Editorial opinion: Spotify premium

In a week that Spotify partnered with Virgin Media and confirmed that a US launch was close (but no cigar just yet), setting up a landing page for US users to register for invites via email, Paul Reed shares his experiences of plugging into Spotify premium, what it means for the industry and the potential impact on the experiential value of music.

I bought into Spotify premium last week week, giving it a go mainly because of the head spinning variety of ways to access Spotify’s huge database of tracks.

Moping to the Red House Painters retrospective in your front room through decent speakers? No problem. Saving that Diplo play-list offline for the journey into work? Easy.

Using it as the office jukebox, jumping from Josh T Pearson to Miles Davis? Satisfying. Rediscovering tracks and artists left by the wayside in pursuit of new musical thrills? Fantastic. And it’s worth £9.99 a month to get rid of those cringe-worthy ads. So, is it game over for everything else?

Not exactly. Spotify’s strengths are also its weaknesses. I tend to use it to skip around different tracks as a kind of personal radio station as opposed to a ‘music discovery’ service or experiential way of listening to albums.

It could be the ‘related artists’ feature or the amount of intriguing play-lists out there but something about Spotify doesn’t invite listening to entire albums and it can make for a somewhat caffeinated, jittery listening experience that I don’t need when I want to get lost in the new Antlers album again.

You can start to feel that there is a huge ocean somewhere out there but that you are splashing around in a puddle, an apt metaphor for the web itself I think.

There is also the very real issue of artists not actually making any money out of it, with Lady Gaga reportedly receiving just over £100 for more than 1m plays of ‘Poker Face’ last year. Just this week, in a move that perfectly illustrates the emphasis on multiple platforms, Spotify announced a partnership with Virgin Media in an exclusive deal that will offer Virgin's 4m UK subscribers access to 13m tracks on Spotify through various platforms including TV, computer and mobile.

The dependence on other devices to get the most out of Spotify is significant and as much as I enjoy the immediacy of this connected technology it could easily turn into a house of cards. In the same way as the vast chain stores that are rapidly becoming the dinosaurs of music retail, Spotify essentially offers an illusion of unlimited choice. Where are The Beatles and Arcade Fire and can it be a legitimate library of popular music without such artists?

Finally, there is also the big issue of ownership. I don’t agree that we’ve seen the last generation to put real value on the concept of owning music. A Spotify subscription is never going to stop me from spending days off in stores such as Rough Trade with knowledgeable staff that I, and many others still trust as gatekeepers to new and exciting worlds of musical possibility.

Spotify is by no means a one stop solution for the music industry but it conjures up the key questions facing music businesses. These revolve around ownership, immediate access, the experiential value of music and how companies need to innovate and fulfil this need beyond the traditional sale of recorded music, capitalising as we enter the era of the cloud.