Well its been a week since I said that I was going to try to increase the personal posts on here and guess what happened? Yeah that’s right I was about to let it slip again, despite having fully intended at least one more post last week other than the Podcast show notes. I know it’s not that big a deal but its a bit annoying that im so easily distracted.
Anyway once again I have my 25 minute timer running in focus booster and whatever is written when that thing tells me times up is what you will get to see.
However this time I don’t really have as much of a plan about what I wanted to talk about, last weeks post I had a topic to base it on before I started which gave me a bit of a start in the right direction. This week im kinda winging it.
While im writing this as well as the timer, I have Spotify playing along which is an interesting topic I suppose as the service has finally made it state side. It has not been received as well over there as it was here due to the fact that while they were waiting for it a lot of americans found other streaming services to fill their needs.
That is not to say its gone badly, I know a few americans that are very happy with the service – but I just wonder if that will remain the same when their free service gets the unlimited taken out of it like ours did. Like a skilled crack dealer, Spotify got us all hooked on it auditory goodness with unlimited free usage only to several months ago pull the plug. Now our free trial with adverts is time limited to 10 hours a month and only being able to play any track 5 times.
That would have been perfectly fine for general usage for me in the pre-spotify era, however having access to that kinda archive of music at my disposal for well over a year completely changed my listening habits. Gone were the days of only occasionally listening to music while playing the odd game that I didn’t enjoy the soundtrack of, now I was used to listening to music of all kinds near constantly.
Now at that point your probably asking why i simply did not pay for the service if i was getting that much use out of it, well the answer to that is two-fold really.
Firstly, the adverts did not bother me. Seriously i never found them that intrusive at all, if anything they even helped solidify the service in my head as the radio replacement i was using it as, all radio stations i listened too before had regular adverts.
Secondly, none of the extra features of the paid service held any appeal to me. Offline playlists and access to the mobile application? Thats what i have my MP3 collection for, Spotify is for finding that track that you only want to listen too once in a while, listening to a new album before you lay down cash on it or listening to the playlists that other people send you or of things you like but not enough to buy.
One such example of that last group is my most commonly used playlist ‘The Complete Rock Band Collection Playlist‘ – This 2134 track monstrosity is a compilation playlist of every track that has appearing on Rock Band (1,2,3, Lego & Green Day) including all the DLC & Rock Band Network tracks. Many of these tracks I like hearing when they are on but I would not go out of my way to listen to them otherwise, therefor not something i would buy.
What made it all the worse is they actually got rid of the second best feature as well, 24 hour passes. You used to be able to buy passes that got rid of the adverts only for the day, this was great for parties when having an advert pop in would have been irritating to say the least. I made use of this on many occasions, some months even paying more than the monthly pass in single one-off payments.
It was the freemium model at its finest. You could Subscribe if you wanted and be rewarded for doing so with a lack of adverts, but if you didn’t want to you just had to put up with the adverts to cover the cost of your service and could buy extras (which could total up to more than the sub rate over time).
Then they either got greedy or (and this is just rumour) they agreed to cut the free package to appease the record labels that were stalling the transition state-side with licensing restrictions.
Anyway there goes the buzzer on this post, but whatever the reason as Saturday I am now finally a subscriber but I will have to see how long that lasts.
