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Except maybe vinyl, I've gone through it all: taping songs off the radio, burning minidiscs and CDs, Napster, eMule, Pandora, iTunes, etc. I love Spotify and the actual way of consuming and discovering music. Some say that music taste stagnates as we age but I come from a metal and rock background and I have been making escapades into electronic music (including EDM), funk, soul, and more in my late twenties and early thirties, and I expect this trend to continue into old age. None of this ever happened when I was in my teens, where I would just buy the metal magazines, go to the metal record store, and speak only to metalheads. Part may be me, but another part is certainly Spotify / music streaming. My only criticism is that Spotify's music recommendation algorithms are really subpar. When I like a new song, I tap "Go to Radio" and it shows a playlist of related songs, but it seems like it relies too much on the preferences of other users and on obvious connections between artists. Pandora in the mid-2000's already blew it out of the water in this regard - I remember going through a personal golden age of music discovery thanks to it. I could not believe how spot-on the recommendations felt and how they could dig out superobscure stuff that resonated with me. I don't know what the state of the service is right now but if it was just as good as in the 2000's and it was available in Europe I would pay for it without a doubt. What's surprising is that Spotify's recommendation tech is so far behind, and that they don't seem to care. Other than that, I can't think of a single non-essential service in my life providing more value than "$9.99 a month for unlimited music". The utility to cost ratio is off the charts since I use it for six or eight hours daily and it costs peanuts. If there was a nuclear apocalypse and I had to listen to cassettes on my pipboy, I'd surely be nostalgic about the good old days of music streaming. |