Spotify, The Review
A few weeks ago I signed up for Spotify and have been using it on and off.
Unlike practically everyone else I know, I resisted using Spotify for years. It’s not that I distrust the idea of The Cloud, it’s just that I expect The Cloud to stab me in the back at the least convenient time. I’ve been using computers for so long that I automatically hit CTRL+S to save at the end of every sentence, and I keep local backups of all my data. (Hits CTRL+S) The idea of trusting The Cloud to store my data sets off alarm bells in the back of my head. Additionally, I have a hoard of about 40 gigabytes of MP3 music files I’ve accumulated since I first got an MP3 player (a Rio Chiba) in 2003, and I’ve been moving that collection from computer to computer ever since. In other words, I’m old enough to assume that the default will be that there is no Internet connection, or that the Internet will stop working at the worst possible time.
(Hits CTRL+S)
So, what changed?
You might have seen a news report that Spotify bought audiobook distributor Findaway Voices. All my Caina and Nadia audiobooks are on Findaway, so there’s a non-trivial chance that they might be available on Spotify in sometime in 2022. Of course, no one knows how this will work out in practice. Spotify says it presently doesn’t plan to offer audiobook subscriptions. Then again, when a publicly traded corporation says something, there’s a 50/50 chance it’s lying, and Spotify doesn’t currently have any ala carte sales. And I’m not opposed to the idea of audiobook streaming in principle, as my YouTube experiment demonstrated. Someone calculated that a 10-hour audiobook would only generated $0.80 for the author under Spotify’s current payment scheme. But which is better – to sell 20 copies of an audiobook a month on Audible for about $4.50 a sale, or to stream the same audiobook 1,000 times a month for $0.80 a stream?
Anyway, because some of my audiobooks might turn up on Spotify, it makes sense that I should get familiar with the platform.
People always say that the organic discovery and recommendation features on Spotify are very good, and I can confirm that this is true. An anecdote will illustrate the point. Way back in 2008, I liked the soundtrack for the game ROME TOTAL WAR so much I taught myself to use Audacity just so I could extract the soundtrack from the game’s music files. Recently ROME TOTAL WAR had a remaster release, which meant the soundtrack was finally available – and Spotify recommended the soundtrack to me based off about a week of casual listening. That’s some accurate recommendation right there!
There’s a lot of argument about whether or not Spotify is good or bad or musicians, and no one knows whether or not it will be good for audiobooks. But for the end user, it does seem like Spotify is a pretty good deal.
That said, I’m keeping my hoard of MP3 files, and if I find something I really like, I’m still buying it and keeping the files. 🙂
-JM