Disruptive technology and the future of media

A few months back I got an invite to Spotify, a streaming music service available in Sweden and some other markets, that I have used increasingly since. The basic service is free for invited users and once every ten songs or so they play one or two 30 second commercials. For a fee of 99SEK/month (about $12) you get the service free from commericals and they have a thousands and thousands of albums to choose from.

I must say that this service is brilliant in several ways. When I first started to use it I was happy to discover that the audio quality was totally acceptable and that large parts of my favourite music was available. Now, a bit later, I find myself changing my music listening behaviour due to the nature of the service. You can click on an artist name to see other music by that artist, and you can click on an album name to see what other songs are on that album. This means that you can surf from artist to artist on compilation albums and listen to find new music that you like. This is something that prior to Spotify you could only do using peer to peer file sharing and that was quite a bit less convenient than this solution, putting all legal issues aside for a moment.

So, this way I can search for the title of a film I saw a while back that I liked, Lars and the Real Girl, click on Nat King Cole, find out that an artist named Bebel Gilberto has remixed him. A bit down in the list of albums from that artist I find a collection album named 20 ways to float through walls which sounds kind of cool. One of the artists, Snooze, catches my attention. It turns out I like several songs from the album Goingmobile. All this in a matter of seconds, guided by interesting group names, song names and album covers. Doing the same thing using any other technology that I know of would have taken hours.

One of the most encouraging things about this is that it shows that once the media industry moves past just trying to stop unstoppable file sharing and allow creative people to build something better then they can win their customers back.

I have feeling that the attitude change needed before Spotify could spring into existence would not have happened without the pressure from thepiratebay.org and others.

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