Spotify, and ownership versus access

"Ownership may be great but the future is about access."

Thanks to a very alert set of twitter friends, I managed to get Spotify the day it became available in the US. I love the access to so many songs, along with the easy to create and share playlists. OK, and the chance to check out what’s hot in Finland at the moment is pretty cool as well. I’ve got the free version, meaning I can do whatever I want as long as it’s based off of my desktop computer. $5 a month means synching to my iPhone, something I’m strongly considering trying out since I really like the service.

One thing I’ve been wondering though, is Spofity really that different from older music services that are/were based on subscription rather than purchasing? Up until this point, I, and I suspect many others, have turned up our collective noses at the idea that our main means of ingesting music was not one where we actually owned that music. Thus, I figured, was the rabid success of iTunes – Apple figured out a great system for downloading music that gave listeners ownership of the songs that they were paying money to listen to. Spotify has made me wonder if this, however, is becoming an antiquated model.

I have this giant stack of CDs that have been breathlessly waiting for me to upload them to my computer. Admittedly, this is the first time I’ve really considered doing such a thing. Essential music, yes. But I’ve never considered doing so with my entire music library. Up until a few years ago, transferring files from old computer to new (or simply backing up for a reformatting) involved copious efforts and organization. The idea of having to potentially rerip all of the CDs, or to have to deal with what to do with the gigs upon gigs of files to deal with in a major move, just seemed completely overwhelming to me.

Now, it’s just a matter of keeping your Livedrive or Dropbox nice and synched. And, now that I have that ease in backing up, it’s almost ironic that I look at the stack of CDs I have and wonder “what’s the point?” Sure, maybe the Korean hip-hop or the Japanese Para Para CDs might get uploaded, the sort of stuff where I feel lucky to find people that have heard of these bands, much less that own the same albums as I. But the Green Day? The U2? Surely there are already enough copies of these sitting out in the giant sprawling cloud that is the internet to feed third world countries (assuming such countries find 1s and 0s appetizing, that is). And I have no doubt that, even if Spotify eventually makes way for the next music service, that whatever takes it’s place will have all of that music, plus some.

So I’m totally thinking Spotify is The Next Big Thing, music-wise. And a big reason is that they’ve gotten their timing right. The idea of ownership has always been a shifting and tenuous concept, from public land rights in Europe in the middle ages to ownership of people up until a century or so ago (and even less than that, depending on your nation of choice). And we’ve hit that point in history where we’re wondering, “Why do I need to own this album that 90% of the people I know also own, when we can just share the same copy?” Blame the Green movement/fad, blame a recession that causes us to wonder why the heck we own all this crap, anyways, blame the impending Singularity where we’re all just going to being one writhing entity, anyhow. Or, just blame the fact that we now live in an era where knowing how to find information is more useful than actually knowing the information itself. We’ve moved from being nodes to being connectors. So I can pay from $0 - $5 a month for unlimited access to a massive store of tunes that’s shared with a massive number of people, rather then for a piddly number of songs I can clutch to my chest and decree are mine, all mine, my precious! I, for one, welcome our new music sharing overlords.