The Peanut Gallery: a MetalSucks Reader Thanks Us For Introducing Him to Spotify
I haven’t posted any missives about Spotify in quite some time because, well, it doesn’t seem relevant anymore: all the important metal labels have their wares available on the service in some capacity, the complaints about streaming vs. ownership have died down, and presumably lots of folks now see the light.
But sometimes it’s nice to get a little confirmation that everything we write doesn’t fall on deaf ears or get met with a resounding *FLUSH* in the comments section. To that end, here’s a letter that MetalSucks reader Karl W. sent us about Spotify — his initial rejection of the very idea and his path to eventual enlightenment. *FLUSH* away.
Vince,
One of your fanboys here again, writing to you about Spotify instead of risk this time. (Feel free to use any of this on website if you need, I’m sure there are other people who are in the same boat.)
MetalSucks has been covering Spotify for some time, but I wanted to share my conversion because I was a skeptic, and now I’m fully converted.
I think context is important so a little about myself: I’m 32, make between 80-100k a year, and I play in a band. I’m a huge music fan and I try to buy CDs for the new stuff I like whenever possible — I like to support bands and I know that first week numbers are important.
When I first started reading about Spotify on Metalsucks I checked it out — but quickly ditched it. It was like iTunes, but I had to recreate my lists. It had ads like Pandora. Ugh. I stopped using it pretty fast, barely made it a day before I went back to iTunes. It didn’t have any killer features as far as I was concerned.
Fast forward to probably a year later. I’ve got my work computer, my home computer, and cell phone (I use blue tooth in the car and play my music in the car via my phone). Managing the playlists between all three was starting to finally get irritating.
I happened to check my band’s TuneCore account (I publish my music on there) and realized they had a daily trend report too, not just sales of iTunes or Amazon. I was making some money off of Spotify. Not much, but I thought it was cool that someone was still listening to an old song along with new stuff. I wanted to promote it more, see if it picked up steam. So I downloaded Spotify again, found my own music, and started creating some playlists.
I had been meaning to check out some older Soilwork stuff so I searched for it, found it, and wham. Before you know it I decided to pick up a paid subscription to Spotify. And then I learned how you can download playlists for offline usage.
Now I don’t have to keep any lists synced — Spotify does it automatically. Anything I have at the office or home is available in my car as well. It’s amazing. Consider me a convert.
Also, its fun to share playlists with people — below is a playlist of some of my music. Pretty slick.
So yeah, thank you guys. I definitely can get turned off by people preaching strong about things but once I gave it a fair shot I converted fast. I still haven’t stopped buying physical CDs of bands I love — I just spent $100+ on Machine Head’s new disk, an iTunes pre-order, the special vinyl, and the $80 package with some book thing. Can’t wait.
So thank you guys for being on top of music and trends and sharing.
I’ll end with a music video that was a great excuse to get chicks naked in my basement with corpse paint
Cheers!.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM93dXznkBg
