Technology has allowed us to hear the music we want, when we want, and usually for free. Mark Robertson runs down the options for enjoying a tune in the digital age and asks, with consumers calling the shots, will the musicians ever survive? Illustrations: Mary Hutchison
T o paraphrase the Creme Egg adverts, when it comes to music, how do you hear yours? Streaming over the internet? Nicking stuff from torrents on the web? A bag full of goodies from Fopp? Crates of obscure vinyl from your local specialist emporium?
Hair-splitting over which has more inherent value: a piece of vinyl in your hands or an MP3 on your mobile phone is a moot point now; the bottom line is we want to hear music when and how we please, without worrying too much about the details. After all, by the time any technology makes it into our lives we know it has a limited shelf life: as one platform – vinyl, CD, Minidisc, MP3 – arrives, another is lined up in the wings, waiting to take its place. As with all genuine commercial innovations in the web 2.0 world – Love Film, BBC’s iPlayer, even match.com – the future success of artists and labels relies less on their marketing message and more on their methods of delivery. When Spotify arrived with us in 2008 it was immodestly expected to change our lives, much like iPods and other portable music players were supposed to almost ten years ago. Today, the standalone music player is on the way out, with mobile phones becoming the place not only to play, but also to download music. The song remains the same, it’s only the player that changes.
So what are the options afforded to you to find, listen to and keep music? The first port of call is those services that offer the chance to listen online, but not download music. Spotify (www.spotify.com) is the current site du jour offering free unlimited listening to their 3.5 million tracks as long as you don’t mind adverts piped between your tunes. If you can’t hack the ads then there’s a premium subscription for £9.99 a month. Similarly, one- time rebel Napster has gone legit, offering a £5 a month subscription for access to their catalogue. Last.fm is the king of online radio: a social networking and music site that popularised the ‘if you like this, you’ll love this’ system of listening and recommending. More generally, there are thousands of straightforward online radio stations offering streams of pretty much every possible kind of music. Start somewhere like www.streamfinder.com or www.radio- directory.com.
As far as buying and downloading music goes, iTunes remains the daddy of the retailers, offering over 10 million tracks for download. Apple recently upgraded its iTunes store to offer tracks without Digital Rights Management (DRM), agreeing a deal with the ‘Big Four’ record labels to remove the built-in protection that had previously limited the use of purchased music files. The likes of Amazon and HMV (www.hmv.com/ downloads) also offer DRM- free downloads but have less comprehensive catalogues. (amazon.co.uk)
Aside from the big guns, there are several excellent specialist sites offering downloads by the track or album like 7digital (www.7digital.com), Bleep (bleep.com), Boomkat (www.boomkat.com), and local site tentracks (www.tentracks.co.uk). eMusic (www.emusic.com), which bills itself as the ‘indie iTunes’, offers a number of tracks for a monthly subscription starting at £9.99 for 24
TECHNOLOGY SPECIAL
HOW IT WORKS: SPOTIFY ■ Spotify is a streaming program which lets users listen to music online for free. There are currently about 3.8 million tracks available to a user base of over one million. You can stream as many tracks as you like and it’s all completely legal. ■ Spotify was launched for public use in late 2008, founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon and developed by a team working in Stockholm where the research and development departments are still based. Its headquarters are in London. It’s available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain, and plans for further expansion are in the works. ■ It’s legal because Spotify have struck deals with pretty much all the major labels and an ever-increasing number of smaller independents. Spotify pays for the right to distribute music, funding itself through advertisements and subscription charges. ■ A playlist feature allows users to create playlists and share and edit them with other users, and a ‘radio’ feature can be used to generate random playlists based on particular genres and decades. There’s also a link which lets you buy most of the commercially available tracks. ■ There are a couple of drawbacks. Unless you pay for Premium membership (currently 99p for a day pass or £9.99 for a month) you have to listen to adverts at periodic intervals between songs. Unlike with downloading, you can’t save music onto your computer or MP3 player – you can only listen online. It’s also restricted to personal, non-commercial use, so cafés and shops etc can’t use it on their business premises. (Lizzie Mitchell)
songs, just 42p a track, and there’s a similar deal to be had at www.mp3.com. The final option is not one we endorse, but recognise is a huge part of web activity: illegal downloading. Bit torrents are popular file- sharing tools that allow users to download large files by accessing the data on several different computers simultaneously. Thanks to
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