A lot has been written recently on the present/future of music distribution and how the idea of “owning” the music you listen to needs to be at the very least, re-thunk.

Moving from place to place, body to body, job to job over the last few months has meant I’ve had to be quite frugal with the amount of stuff I carry around with me. So the idea of having one’s music collection floating around virtually – or better still not even owning a music collection but having constant online access to whatever you want to listen to – is very attractive.

I’ve been really digging (if that’s the right word) Spotify lately. If you haven’t heard of it, basically it’s a similar idea to Rhapsody, Napster et al. For a monthly subscription fee you can listen to as much streamed music as you like. Spotify, however, also offer a free membership. If you can tolerate irritating radio-style adverts every three songs or so (ie, if you don’t mind having to turn your speaker volume down for 40 seconds every so often! ) then you can pretty much treat it like a free bespoke radio station.

It also has a neat way of copying & pasting the URLs of individual songs so you can send them to other Spotify users.

And there’s a pretty good selection of music there too. As I type this I am being soothed by the scratchy sounds of Derek Bailey & Otomo Yoshihide’s Good Cop Bad Cop… Actually that reminds me of another post I was going to write about the late Mr Bailey…. I’ll write that one soon. With my hands.

PS: Turns out the Leisur Hive back catalogue is gradually being added to Spotify’s catalogue too. Hear ‘The Soft Column’ and the ‘On Sectional Pad EP’ here. 🙂