Spotify
Ok so I have now joined the future of Music listening.
I never like the idea of CD’s, I think the only Music CD I ever owned was a single CD that came as a promotion “gift” with a computer game I bought, I did have some 5 LP’s back in the day, can’t remember all of them, but I think there was a Magnus uggla, Murtel Crue, and some others.
No I was early with the electronic music, Already on the Commodore 64 I would load up a game just to listen to the music, and on Amiga it was MOD’s, a kind of 4 track sampled music, I even hacked my Amiga 500 to enhance the experience by increasing the “Chip” memory, this was the type of memory that was able to handle Music and Graphics, so by increasing it I could listen to “higer” quality tunes, I also bought a special thing that would enhance the sound, I think it was some kind of Filter or something. 
On The PC, Well I had a bunch of MP3′s I would rip CD’s that friends had, and store them as MP3, and well before you start thinking thta is illegal, well in Sweden it is legal to copy between Friends, so by having a lot of Friends through a Lan party club I aquired more music than I would ever listen too. I actually always been more of a Radio Person, just putting a mixed bunch of music on playing random.
Although back then Harddrive was expensive, so I burned all the MP3′s to CD’s, Unfortunatly this was a bad idea, as one very hot summer I forgot the Leather CD bag on the desk in direct sunlight, and my CD’s basically turned transparent, rendering many of them unreadable.
So I salvaged what could be salvaged, but some 15 CD’s were completely unreadable.
Then came Napster, at that time I was sharing a house with some friends and whenever we had visitors, we would download some music, and they would all store it on my server so we could access it from anywere in the house, so I ended up having all kinds of music, everything from French Rap to Polish Pop, Swedish Rock, to Soviet Marching music!?!?. But with those early download music came the down side of Crap Quality, some of the songs were recorded on low bitrat, no tags, or sometimes not even complete.
So I started looking for a solution, I was still heavily resisting paying for a piece of plastic I would never use, and started looking if there was a way to pay for guaranteed quality downloads, and there was this new cool service called allofmp3, some Russians came up with this brilliant system of selling music to a resonable price and in the format you choosed, you payed depending on the size of the file.
The files were tagged, categorized and super easy to search. It was still not clear weather it was legal or not, I mean technically they were since they payed royalties to the Russian record assosiation I think they were called ROMS, but it was exactly what I was looking for, cheap, easy and good quality. Some time later Itunes started up, but they were expensive and files had DRM(Digital Restrictio… erhm Rights Management), something I’m strongly against as it limits my rights as a consumer.
I can honestly say I do not mind paying for music, I stronly believe artists should get payed, and I have still never been to a concert, so I do not supprt artists that way, I do however pay my Media Tax every time I buy a CD, and believe me I have not used a CD or a DVD to store music since I lost a larger part of my collection to it, I also pay a TV license which effectivly pays for the public Radio and TV here, also whenever I listen to non public Radio I have to listen to commercials, so in the end I have payed for music.
Ok, so then allofmp3 was shut down by American RIAA lobbyists, and my source of Good quality music (Read DRM free in good quality) was lost, I did not want to go back to download through various services since that would be a step back, so it was back to listening to internet radio stations, I did buy some music from Itunes when they released Itunes plus, a service were you could get DRM free music.
But now some Swedish guys have launched a new service called Spotify, it is a legal music distribution system, that do not require(Or allow) you to keep any files locally, instead you stream the songs, in from what I can hear good quality. They have a huge collection that is growing. It has several ways you can use it, one is payed by commercials, you can buy day passes, as well as a monthly subscription that both do not have commercials.
You can make customized playlists, or just make your own radio station based on music you like, really nice.
It is currently in Beta, and on Invitation only, except for the premium monthly service, I tried several times to sign up for the premium support but it was failing, I think it had to do with the beta, I did not have an invitation so I wrote them requesting that they fixed the payment system so I could get an account.
They replyed back saying there were some problems with the payment system, but they also sent me an invitation, I have now tried it for a Day and I like it a lot, It has a native client for Mac OSX, and the commercials are not intrusive at all something I can definatly live with, although I will for sure upgrade to the premium system just to show I support this.
There is one downside though, since it is streaming there is no way of transferring the file to a portable media player, hopefully that is only tempoarary, or at least some kind of mobile client.
Anyway, you can find it here: www.spotify.com I do not have any invitations yet, so if you want to join you can try the premium service, or wait untill i upgrade to the premium servie and then maybe If I know you I can arrange an invitation.
