The intersection between music and technology has always been a difficult one. Since the heady days of Napster, the "traditional" music industry has been (at best) wary of new technology, and in North America it's been especially difficult. Even when companies have tried to promote downloadable music, outside of iTunes it's usually fallen short.

If you're wondering what I mean by that last--at least faintly cryptic--comment, it relates to the time I received a "speed of light internet license" from Bell Sympatico. Now, Bell Sympatico is--like most internet providers--overpriced, so the fact that they'd given me a whole fifteen dollars to spend on music from their online music store seemed like a major victory. Though I usually just buy CDs, I decided to purchase an album by an artist who I felt deserved support, so bought mc chris' "mc chris is dead" .

After a confusing few hours of wrestling with licenses in windows media player and a general confusion of how I was supposed to get this music onto any other device, I just gave up and downloaded the album again from a less-reputable source. (Having already paid for the music, I thought it was fair game.)

So buying music online still sucks, especially if you're not an iTunes convert. Then there's the difficulty of discovering new music. For example, when someone tells me about a band I should listen to, I generally have to resort to one of two things--MySpace, to listen to the tracks they've uploaded there, or YouTube, to trawl through their back catalogue of videos or (as is sometimes the case) fan-made videos. It's an unsatisfying experience, and with the radio and music channels a wasteland of Nickeback, there seems to be nowhere to turn.


But recently I've been travelling, and been lucky enough to spend enough time in the UK to spend some time using the Spotify service. I'd heard so many tweets raving about it from Europe-based Twitterers that I had to give it a go, and I'm glad I did.

Using a strange sort of peer-to-peer streaming service, Spotify offers up pretty much all of the music you can think of streaming instantly (genuinely without a delay) and all you have to pay is a short (30 seconds long) advert about every 4-5 songs or so. It's not a perfect solution--the adverts certainly break your mood if you're listening to something atmospheric--but as long as you think of them as slightly annoying skits (like on a rap album!) you can live with them. And if you really can't, for £9.99 a month (in the UK--translating to about $18) you can listen to as much music as you want with no adverts.


It's all quite incredible, really. It isn't perfect--if you like a wide range of music, you are going to stump it (it doesn't have music from every label ever) but most things you can imagine wanting to listen to are there, even the odd out-of-print or hard to find album. In using it, though, I got very, very said. After all, Spotify isn't confirmed for a North American release, and even then, like other fantastic inventions (Netflix streaming, anyone?) there's a significant chance it could be released in the USA but not here.

That would be a travesty, but that it's taking the service so long to reach these shores already is an absurdity. It's a perfect vehicle for music discovery--wonder what a band sound like? Why not listen to one of their albums?--and in its free form, at least, doesn't signal the death knell for music sales. Indeed, emboldened by the amount of new music I've heard recently, I've already bought 3 albums in the past week with more to come.

Once you've tried it, you won't be able to deny Spotify's superiority to any other service out there. And you'll pine desperately for it to come to Canada.