Pretty much how I felt using cached Spotify on airplane flight.

I realized a few months ago that I was not listening to much music. I didn’t have a streaming app I liked, I had grown to loathe iTunes, few of the services I once used to pirate music still operated and I didn’t feel inspired to muck around with torrents.

There wasn’t time in my daily life for much discovery, I was busy launching Betabeat and helping my girlfriend transition to living in NYC. But just as I slowly realized how much not going to Jiu Jitsu was hurting my quality of life, it struck me on several different occasions how unhappy I was not to be enjoying music on a regular basis.

All this changed in the last two months with Turntable.fm and Spotify. The former was a blessing, because I was able to cover Turntable.fm as part of my work at Betabeat, so using the service paid double dividends. The same is true to a lesser degree for Spotify, which is not local enough to merit continued coverage from Betabeat, but big enough to deserve the occasional story. 

I hope to write a lot over the next couple weeks about how the two services help me to discover new artists that I love, which for me is probably the most powerful thing a music service can do. I’ve already subscribed to my friend Jake’s playlist, Todayz Jamz, through Spotify. Since I met him in Memphis six summers ago, he has proved to be the best way to learn about artists and records that will stick with me. He signed up for Spotify premium and if he keeps this playlist fresh, I expect it will change my life for the better. We’re also planning a semi-private Turntable.fm hang for later this week, so if anyone feels like joining in, just holler.