If you have never taken any of my lucid advice in the past, I urge you at least to consider taking the advice which is to follow. Today marks what feels to me like day 1, Genesis in the future of how I personally shall listen to music. MP3s revolutionised the music industry allowing for online downloads and whilst it is true that many users today download their music legally from sources such as iTunes, Amazon and Napster, internet  piracy remains widespread thanks in part to the cost of purchasing music albums. For a long time the industry has sought to overcome this problem by reducing costs and widening the media available for download but whilst prices remain relatively high, piracy will ensue.

Today, my music library changes forever after having been introduced to Spotify. I had seen and heard the name banded around the internet before but before today paid no attention at all to exactly what it is. I should like to introduce each and every one of you to this small and what I believe to be revolutionary program.

When I first discovered Last FM around a year ago I thought the service was ingenious  and that I would use it on a daily basis. As it turned out the inability to pick exactly what you wanted to listen to and what felt like a cripplingly incomplete user experience resulted in my leaving it behind. Spotify in effect takes the principle of Last FM and places it on E.

Spotify, a small 5MB program uses a very user friendly interface resembling iTunes to allow you to search for and listen to music. Spotify’s database had in it every album I could throw at it and then some, showing me albums by my favourite artists that I didn’t even know existed. Unlike Last FM whereby one can pick a song, listen to it and then be followed by songs Last FM deems are similar. Spotify allows users to listen to entire albums, save these albums as playlists on your computer of choice and come back to them whenever you feel like it. So far I have recreated about half of my current MP3 collection of albums in Spotify.

It gets better. You might think that streaming music would render the quality less than that desired, you would be wrong. MP3 files are notoriously poor quality as compared to files embedded on CD’s as the original quality the album was meant to be heard in. Spotify therefore provides the latter aural experience for your pleasure rather than a stripped down and compressed MP3 quality. In addition streaming times are absolutely nill as soon as you double click on a song it plays, no waiting, no fuss.

Essentially what my Spotify now looks like is my iTunes library,  however I now get vastly enhanced audio quality, access to every album I can think of and then some, every new release, a chart list, radio and much more. The best thing about it all… its entirely free and completely LEGAL. There are no catches, there are no legal repercussions and every time you listen to a track you are support the artist sending royalties their way.

Of course you can’t download the tracks and put them on your MP3 player, that remains the jurisdiction of iTunes and other stores but for listening to music at your computer there can be no better method than by using Spotify. Forget your low quality compressed MP3 collection, download Spotify and embrace the revolution. It has been announced this week that due to the success of services like this the Top 40 Chart in the UK will next year be basing their rankings on streamed plays as downloading is slowly becoming a thing of the past. I urge you to hop on and enjoy.