ALL THE CHOONS

A while back I got Spotify, the free version. I was curious as to why people wanted access to songs they could not keep or own. As it was the free version, I did not have access to what the company considered new or popular. This is apparently music from people such as Demi Lovato, Camila Cabello, Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Dua Lipa, etc. I’m sure these are all fine and worth listening to if you’re into that, but that’s not what I needed Spotify for.

I listen to a lot of foreign music - mostly from Hong Kong. In fact, pretty much all of it is from Hong Kong apart from the back catalogue and new releases from Jay Chou, from Taiwan. It’s either Cantonese (my first choice) or Mandarin but that doesn’t matter; the music may sound the same as all the other pop / rock stuff I listen to through my iTunes account (Seether, the unofficial Supernatural playlist, AC/DC, etc.) but it’s really not the same at all. Every track by Eminem, Take That or Justin Bieber is a reflection of their upbringing, their influences, and their experiences in music and beyond. So it goes with a lot of underground Hong Kong bands. Now they can get their stuff onto Spotify, it’s easier for people to choose what they want and share it with others.

What’s that got to do with me? Well for one, if I wanted to try out new music from HK then the only way was to go through iTunes and try the 30 - 90 second free-play snippets. Not great, as I normally need to hear an album a few times over before I decide if I like it or not. I do hear opening strains and think YES I NEED THIS, but it doesn’t happen very often. Songs, like people, and in fact most of life, has to grown on me.



So what Spotify is doing for me is letting me try hundreds of artists I may not have heard of, or if I have, never taken the plunge and bought stuff on iTunes to see if I like the album. I have done this a few times and ended up wiping most of the album as it wasn’t what I thought it was, and failed to grow on me.

Skip back to last week, just before Christmas. I received the usual marketing email from Spotify about going to Premium. This normally a tenner a month. I balked at that every time I received the email - £10 per month? For music I can’t even keep? WTF? No thanks.


And then a special offer came through - 99p for a three-month block of Premium. Hmm. After thoroughly reading the T&Cs (actually written in simple, brain-friendly English for a change), it was actually the equivalent of 33p each month for 3 months. If you didn’t cancel it after this time, it shot up to £9.99 per month. However, you could still cancel at any time.

Now 33p a month for the Premium service sounded great. I’m not going to lie; my plan is currently the same as probably everyone else who’s taken up this offer - wait just before the 3 months is up and then cancel, right? It’s what everyone does, and in the end it’s only cost you 99p to try out what all this streaming music malarky is all about. And this is where it gets interesting - what is this streaming malarky all about?

Once upon a time, people bought ‘hard copies’ of music - records, CDs, or minidiscs. Then it moved to ‘soft copies’ - mp3s from Amazon, iTunes and Google Store downloads, etc. Cloud storage and streaming access became the In Thing, and now we have services that deliver any artist, any tune, any track that used to be purchase-only, on near-instant demand through companies like Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, Deezer, Google Play Music, and more. So why is this shift happening?


I was sceptical of streaming services before I got Spotify Premium - why would I want to listen to stuff but not own it? As I started to use it, I realised a lot of my questions were redundant; I didn't have to own it to be able to stream it, muppet; I didn’t have to pay per album to buy music any more, when for one charge a month I could have about 75% of the world’s music in my pocket; my iPhone 7 doesn’t use as much battery as I thought it would when streaming (literally 40% used in about 5 hours. Considering that’s streaming from a 4G connection and Bluetoothing it to my headphones or speakers at the same time, I’m quite happy with that). On top of all that, the fact that I can and do now try out a few new artists every time I log in, and have discovered a lot more music is MIND-BLOWING. I get bored easily, and although I have classics on my phone that I need to keep forever, now that I have this service I can sample so much more stuff, explore so much further, and not have to worry about barriers or boundaries.

That’s what I like the most; I can literally skip that one track on the album that's not doing it for me, try related artists, save albums I want to try over and over, test out performers or artists I’ve always been curious about - all for one price. For the consumer, it’s almost a dream come true. For the artists putting their wares on the service? The jury is still out - there has been quite a bit of criticism of how exactly artists should be paid for their work. I’m all for them getting a larger percentage of the profits when streamed by consumers, as for all the cost of servers and infrastructure, it has to be cheaper than owning factories and warehouses and people to create, pack, and ship hard copies to shops that may not sell them all. Having said that, I’m still on the platform. With heavy hitters like Taylor Swift renegotiating and forcing the service to change the way it operates, hopefully in a few years it will have a big difference on the revenues that artists receive. If not, then it could be back to purchasing albums the old-fashioned way for me - and by that I mean iTunes or alternative mp3 purchases like Amazon (depending on their royalty policies).

So getting back to what I’m using it for. Highlights: I’ve found a better way for me to stream Eason Chan (陳奕迅)’s back catalogue and new releases, giving me back about a third of my karaoke memories. Also helping is access to all my lost Aaron Kwok (郭富城) albums (most of the other 2 thirds of my karaoke memories) - and then there are the discoveries. I now have all music ever released by Hong Kong Punk-Pop / College Rock band ToNick (which is AWESOME), and of course everyone on my favourites playlist that’s been posted here.

The thing is, I know what will happen when my 3 months cheapie rate is up; I’ll decide that I’ve adjusted to the truly worldwide access levels I’ve got and I won’t want to give this up. The question is, is it worth £9.99 a month to be able to discover, create (and download) my biggest and broadest mixtape in history?

Who knows. I’m sure I’ll find out in February next year, though. Especially as I'm about to sort that Favourites playlist out and make it worth it.

Soopy twist.