DJ Shadow, Eminem: their whole back catalogues are there. Nine Inch Nails? They’ve got it. Ella Fitzgerald? Virtually everything she’s ever done. Right now I’m listening to a recording of Miles Davis in concert in Berlin from 1964 that before about 20 minutes ago I never knew existed. Unfortunately, some of the very biggest artists have not deigned to grace Spotify with their presence – there’s no sign of the Beatles, Pink Floyd or Radiohead, for instance – but it’s surely only a matter of time before they too succumb. The catalogue, it seems to me, can only improve in strength and depth from this point on.

All the tracks on Spotify stream at a genuinely high quality. In fact, encoded using the open source codec Ogg Vorbis at 160 kbps, they sound better than what you get from iTunes where the standard is 128 kbps. What’s more, by combining traditional streaming with P2P technology, the boffins behind the service have managed to completely eradicate buffering. What that means in practice is that even with slow internet connections everything plays immediately, exactly as it would if it were living on your hard drive or being played on CD.

And because Spotify is web based you can log into your account from anywhere. Forgot your ipod but want to listen to some tunes at work? Just download the Spotify music player (available for Windows, Mac and Linux), log in (exactly as you would on, say, Skype), and hey presto, a world of music is back at your finger tips.

So what’s the catch then? Well, first there’s the cost. The so-called “free” version of Spotify – which is not currently available in Australia, but should be soon – is supported by advertising: you pay for it indirectly by exposing your grey matter to evil corporate messages every 25 minutes or so. But that’s hardly the end of the world. You can always turn the sound down after all. And the ad-free premium service – which is available here – is a steal at only $20 a month, or $200 a year. When you consider that the Kings of Leon’s new album is currently selling for $17 on iTunes and would cost you more still in the shops, that’s a definite bargain.

No, the main problem with Spotify at the minute is its lack of portability. It is yet to be made available on mobile devices, accessible via the Cloud. But it is still early days. The FAQ section of the website assures me that it’s only a matter of time: they are already working on something.

And when such an application is finally released, that will surely be it for the mp3 player. With any song streamable from any computer or any mobile, anytime and anywhere – and that is clearly the goal here – music will finally have made the transition from a good to a service. As with television, rather than actually owning what you’re consuming, you will simply pay a subscription fee appropriate to the quality of the service you want.

This will not spell the end for physical products entirely. After all, TV works alongside not in competition with the market for DVDs. And time has already shown, I think, that there will always be a place for the humble record. But Spotify really does mark an important evolution in the history of the music business. An evolution, moreover, which can only benefit artists and the industry.

Why, after all, would anyone – even impoverished young folk – bother scouring the web for illegal bit-torrents when they could access whatever music they wanted instantly, anywhere, via Spotify? It’s more convenient. Simple as that. And the fact that in doing so they would be putting a couple of cents into the pockets of their favourite artists (even if it does come from advertisers) would merely be a happy by-product. Everyone wins.

All of which is to say that with Spotify, finally, we have a service for the digital age whereby what’s good for the consumer is good for artists too.

(due to appear in abridged form in the next issue of Music Feeds)