The joy of Spotify

Like a few who have ploughed through the Steve Jobs biography, I am now heartily tired of early adopters, those strange men who are always at the front of the queue at the Apple shop when some dismal new gewgaw is coming out. I myself am a classic late adopter, discovering the new and exciting only when it’s old and worn out.

I had a CD player years after everyone else; a tribesman in Papua New Guinea was the only person to have an iPod after me; and now I am faintly obsessed by Spotify, the music-streaming service out there on the internet, wherever that is. For a mere £9.99 a month, which is just under a tenner more than I want to pay, you can play any piece of music it has stored in its large computers any number of times, and it has extraordinarily large computers. There’s almost a feeling of triumph when you look for a song and it’s not there.

Needless to say, I have the freebie option. For this, mothwallets can play a maximum of ten hours of music a month, and play a particular song up to five times. After every two or three songs there’s a 30-second radio ad for some product you not only don’t need but also swear never to buy, even if you did need it. This is the price we have to pay for being wilful, contrary and mean, but the limits thus imposed do concentrate the mind rather.

Every song I choose has to count, so I use the service not as a replacement for my CD collection — which you might do if you were paying £9.99 a month — but as an adjunct, even a research tool.