If you’re a big music fan like me, it’s likely you’ll be faced with a really big problem. Years ago, when CDs, Tapes and Vinyl were the norm, I accrued a huge number of them. They’re mounted on the wall in a big rack. However, if I’m honest, I’ve not used them from years, except in the car. Why? Well, because they’re all ripped and sitting on an external hard drive upstairs – I transfer them to my Windows Phone, or to my wife’s iPod when she wants to listen. But isn’t having all the CD’s sitting there a massive waste of resources?
I’ve been reading Tim Jackson’s ‘Prosperity without Growth’, which is about how we start to separate the conditions in which humans flourish from the need for increasing use of the world’s resources. Now, nobody (or at least very few), people would argue that music isn’t really great for flourising. People find it motivating, energising, relaxing, etc, all part of the drivers of society, and a language of participation that people need for well-being. As I was lying awake in bed last night, I was trying to come up with a solution whereby you minimise consumption, whilst holding on to the flourishing conditions that music delivers. Now, the simplest solution of ripping the lot and selling/recycling the CDs sounds really simple doesn’t it?
It all sounds simple, until you’re realise you’re committing massive copyright infringement. Now, whatever your view on UK copyright law. it’s the law, and you shouldn’t infringe. In my view, the format in which you own the work should be immaterial, as you’ve already purchased it, but whatever. So you can’t do this. I wouldn’t mind purchasing it in a digital format again (like I did for CDs when tapes started to die out), but no services really give you full rights over the work at this point – if you download from Amazon, or iTunes you only get it once, or 5 times respectively. You can’t download them infinitely, once you’ve paid for them.
So I started thinking about services that might get around that issue – designing one whereby you bought the content but it was stored on the cloud and you could stream any time. So that could be Network Attached Storage (NAS), whereby I stored the whole lot, but what about data failure? Even ignoring that, it doesn’t get around the problem that everyone in the world has their own set of CDs, plastic and paper artwork on their walls, which could be used for something else?
I suddenly came to the realisation that a service like Spotify is probably the best available at the moment, as long as you can get over the concept of not ‘owning’ things, but instead paying for the service/condition to flourish. Paying £10 a month for premium gives you pretty much all the features you need – offline listening (for when the network’s knackered), portable apps for music on the go, and all streamed from one database, which only needs one set of infrastructure to support it, as opposed to all the manufacturing supply chain etc in traditional models. You get all of this, plus access to as much new music as you want/is released. Brilliant!
I’m going to start by subscribing to Spotify and will report back. I’m on pretty rubbish broadband so I’m hoping that it won’t make downloading/browsing too difficult. THe other worry I have is streaming it all around the house – I have a CD player in the kitchen, but I also plug in the phone to listen sometimes. I’ll post an update on how it works out (plus what the wife thinks!) in a few months. I’ll also try and do some digging on the manufacturing impacts of traditional CDs vs. supporting Spotify….
Tags: flourishing, music, prosperity without growth, spotify, sustainability
