[willwhitney]

Not to mention that Spotify and Pandora are making it possible for young, poor people to be active music consumers without turning to piracy. When I was in high school, my options were to pay $15 an album, and thus only have access and exposure to a tiny music collection, or pirate music, hear a lot of great music, especially from smaller artists, and drag my friends to their concerts every time they were in town.

Now I'm in college and still broke, but I pony up the $10/month for Spotify, and I continually encourage my friends to do so as well. They've created an experience that's dramatically better than piracy (even with nice private trackers), pays out at least some to the artists along with the moneypile that goes to the labels, and enfranchises people like me. I've always listened to an extremely wide selection of music, and now that I can pay to do it, I'm very happy to.

And I still drag my friends to every good concert in town.

[nilliams]

Exactly, I'm proud to pay my Spotify membership and I feel I get my money's worth... I'd probably pay more. I have now gone over 2 years without torrenting a single album (the exception being one quite-large Canadian band who happened to not be on Spotify at the time ... I'd already bought the album on vinyl so I didn't feel to bad about it).

Before Spotify my best effort at trying to be legal was to splash out every couple of months on some vinyl copies (nice to own... I still do this sometimes) of albums I'd already stolen via bittorent.

Spotify, is a music-lover's dream and it's how music distribution should work.