How many is a Brazilian???
I’ve always had my reservations about storing my documents in the cloud, especially music. I always felt as though music in the cloud A) took up too much space to be effective for large collections like mine, and B) I couldn’t convince myself to spend hours uploading multiple gigabytes of mp3′s… Seemed like a waste of time since I listen to music on either my MacBook Air or my iPhone.
My concern about storing documents in the cloud is basically the security and reliability (is it secure, and will I have access to a wifi source when I need it?). I don’t create and use a lot of documents in my personal life though, and those I do create or reuse are easily stored on my laptop so I can avoid those issues pretty easily.
Back to the music though… Thanks to a suggestion from @LDNcalling on Twitter in the recent past though I’ve been experimenting with the free version of Spotify and decided to get the Premium account over the weekend. Now, without having the need for saving large quantities of mp3′s in the cloud I can listen to their entire database of 15 million songs for $10 a month from my iPhone, MacBook Air, work computer etc.
With the premium account you get “more” but the two things that meant the most to me were higher bitrates on songs (320 vs. 160 on the free accounts), and no advertisements! I’m now contemplating deleting a lot of those rarely played mp3′s from my MacBook Air and just listening to those tunes on Spotify when I want to hear them, thereby saving me precious memory! It will also load any songs on the hard drive to integrate everything into one interface.
Listening to music that’s new to me is one of my favorite things in life, and there are entire collections of albums to hear! For example, as a big Gary Numan fan I have a bunch of his albums, but nowhere near ALL of them. With Spotify I can listen to ALL of those older, harder to find albums or those I just didn’t want to fork over the money for at the time because there was something else I wanted more. New music? Just pick some genres or do searches for musicians/bands that you want to hear. Their database is large, but you may not find every single thing you want to try out. Still, I think it would have to be rare, or very new.
On the downside, I do NOT want to connect my account to Facebook, which you are strongly encouraged to do during the sign up process. I don’t care to broadcast every song I listen to for one thing, and I prefer to keep all my social networks separated. It’s just me.
I’m pretty psyched over Spotify premium. I consider it something of a customizable, Internet based radio. And I hate listening to the radio! Around here it’s all classic rock, pop, country, pop-country, and talk radio… Give me something more unique, thank you very much!
I have 9 “invitations” for a free month or something like that, so if you’re interested in checking out Spotify premium let me know. Contact me through Twitter and DM me your email address, and I’ll send an invitation to you. Or leave a comment on this blog post.
If your listening habits are anything like mine, I don’t see any way you will regret the decision to make Spotify your primary source for tunes.