Spotify: One Piece of my Digital Music Puzzle

Academic work has really predominated for a while but next week is reading week, so there's some respite on that front. I wanted to talk about Spotify because for me it's an important piece of the puzzle along with last.fm which tracks everything digital I listen to. Spotify then allows me to follow-up what last.fm recommends at album length with last.fm recording my listening further. It's simply a virtuous circle, it's not perfect but more on that another time.

Spotify after the jump.

Update: Spotify now have gapless playback, awesome!



I know Spotify gets a bad rap in the press. Artists with new music coming out probably have to ask if they're undercutting themselves and losing sales but for back catalogue it has got to be an earner. Even with the derisory rates offered by Spotify reported in the media (as known unknowns) in recent months it seems that for the right music at the right time there are real earning opportunities.

In conjunction with recommendation algorithms like, yes, last fm there is a real possibility for users to unearth music that the media or their friends will never bring to their attention--I know it's that way for me. It's in cases like this where the opportunity to earn something is surely to be welcomed. I know recommendation algorithms are reviled in some quarters as a "soulless" method of discovery, but I contend that so much musical similiarity can be mapped by listenership and historical association. In other words, the ghost in the machine is in fact us and our choices. By giving us a window to listenership, recommendation algorithms commonly bunch together artists that are historically and sonically associated. In my opinion doing the easy part of critics' jobs, at least up to a point but I digress.

There's a lot of complication introduced to the financial equation once you start differentiating the interests of record labels and artists. It stands to reason that for the top six or so major corporate record companies with multiple imprints and thousands of artists this is a much better proposition. Their game is fractions, not absolute numbers. It doesn't matter which artist gets the plays, rather it's a question of who's artist does. From then on in it's passive income--the best kind. Even if it's not huge, no one has to raise a finger.

Now, this is not a plug but I do have to say that I am a paying Spotify user. The unlimited service works for me very well and at a price bellow a single cinema ticket. That's not to say it's perfect for my wants: I'm sure there's at least a marginal case for raising the bit rate but this is a question of technical road maps, my real gripe however is the lack of gapless playback.

I love albums and having superfluous gaps dropped into them when there should not be lead-in time between tracks (like in the case of a fade between the current track and the following track) can be a trifle disconcerting at times. It's not the end of the world, but knowing that it's just a property of their client software (not the streaming service itself or the .ogg files they use for audio) makes me somewhat disapointed. Spotify is the perfect vehicle for introducing people to albums and providing them with a large transactional library of music, much like google.

Just get rid of the gaps and let people know what the real deal for artists is, the second point applies just as much to the labels that benefit from spotify