The way we listen to music is changing. From people wearing ungodly large headphones on the train, to hipsters rocking out to their vinyl tracks, it seems like there is a "new thing" with respect to listening to music that comes out every single day.
I'm not saying I miss the days of listening to my Discman, but it is interesting to me how many of my friends choose to not own a music collection at all anymore. Streaming is the new kid on the block, and it looks like more and more people are turning to services like Spotify for their musical needs than good old iTunes or Amazon.
Call me old fashioned, but having access to the MP3 files locally on my hard drive gives me some sort of comfort, whether the MP3s are purchased and downloaded from an online source like Amazon or old-school ripped from CDs I've had since the olden days. But storing the MP3 files locally, as I'm sure many of you know, has a plethora of drawbacks: hard drive corruption, space limitations, compressed file extensions that can wreck sound quality, the laborious task of syncing your mobile devices with your library, etc etc etc.
Now there are two services that take care of all of those problems for you, and unsurprisingly, they revolve around the now-ubiquitous storage solution known as "the cloud". One of these I'm sure the vast majority of you have heard of, and the other is a bit less mainstream...
Spotify
For the price of roughly $10 a month, you receive virtually limitless access to music, ad-free, through Spotify Premium. Unless you're listening to music that can only be bought off a Memorex-burned-CD at a merch counter after a show that is sold-out at 95 tickets, the tunes you're looking for almost certainly will be available through Spotify.
Spotify doesn't require you to "own" any music of your own -- you just stream whatever you choose, the interface is similar to that of iTunes, and it is compatible with essentially every mobile platform (Android, iOS, Blackberry, etc.) on the market.
Google Play
This is a slightly more conventional option that meets you half-way (if owning all of your own music is one extreme, and Spotify is the polar opposite). Google Play allows you to upload your entire music collection to the Google ether, and you can, once again, access it through your mobile device, computer/laptop, iPads, etc. The service also allows streaming (similar to Spotify), but you can upload up to 20,000 of your own songs to Google for free (and additional songs for additional cash), eliminating the need to worry about back-ups, redundancy, and transferring of music between PCs and devices when you buy something new.
Now I consider myself to be a pretty technologically-savvy guy, but I have been hesitant to adopt either of these services. I also listen to a lot of music, pretty much all the time, and enjoy having a large library that I can carry around with my iPhone and back up on my hard drive...
But that doesn't make sense anymore, right? Why carry it on a physical hard drive? Let Google or Spotify carry it for you, and you won't have to pull your hair out when your hard drive crashes and you lose thousands of songs and playlists. Maybe a hard drive crash is the chief impetus behind switching to a service like Spotify for a lot of users -- it would be damn-near impossible to replicate my entire music collection again if I lost everything.
I would say that the only thing holding me back is the fact that I will be completely dependent on the internet for my music-listening pleasures if I cross over to either Spotify or Google. We do have unlimited internet pretty much everywhere nowadays, but with companies like Verizon continuing to throttle bandwidth and limiting access to 4G/3G connections, I am hesitant to part with my albums on my drive. Call me old fashioned, I suppose.
How do you guys listen to music? Spotify? Google? Keeping it local on your drive through iTunes? Do you think the trend of moving towards streaming will continue, or are people going to stand firm by their "physical" copies of media?
Way to spend 30 minutes rehashing something everybody has known for half a decade.
You also left out like 5 other good streaming services.
Red arrow me if I'm telling the truth.
"I would say that the only thing holding me back is the fact that I will be completely dependent on the internet for my music-listening pleasures if I cross over to either Spotify or Google."
I don't know about Google Play but Spotify actually does let its users listen to music without an internet connection. with Spotify Premium
Yep, Spotify Premium has "offline mode" as well as the necessary mobile apps for iPhone, Android, etc. I'm a huge fan of Spotify, though one of its drawbacks is that, as extensive as its library is, there are shortcomings as has been mentioned.
Spotify is missing to much of my "kind of music". Apart from that, I think Spotify is a pretty nice service. Haven't tried Google Play so far, maybe I give it a shot once I got some spare time.
Rhapsody has been doing a streaming service for years before spotify, don't know why it never went mainstream
The reason why I won't do spotify is that it and pandora eat up way too much data when I use it on my smartphone. With all these carriers making us pay so much money per GB of data, it becomes really expensive. I love them on my desktop, but if I don't have access to wifi, I have to be very careful of how long I stream music from those sites. Using those services to discover music on my desktop and then having a physical copy on a hard-drive eliminates that problem and so far I'm happy sticking to this configuration.
I prefer hypem -> popular. Does nobody else use this thing?
Spotify is phenomenal...
Its all about Soundcloud
I'll be honest. There is nothing like owning music. It just feels awesome to be able to control exactly what I want and have all the best songs I've listened to in many different places (in the car, Spotify, pandora, parties, etc). Pandora great for me. It helps me find a lot of new music that I haven't been exposed to, but in the end I like to have it on my Itunes to put on my Iphone, computer and every other apple device. The whole thing is seamless and I am used to it.
That's my take
ITunes is obsolete, but not because of Spotify. That's been around for years; before Spotify there was Napster 2.0.
ITunes is obsolete because Amazon is cheaper.
Grooveshark!!!
Haha, there are only two explanations for making this goofy statement: 1) you're actually a hipster in secret (not just in jest, but literally!), or 2) you didn't adequately research Spotify before writing this simultaneously glowing and sarcastic prose. Spotify is not bad for indie, I'll at least give it that much. But, I don't know if anyone's heard of this band called "The Beatles", I know they're pretty obscure. There's this group called "Led Zeppelin", not sure if anyone's heard of them ever. There's this band by the name of "Pink Floyd", don't know if anyone is familiar with their work in the slightest.
Grooveshark is even better than Spotify imo.
I use Spotify, Pandora, IHeartRadio, and Google Music but I agree there is something about having iTunes that makes it your collection.
I'm bitter thinking about how many years I spent building and honing my collection of music to the jealousy of my friends, now they all have a free app that has everything. Feels like I have an extensive VHS collection and I'm in denial about this new wave of DVDs that everyone is adopting cause it's the same thing as my tapes right? Right?!
What about youtube? It has nearly every song ever made, and it's free.
YouTube quality is the absolute worst and it's clunky IMHO. And...VEVO...
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