spotify the difference.
OK, I’ll come clean. I have a bit of a CD habit. Well, a lot of a CD habit. I visit a music store in Leamington called Head (formerly Fopp) most weekends. The prices range from £2 for old stuff to £10 for chart stuff, which means temptation is never far away. But this may be about to change.
Yesterday I read a piece in the Guardian about Spotify, a new online music delivery system which is completely free. You don’t get to ‘own’ the music, but you can just play what you want whenever you want. Which is as good as in my book. The Guardian called Spotify ‘a potentially life-changing experience’, and having played around with it for a day, I can see why. You can listen by genre, make playlists, search, shuffle, skip… anything you can do with iTunes except download. But best of all you can be adventurous – check out stuff you’d never normally listen to because you don’t have to pay a penny for it. Is there a catch? Well a very small one. Every 25 minutes you have to listen to a 30-second ad – but I can live with that. (And if you really can’t you can pay £9.99 a month for an ad-free service). I can see my laptop is going to be hooked up to my stereo system any day now and I won’t have to worry about drowning in a sea of CDs.