Spotify: the music lover's savior

In our advanced day and age of accessibility and information, the bounds of how we pursue entertainment keep being stretched outwards.

I mean, to anyone born after 1985 it is incomprehensible to imagine that people once had to go out and actually purchase music.

This is a foreign concept to us, the generation that grew up on flip phones and AOL instant messaging. Going out to a record store seems absurd and unnecessary; any music desired could be found through a quick perusal of the Internet’s canals. However, up until recently, there was never a unanimous consent as to which was the best way to download music.

There was the sanctimonious bunch that believed that every cent of the song should be accounted for. This group of people usually had emaciated libraries due to their sense of integrity and, more accurately, ineptitude with technology. These people were always too willing to part with their 99 cents and usually gravitated toward the top 40 radio-type music.

There was the pirate, who went out of his way to download ludicrous amounts of music just to prove that he could. This was the type of person who would spend hours trolling the Internet, scavenging the back passages of the World Wide Web to do comparative checks on sound quality. These are the people who have lost their way — there is no chance in hell that they are ever going to get through the 40,000 songs rotating on their iPod classics.

For the majority of us, the happy medium that utilized a hybrid of purchased music, illegal downloads and file sharing, there was no proven way to effectively get tons of great music. It required a serious effort to be in touch and up-to-date in each specific genre of music, and downloading a lot of songs was slow and cumbersome. This left many listeners in an unsure middle ground between purchasing and pirating and often led to a user’s library having many holes.

Cut to today and the solution that the majority of listeners have sought is here to stay. If you don’t already have a Spotify account, hop on the Web and do yourself a favor because this thing is seriously a music fan’s best friend.

I first discovered Spotify about two years ago, and it completely revolutionized the way I listened to music. Essentially, Spotify is a program that allows users to stream music from the “cloud” and save it in playlists or “star” their favorite songs.

It also incorporates social media by allowing users to scope out their friends’ playlists and see what they’re listening to. There is a free version, which forces you to suffer through unwelcomed commercials, and a premium version which allows users to download music onto their hard drive commercial-free. What makes Spotify so revolutionary is its selection, expediency and organization.

When I first began using Spotify I was amazed at how much new music I was discovering. It is so easy to browse that I was exploring genres that I had never even given a chance before. The selection is so vast and the downloading process so easy, that at first it can even feel a bit overwhelming. It is akin to kid in a candy shop — everything is so tempting that you don’t know what to try first.

My favorite feature of Spotify is the social aspect: if I ever am low on inspiration or need to add some variety to my music, I can always piggyback on what my friends have been bumping to. I really discovered so much new music through browsing my friends’ playlists and exploring what they think is hype.

The one drawback of Spotify is that it only carries official releases, so anything that didn’t get an official release, e.g. mixtapes, won’t be available on Spotify. I combat this by supplementing from Datpiff and other file streaming websites, and those songs then get added to my Spotify account.

If you’re having trouble compiling playlists, or are one of those people who feel they don’t know enough music, Spotify is for you. It immensely improves your exposure to a plethora of different music types and can truly change the way you listen. Personally, it changed everything about the way I did.