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Spotify, You Complete Me

By Alvin Soon - on 16 Apr 2013, 12:01pm

You know you’re getting on in years when you keep listening to the same old songs over and over again. The songs on my repeat list are frequently from when I was growing up in the 90s and early 2000; when Bonnie Loo, the finalist in Campus Superstar 2013, chose a Kit Chan song as a ‘classic’, I whined that the song’s “not that old”, I still remember when it first came out on cassette. That was before I did the math and realized Bonnie hadn’t even been born when the song was released.

Fugh.

Unless you make the effort or work in a place where they blare the radio, it’s hard to find new music when you grow older. It’s also made harder when the new-fangled stuff the kids listen to these days sounds like the devil’s music to you, i.e. looking at you, dubstep (another bad sign I'm getting older).

A few of us here at HardwareZone have had early access to Spotify premium accounts ahead of its local launch. When I plugged into Spotify a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t expecting much. Oh, how naive. That nonchalance has pretty much gone out the window, as Spotify has become music-crack to my addicted ears. I’ve been using the app almost everyday since I first signed on, and it’s made sitting at my desk and being on the go 100% more enjoyable.

The problem with traditional radio is that, while sometimes you get tuned in to tracks you like, you have to sit through all the other stuff you don’t like to get there. With Spotify, I could try out different Radio genres to find the ones I liked (electronica, nope, classical, nope, singer-songwriter, oh yes), and even skip the songs I didn’t like. I couldn't do that with Justin Bieber on the radio.

The last two weeks with Spotify have been ear-opening. It feels rather like having someone go off movies for the last decade, and then handing them the keys to an entire library’s worth of all the good movies made in the past 10 years - anything good seems extra good, anything new seems ear-blowing. Like flinging open a treasure chest and swimming in gold. There's so much good music in the world, but I never had a good way of finding it; Spotify has shown me the way, handed me the keys and pushed me out of the door.

Thanks to Spotify, this musical fuddy-duddy (do the hip cats still say that nowadays?) is getting jiggy with the freshest fly tracks. Spotify, you complete me.

Alvin Soon

Alvin Soon / Former Deputy Editor

I like coffee and cameras, but not together.

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