Invisible Oranges on Spotify
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Invisible Oranges is now on Spotify. Obviously, we’re not a band or a label. But our intrepid webmasters at Ideophony have created a playlist (255 tracks, 17 hours!) out of our staff’s year-end picks from 2010. Surprisingly, Spotify contains many of those records – 21, specifically:
Accept – Blood of the Nations
Alcest – Écailles de lune
Amebix – Redux
Atheist – Jupiter
Black Tusk – Taste the Sin
Deftones – Diamond Eyes
The Dillinger Escape Plan – Option Paralysis
Electric Wizard – Black Masses
Grand Magus – Hammer of the North
High on Fire – Snakes for the Divine
Immolation – Majesty and Decay
Intronaut – Valley of Smoke
Killing Joke – Absolute Dissent
Krieg – The Isolationist
Kylesa – Spiral Shadow
Overkill – Ironbound
Rotting Christ – AEALO
Slough Feg – The Animal Spirits
Triptykon – Eparistera Daimones
Unearthly Trance – V
Wormrot – Abuse
Here’s the playlist. It would be like an Invisible Oranges station on Last.fm or Pandora.
Spotify currently is Europe-only, so let me go into it briefly for our North American readers. It’s like iTunes, but with no buying (you pay a monthly subscription fee), and it streams music. If you’re a subscriber, you can hear anything on Spotify anywhere with Internet – your home computer, your smartphone, and probably your car in the future. Earache’s blog has two good posts discussing Spotify here and here. This video shows how Spotify works:
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How Spotify works
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQC2eBQ7Lsk
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I can’t wait until Spotify hits the States, because I am ready to move beyond MP3’s. They are a nuisance. Ripping them is a nuisance. If people send them to me, they’re always tagged badly and often ripped at crappy bitrates. I want to spend my time listening to music, not cataloguing it. And I have no desire to “own” music. The whole point of “owning” music is to be able to listen to it whenever and wherever one wants. I always have my phone on me. If in a few years, bandwidth and hardware can stream music seamlessly to my phone, I am so there.
Pros: The more music Spotify has, the more it might deter piracy, or even render it obsolete. People would forego the search costs of torrents if they could find their favorite music on Spotify (and not have to worry about carrying files from place to place). And since royalties are based on frequency of plays, artists would finally get compensated for how much Internet traffic they generate.
Cons: Even more power and money concentrated in the hands of a few. It takes massive infrastructure and business capabilities to run something like Spotify. If everyone’s on Spotify, and Spotify goes down, everyone’s screwed. Maybe there’s something to having that LP/CD/tape that you and only you own. But everything is moving towards cloud computing. I currently entrust Google with all my text documents. And I already use a primitive precursor to Spotify: YouTube. If a song has sufficient notoriety, it can be heard on YouTube instantly. Why not stop using YouTube as a jukebox and use something made for that purpose?
Of course, given our esoteric interests, it may be a while before Spotify is for us. My test is Urfaust splits. When Spotify carries Urfaust splits, it’s time to pull the trigger.
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