Although I might appear to some people as tech-savvy and into all the latest digital and online fads that is really not accurate.  Yes I do have my own website, blog excessively, download music, upload photos to Flickr and kind of keep a Facebook page.  I have a couple of digital cameras, a couple of mp3 players and mobile phone that can play mp3s, take photos and surf the net.  However I do have plenty of blind spots and in many cases I am actually a late-adopter.For example, I don’t have a DVD recorder.  I have a DVDR on the computer but the only DVDs I have ever burned are the system backups of the new PC.  I may have that phone, but I don;t really understand it: I don’t go on the Internet with it, have never sent a picture message, and never blutoothed anything in my life.  Likewise, I may have been online since the BBS days, but I can’t see the point of Twitter, resisted the lure of Last.fm even though it sounded like my sort of thing, and never really dabbled in peer-to-peer filesharing.

Today though I did jump on a new bandwagon – Spotify – and it really is rather good.  It is a bit like Last.fm (which makes me regret not using that when it started) in that it streams music to the PC to listen to.  It is not a download; you do not keep the music to listen to whenever you want to.  If you want to hear it again you stream it again.  It is like a giant jukebox or a radio station where you choose what to listen to.

There are two ways to hear all this music.  You can either get adverts played between the tunes or pay a subscription to get advert-free music.  I am, naturally, trying the free version out first.  I figured that I would see if I used the service enough and got annoyed anough by the ads to make it worth paying.  So far I have heard very few adverts, maybe one per dozen tracks so I’m not going to start paying any time soon.

As soon as I downloaded the client software I was listening to Bruce Springsteen’s new album almost immediately.  Sounds OK, but not something I would bother to own.  After that I started exploring to see what I could find.  First of all I looked for Egg, but they are not on there. Not a good start.

After that things got better.  I listened to the recent Zombies re-union live album, and then a Sammy Hagar album.  I can remember in the midseventies I used to read the NME and Melody Maker most weeks and sometimes read Sounds and/or Record Mirror too and there were various acts and albums that were advertised extensively but I never heard their music.  Sammy Hagar was one of them.  The ‘Red’ album was promoted everywhere, but nobody at school had it so I didn’t hear it.   I always wondered what it was like and now I know.

(OK, but not essential)

I then went looking for stuff I had on vinyl but couldn’t ever find on CD, starting with Infinity Machine by Passport.  Not only was it there, but there were twenty other Passport albums.  I used to really like that album, especially the first track which I have now heard again for the first time in probably twenty years.

(First track still great. Less interested in the rest.)

Passport’s style is the now universally-derided ‘jazz-rock’, so a bit like Weather Report or Spyrogyra.  Personally I quite like it although I will now be shunned in polite society for admitting it.  I may delve into a few similar artists like Brand X, Jean-Luc Ponty and whatever else I can find.

Apart from that I have listened to a bit of old Can (spotify has loads of their stuff) and I’m now listening to Vangelis’ album Spiral.

The problem is that my mind has gone blank.  There must be hundreds of old tunes I am dying to hear again and new artists I want to see what the fuss is about, but I just can’t think of them.

Is this a good thing for the music industry though?   No idea.  You can’t extrapolate from how one person uses the service because everyone will use it differently.  The music business may lose same sales from me as I re-listen to old favourites that I might have been tempted to buy but after hearing them once it has got it out of my system.  It may also lose sales from obscure stuff you can’t easily get to hear without buying the CD, that I will listen to and decide is not that great.

On the other had I expect to hear things I like enough that I want to be able to play them in the car or on the mp3 player and I will go out and buy the CD or download the tunes.  In other words I will probably spend as much on music as bef0re but waste less.

Right…  time to go and listen to some Clan of Xymox…