You know how it goes, you’re sat there listening to some young Shoreditch thing strum her out of tune guitar whilst shoving a vacuum cleaner down then microphone, ahem. When, just as you have turned your speakers up to maximum capacity Roberta pipes up and ruins it, ruins it all.
Yes Spotify, oh how great it was, and yes I’m cheap I could subscribe but I want to save my pennies, and just track her down and lodge the microphone so far down her throat that she can only mumble rhythmic static.
For those of you who are wandering what the hell I’m writing about, and whether I am slightly psychotic, fear not there’s a great new thing in Internet world, called Spotify. Hardly a justification for dismembering someone’s vocal chords, but wait…
The premise is simple: radio for whatever century it is that we are in. Find a track; play instantly at a decent quality (160kb/s), build your own play lists and take them wherever you go. Search and chances are you will find, with 7 of the major labels signed up, the only problem is this Roberta bitch who pipes up every half hour to tell you how great the premium service is, where you don’t have to listen to her hawk on all day for a tenner a month, and the worst thing about it is, she’s right.
I send a nod of respect to Spotify for managing to apply an old model for music distribution (radio) to the internet, in a way that the record industry dinosaurs have finally been able to understand. As an upshot of this Spotify have made a vast catalogue of music available for free (ad sponsored) and accessible (relatively).
For those that pay the monthly subscription, avoiding the advertising, enjoy paying for your music, but not owning it. When your Internet goes down, enjoy not having your music, that you don’t actually own, but have effectively paid for. Nice one Spotify.
Spotify is a hint of the things to come, you will increasingly hear in the upcoming months about the cloud. It sound all lovely and fluffy, and kinda could be, but this one definitely has a metallic lining, and who knows whether it will be a silver one.
Imagine all your information, images, music, tastes and culture being stored in a central place on the internet, accessible and sharable from wherever you are. The devices you use to access your stuff become small little interfaces; constantly connected, welcome to the cloud.
Sounds kind of cool, but the nice thing about a normal computer, in the most part, is whats mine is mine, not what’s mine is mine, but I have to get at through Google. (Google if your reading this please don’t advertise Spotify to me).
This is the age of software as service, consuming lifestyle.
Kill Roberta, kill her.
http://robertafromspotify.co.uk/