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Old 02-21-2012, 08:58 AM   #10
Undertoad
Radical Centrist
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Cottage of Prussia
Posts: 31,423
The reason I had to have a phone: Spotify

As a dedicated music lover there are times in my life where I have bought one CD per week. That's about $600 a year to *own* a limited subset of all the music I would like to listen to at any given moment.

That's not to mention the various hauling around of crates of albums in various formats, and the buying/installation/hauling of shelving to stow it all.

Arrive the mp3 era and now it could be made portable! But converting all this into sound files took weeks of planning and execution, and at the end of it, I had 100GB of files. No portable player would load up the entire set. And now it was necessary to manage this collection, another pain in the ass. And if the hard drive takes a crap, it's all gone, unless you had the resources to entirely back it up.

Well, streaming music platforms make almost all of this suddenly unnecessary. Instead of owning all this stuff, you are renting it. Instead of $600 a year you pay $120. Instead of having access to only what you have bought, you have access to 99%[1] of everything[2]. Instead of having to sample it in tidbits over the net, you just hit play and have access to complete works.

Using Spotify has been a big personal boon to me, and I've posted about it before. This thing has opened up major sectors of music and brought back a lot of personal joy of music to me.

Now. Instead of owning a separate music playing device, one has just a phone, and Spotify streams the music to the phone. Instead of buying a shit ton of memory for a device, the files arrive as needed and are played, not permanently stored. Suddenly 99% of everything is portable[3] and cheap.

When the light went on in my head that streaming meant all of the above, that the phone could receive streams, and there was a Spotify app, well that was it; that was the moment I had to have a phone. Because I knew it would not just be a toy for me, but really improve my life, you know?



[1] 99% is a necessary oversimplification. My finding is that it is everything except Pink Floyd and the Beatles and other money-grubbing greedhead acts. I expect there is an economics reason why they are not there, such as their management still makes more money from old people buying CDs at a rate of $600 a year. But I have heard all the Floyd I will ever hear[1a], and I can play almost everything in my head from memory -- without incurring a charge for songwriting royalties. (YET. I'm sure they are working on that.)

[1a] No need for Floyd when there is Mogwai. Because Mogwai!

[2] I am not aware of the coverage of Spotify's Jazz/Classical music collection.

[3] As long as there is a data connection to your phone. People who live where cell towers are unavailable will not be happy with this new lifestyle. You may have to wait 6 months... or install Wi-Fi everywhere you need music.
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