My Spotify Salvation

Yesterday I took the plunge. All it took was a burning desire to listen to the Gourds, a definite lack of the Gourds on my iTunes, a Visa debit card, and…oh, I don’t know…a dose of free spirit. Yes. As of 24 hours ago, I am officially a Spotify subscriber. (For the curious, I am not a “Premium” subscriber, but only an “Unlimited” subscriber.) The monthly fee for the serves is $4.99, which is just about $60 per annum to stream unlimited music…and more music than you can find on iTunes most of the time. There are still some great streaming services available for free online—a favorite of mine is Grooveshark—but none of them match up to the organization, audio quality, and sheer range of tunes provided by Spotify.

I should admit something: I did not start paying for Spotify because I felt guilty or because I wanted to or even because I thought all those independent musicians out there deserved a few more coins to jangle in their pockets. I started paying because I had to. According to the contract of those who download Spotify for free, not only do you have to start coughing up the money after six months, but also you are only given two weeks using Spotify for free abroad. So now here I am. Paying for Spotify. And you know what? I feel pretty good about it.

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In the past I’ve ranted about how the “physicality” of books is the trump card that they can always play over the Kindle and, while I haven’t posted anything on the blog about it, I’ve always appreciated the reality of owning a CD (or a tape or a record) as a piece of physical property. A digital album download always felt like it was too easy because of the lack of physical interaction. I click a few buttons, type in a credit card number, click a few more buttons, and voilà! the album is playing through your computer speakers. This “easiness” has always irked me in the back of my mind. I would always own a CD than a digital album (although preferably also have digital files and have the CD not in a plastic/jewel case but a cardboard one…I’m picky). A digital file just doesn’t do it for me. A digital file which I do not actually own? Maybe that’s one step in the wrong direction…

But at the end of the day, Spotify is too good to be true. There are limits on how much money I can feasibly spend on music—a problem that Spotify dashes on the rocks. Here’s a little math: let’s say that I bought every song in my iTunes…(which I haven’t…?). Assuming that I purchased all of them from the iTunes Store at 99¢ a pop, I would have spent a grand total of $12,375. More simple math? If we assume that I started listening to music (and buying it) at age eight, then I would have spent $883.92 per year on music. (Math note: I realized after I did this super-duper complicated math that not only do I have around 100-150 songs that were downloaded for free on my iTunes, but also that there are several hundred (thousand?!) songs on my hard-drive that are unaccounted for in above heady mathiness.)

Spotify? Like I said above, $4.99 per month, roughly $60 per annum. Because I’m a math major (lie), let’s do a little more math. At $60 per month, that same number of songs could have been listened to me (assuming, of course, that Spotify existed when I was eight) for a paltry total of $840…a little less than what I otherwise would have (should have…) been spending per year.

Oh. And the ads are gone. That’s a definite plus.