Paying for music is something a lot of us have never done and will never do. Spotify has come closest to tempting me but it just seems like a waste of money to me. Pre-internet, i can remember buying a handful of cd’s and recording the rest from radio to tapes or from TV to VHS…
Music sounds better when it’s free
These days, when i’m driving long distance, i’ll listen to the radio rather than listen to my iPod. Why? Because despite having 3000+ songs on my iPod, i get bored easily… there’s nothing worse than overplaying a song you like until you no longer like it and that’s what happens if you’re not adding new music in to the mix on a regular basis. For me, iTunes and Spotify do a great job with this but there’s one slight problem – they’re not free.
For quite some time now i’ve used YouTube as my main music player… i’ll create private playlists and add a bunch of music videos to them, then just leave them playing in the background. The beauty of this set up is that you can generally hear new music as soon as it’s released, plus there’s millions of cover versions… if you just want a drum cover of a song, no problem…
Maybe you’d prefer guitar only?
How about a cover by an unknown artist?
And then of course there’s the original version… official video, live videos, fan made video, video with lyrics on it… you name it, you got it… this is where all other services can’t compete. You don’t necessarily want to hear the same studio version of a song over and over… but you may want to listen to 10 different live versions you don’t end up ‘killing’ your enjoyment of the song.
Mobile Apps
Spotify & iTunes in particular are obviously pretty mobile friendly. Both offer some sort of local storage options. This is the one disadvantage of YouTube – you can’t really store videos offline (you can but its hassle). However, when it comes to streaming, YouTube’s mobile app offering is pretty solid, plus they’ve a nice mobile website too so no matter what device you’re on, you’ll never be stuck.
I’ve seen a few people complaining about the closure of Eircom’s MusicHub and saying they used it regularly. For those handful of people who don’t know what to do now, start using YouTube to stream music. There’ll also be iTunes radio coming with the release of iOS7 and you wouldn’t put it past Apple to revolutionise how we consume music. Again.