I used to buy albums, a lot of them. Really. I almost had to have a separate room just to store them all.
Then, I won a CD player (new, exiting!) in a Pepsi competition at work. There weren't a lot of CD's out at the time, but I started buying them and within a few months I had stopped buying vinyl. CD's were just too convenient and it was clear which way the market was going.
They did me fine for a long long time. I still have all the vinyl, although I no longer have a turntable. I keep meaning to get a digital one and convert them to MP3's, but the truth is I will probably sell them all to a collector. It's not even about the investment now, it's about the space. However, this is also forcing me to think about that wardrobe crammed with CD's. You see, I've stopped buying those too. Thing is, I never decided to stop buying them, I realised when HMV went into receivership that I didn't miss it. I'd already stopped buying CD's without noticing.
It wasn't Amazon Music or Google Play Music that had snuck it's way into my life (although I have uploaded my personal MP3 collection to the latter) because both of those services pretty much rely on the old paradigm of buying an album/cd/whatever at a time. No, what had wormed it's way into my audio routine was Spotify.
Many of you will already be familiar with it, but for those still baffled - here's a summary.
You can download the Spotify app to your PC, Smartphone, Tablet and many audio devices now have it built-in. You need to have an account, but that is free. The free account lets you listen to whatever music Spotify has in it's library (which is almost everything today) and create your own playlists. There are restrictions and you do get to listen to adverts every now and again.
If you pay for the Premium subscription (£10 a month or thereabouts), there are no restrictions or adverts, and you can 'download' your playlists. This means you can still listen to them without having to 'stream' them in real time over an Internet connection.
Now, you can 'buy' music from Spotify within the app, just like you can with the Amazon or Google app - but why would you? I've found that I don't need the security blanket of owning a physical CD or MP3 of the songs I listen to. My playlists sync across all my devices, so if I add a track to a playlist on my phone, it updates on my tablet and PC. If that happens to be an 'offline' playlist, the new track simply downloads (in Spotify's proprietary file format) when that device next has an Internet collection.
I find I'm listening to even more music, and more varied music, because I don't have to place an order with Play.com or visit a store to hunt down a song I've heard about. I just search for it on my of my devices and straightaway can listen to it as many times as I want for as long as I want -all the time I pay my tenner a month.
I know you'll be thinking "so how do you play it in the car?". Well, it's no different to an iPod or MP3 player. In my case, when I get in my car I slam my phone (Nexus 4) into the cradle when I get in. The cradle charges the phone wirelessly and the audio (via the Spotify client) plays over Bluetooth to the car stereo. Same deal at home, all of my audio systems are bluetooth, so I play music from my phone or tablet using the Spotify client wirelessly.
Any monthly subscription should be carefully considered, especially with drummers or other musicians who would rather buy the next shiny piece of kit to augment their set-up, but this one saves me literally hundreds of pounds and gives me limitless flexibility.
Spotify, damned clever those Swedes ;-)
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