To Premium, or not to Premium?

So in music news: Spotify has gone completely immoral.

A short description of this online jukebox, for those of you don’t know what Spotify is and therefore who I can only assume enjoy silence and loneliness and sadness (but not the emo type of sadness because for that you need a soundtrack comprised of My Chemical Romance’s 2nd album, which by necessity negates silence), is that it popped up out of nowhere (Sweden) just over 3 years ago. It was a program, not on a webpage, it streamed music almost instantly, and had an unexpectedly vast song catalogue, we are talking a medium sized HMV (R.I.P.) here – not the one on Oxford Street, good lord no, that place is colossal. We are talking perhaps the Camden High Street branch on a good stock day.

It was a pretty minor thing amongst pretty major music lovers for about three months until suddenly the common man heard about it and membership EXPLODED, and the best part was that it was free, wholly free and nothing but free. In fact, that last part isn’t strictly true because in between every ten songs or so an annoying Swedish man by the name of Jonathan with a fake American accent (which somehow manages to be more irritating than a real American accent. Why would you fake something and not at least improve it slightly?) would pop up for 30 seconds and announce something called “Spotify Premium”, an option where you could listen to all the music but WITHOUT ADVERTS which in effect meant “without Jonathan” and effectively accounted for why he was so annoying.

However, it was a tenner per month, for the mere privilege of losing Jonathan (and now I think about it, Basshunter. He was in a lot of the adverts too. At least their advertising department had it spot on in terms of annoying people you’d want to get rid of) so for most people, the free music was too good to pay for (THE IRONY). Thus, Spotify premium, Jonathan and Basshunter were ridiculed, scoffed at, cyber-heckled if you will.

Fast forward 2 years, in which time Spotify now counted its membership in the hundreds of millions, or maybe thousands of millions, or even billions of millions, either way there were loads of people, more than I was taught to count up to the last time I studied maths. And they were all hopelessly devoted to the green/grey stuff (the Spotify interface), addicted beyond their wildest dreams with their Windows Media Player and iTunes confined to a dusty corner of their screen.

And then disaster struck.

Spotify announced all of a sudden it was restricting the music allowance to just 10 hours per month and 5 plays per song. Basically cutting off our music supply. Initial reactions were of panicked assurance:

“But…But surely I don’t already use 10 hours per month, it’ll be fine…wont it? WONT IT?!?!”

“5 times per song…I generally need to listen to Ellie Goulding’s rendition of Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ 6 times to fully analyse the differences…”

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”

Panicked. Assurance.

But there was a way around this curtailment of our basic human rights:
PAYING FOR SPOTIFY PREMIUM.

And thus the panicked assurance turned to panic buying as those thousands who had used up their 10 hour allocation in the first, well, 10 hours, suddenly needed music. Spotify had played the Nestle trick on us and got us addicted to something free, then pulled the music out from under our ears and gave us the non-option of lose it or pay for it.

Disclaimer: don’t get me wrong, giving free Nestle milk to babies in Africa so they are weaned off their mothers’ breast milk and get addicted to the Nestle milk and then suddenly making the mothers pay for it is way worse than this, but that’s for a different blog post…not written by me. I do music, travelling, London and complaining about irrelevant stuff. What?! I can’t do everything. If you want to know more about it, here’s a link, go knock yourselves out.

You could almost hear Jonathan laughing in his ridiculous fake American accent, him and Basshunter helping themselves to a gluttonous Smorgasbord laid out on an Ikea table whilst ABBA played in the background, not on Spotify, but live, hired with the money coming in from Spotify premium subscriptions for this moment of Swedish triumph.

And so, as above: Spotify has gone completely immoral. Do we give our money to these thieving human rights violators because we need and love the music and hey, a tenner is what I used to spend on one CD about five years ago anyway whilst now for that price I can get all the music I want, on my phone no less. Or do we stand defiant and firm to our moral principles and say “MUSIC IS JUST A BUNCH OF SOUNDS THAT I CAN’T EVEN SEE OR TOUCH SO IT SHOULD BE FREE! Back to illegally downloading I go…”

I have abstained from the ten pound indulgence for almost a year. But now it’s a summer of discontent, working hard, sheltering indoors from the rain and needing music on my phone to drown out the complaints of tourists during the Olympics about how the Picadilly and Victoria lines’ shades of blue aren’t distinct enough.

So today, as I finally tire of my limited free supply and find it no longer sufficient, I am faced with the age old (if you’re a 1 year old) question: To premium or not to premium?
Thoughts, comments and answers to my conundrum appreciated below.