Spotify Adds Led Zeppelin as It Focuses on Mobile Business

After year with Spotify, I can't imagine going back to the model of buying one album/song at a time now.

Using dial-up services for whole albums was time consuming but downloading individual songs wasn't too bad. So I could download one or two songs from an artist I wasn't that familiar with and if I liked the songs, I might go to the store, or CDNow :), to buy a CD.

So you could access a lot of music to sample but still only ended up with a few albums to actually listen to.

I recall growing up listening to certain albums countless times. I'm not sure if I'd still do that today. Some songs require a few listens before they really click with you, and services like Spotify don't have the limits that the old models did.

While it may be nice nostalgia to look back at how I listened to and acquired music growing up, if you could have given 16 year-old me today's Spotify, I would have taken it in a heartbeat.

I remember being away from home for a few days in the late 80s and, having got bored with the few tapes I could carry with me I bought Husker Du's Zen Arcade, as I'd read a review of an album I liked that made reference to that one. On the first listen, I thought it was an absolute chaotic racket.

But having bought it, and not having much else to listen to, I played it through a few times and by the end of my trip I'd bought their next two albums. I'm pretty sure that had I had Spotify back then, I would have managed at most a couple of tracks before dismissing the album out of hand, trying something else and never listening to it again.

Don't get me wrong - instant access to most of the world's music is great. But unless you've got better willpower than I have, that access could easily result in you missing out on some of those harder to get into artists.

Unfortunately, this just isn't true. Enjoyment of music is very dependent on context in most circumstances.

An easy example is metal drumming -- not necessarily impressive based on sound alone, but extremely impressive once you realize the physicality it requires.

The same goes for the way in which the user hears the music. Track 6 out of 10 on a physical CD or spotify CD may not get noticed as much as it would if it were track 1 on side B of a vinyl

I gave away / lost / threw away all of my CDs over the last few years. I don't own a stereo, so they just took up space. I think that the artists that refuse to appear on Spotify are very short sighted, they may as well be invisible to a whole generation.

http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#royalties-i...

"They absolutely don't pay every artist the same amount. Besides the fact that per-stream rates are almost meaningless because they vary month-to-month as Spotify's own revenues fluctuate, I would be willing to believe major labels get a higher payout as a result of their equity positions. And with that, it isn't too preposterous that Atlantic (via parent WMG) would have brought Led Zeppelin exclusively to Spotify on special terms such as a minimum per-stream rate, some free extended term advertising to artificially boost data figures, or something entirely more enticing. And even if Spotify is, in fact, paying out an equal rate for Led Zeppelin streams, it may be that Atlantic received a nice advance--or even a debt-free bonus--as an incentive."

So maybe Spotify is dealing with the labels/publishers (Atlantic has Zepp) to cut this special deal and perhaps allow them a bigger rev share?