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Simple Brilliant - and Free

'The most important thing used to be to have clean knickers in hospital - today it's a clean iPod free of embarrassing songs.'

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It costs $2500 to fill an 8 GB iPod. On an average only 4% of the tracks on an iPod are legal. And each track is pirated at least 20 times. But easy! For now all music is legal and free at Spotify. The business model of ownership has been superseded by one of accessibility. The future is here. As children we could dream of how incredibly cool our daily lives would someday be. We were so obsessed with cars flying up into the sky that our fantasy couldn't see how our lives would really turn out. Think about it: aren't our lives and opportunities with today's gadgets and with the Internet amazing? Here's what it's like of an evening in my home. The school girl plays around, chats, checks out YouTube in front of the Disney Channel, all the while she does her homework. In the background she's listening to the Jonas Brothers on Spotify. The smaller children are dancing to Rihanna's Umbrella, that too on Spotify. We used to talk of multi-culture and say things like 'the food's great in India'. Today instead it's all about multitasking. We do everything at once. I'm watching an downloaded episode of True Blood, I send a few SMS messages with my one cellphone, I play around with my iPhone, and I film something else for fun with my third cellphone. I update my own blogs and read a few others. I answer way too many mail messages. I put up a few more links at Facebook. I buy a few cool applications from the Appstore. Our phone doesn't ring anymore but no one can be bothered to cancel it. There are some skin creams I'm running short of so I order them online. And I make long playlists on Spotify to send to others. And as soon as we get up in the morning we have Spotify on, hour after hour. And it's great! I'm totally intoxicated by this media climate. I could never in my wildest dreams have suspected it'd be this cool to live when I turned 35. Micael Dahlén, professor in marketing and consumer behaviour at Stockholm's Handelshögskolan and author of the acclaimed book Nextopia, explained to Dagens Industri: 'we're running out of time - not because we work too much but because we play too much'. Yup. And we've totally lost it. No one has the patience any longer to wait for things when we're used to just going out and taking what we want. We can't be bothered to watch movies - the trailer's good enough - and we can't be bothered to read long articles anymore either. The ultimate proof of the future is Spotify, a streamed and free iTunes. Such a simple and brilliant idea came and destroyed everything in its path: all illegal file sharing, the radio, all the inept attempts by the record companies and the Internet providers to sell music for cellphones. Now all the music in the world is out there - and free! You don't even have to wait a single second to get what you want. I got tossed out of Waffles because my ratio was so poor but that's fine by me. I downloaded too much junk no one else wanted. The most important thing used to be to have clean knickers when you went to hospital - today it's a clean iPod free of embarrassing songs. So I ask Martin Lorentzon, founder of Tradedoubler, to explain why his new company Spotify is the future: 'in the business to consumer model it's the consumers that determine whether you succeed. When someone asks me which three things are most important for Spotify I answer only half tongue in cheek that they're the consumer, the consumer, and the consumer'. Spotify is free and only a click away and thus it's the future. As Martin himself says: 'the Pirate Bay sucks, Spotify rules!' The idea is to have accessibility to music wherever you are on any gadget at all. World domination! Only one week after the official release Spotify's market value is over $100 million.

By Linda Skugge for SvD 24 October 2008.

Clipothèque now supports Spotify.