Pay for music? Who does that anymore?
Ask yourself, though. When was the last time you paid for music? When was the last time you logged into your iTunes account and bought an entire album? Or even just a song?
Even more unlikely - when was the last time you went to Best Buy or FYE and spent an entire $10 on a record? When was the last time you bought an album from your favorite artist the first day it came out?
Well, now there's a remedy for all the folks out there who never want to pay for music. Instead of continuing your illegal ways of downloading, the industry is churning out music subscription services that you can pay for to gain access to almost anything.
The latest and perhaps greatest of these services, called Spotify, just made its entrance into the U.S. market last week. It's available for free if you can manage to scrounge an invite from a friend or from Klout.com, which has been giving away invites to new users.
But if you want to try out the highly anticipated service immediately - and I certainly recommend you do - you can just pay the nominal $5 fee for the first month. After a while of toying around with the free version, you'll probably want to sign up anyway.
Spotify is basically Pandora or Grooveshark on steroids. Along with Rdio, these new subscription services are reinventing the way people listen to music. Spotify is the one that has impressed me most. When you manage to get an invite, or just pay the $5 to start up, you download a desktop app that will contain your entire Spotify library.
It starts off interestingly enough: Spotify takes all of your local music files and puts them in a library. Within seconds, everything you have in iTunes - yes, including all your illegally downloaded songs - is in your Spotify library. That's cool, but it's nothing special.
However, the hook is this: You can stream any song. Similar to Grooveshark, you can search any artist and play any song at any time. If you like it enough, there's a link to purchase the music - but why bother? You've paid your $5 dues, so just stream music the entire time. It's the future, anyway.
With the $5-per-month plan, you can download Spotify's iPhone app, which enables you to listen to certain songs or playlists that you make available when offline. That's not an impressive feature, at all - you still have to use up space on your phone to store those offline tracks. But if you have 3G (which, c'mon, it's 2011, you should have an iPhone or Android with 3G), you can splurge for the $10-per-month plan, which I'll probably cross over to soon.
For $10 a month, you get the entire online streaming service on your phone. You can listen to anything you want at any time, no matter where you are, without using memory on your phone, for only $10 a month. That's the cost of a single CD, for those of you who can't remember.
To me, it seems obvious that Spotify should dominate this market. Rdio is cool, and it will certainly have its niche, but Spotify is the more impressive service. The only way it will be challenged - and this is a heavyweight contender - is if Apple's iCloud can match it.
The iCloud will definitely be something people want to wait around for, and maybe it's prudent to hold off on buying that $10/month Spotify plan until then. With Apple's new iPhone operating system and iCloud (assuming it doesn't suck), Apple may have cornered the digital streaming world already.
One thing that is a forgone conclusion, though, is the end result. With all of these services trying to earn the little money people are willing to pay for music, there will be heightened competition in the market.
The people who win are the music listeners. Consumers get a better catalog of music and more for their dollar - if they're willing to spend it.
