Everyone’s talking about Spotify today, and it’s hardly surprising. The legal music streaming software has been making waves online over the last year, becoming the talk of savvy offices as invites made their way through the musos and then the service opened its doors to all (at least in some European markets).

For the uninitiated, Spotify lets users stream full tracks/albums from a huge library of music along one of two business models. Non-subscribers have a few precious seconds stolen from them between tracks by ever-more irritating advertising, while those who pay £9.99 a month (like myself) can listen completely ad-free.

That £9.99 price tag seems problematic. You don’t get tied into a contract, but if you start doing some maths it really begins to add up. So is it worth it? Before today, my answer was ‘maybe’. Now, I’m leaning towards Spotify actually resembling something close to value for money.

Introducing Spotify Mobile, an in-yo’-pocket version available to subscribers with iPhone or Android phones. It’s ad-free, obviously, and allows users to stream their playlists over 3G or WiFi. It also enables people to download those playlists over WiFi, useful for those who want to listen on the move.

Predictably, Spotify’s App Store approval and subsequent app launch has attracted much positive chatter, and I’ve downloaded it to have a look. As one might have expected, it’s crisp and intuitive. But there are still questions. Does this make £9.99 a month value for money? I can’t see this development attracting many subscribers who weren’t already sold on the Spotify idea.

It also competes with iTunes which, in itself, made it a slight surprise that Apple approved the app. The capacity of the bigger iPhone models means that many of us are already carrying around libraries of music which make the idea of paying a large monthly subscription for Spotify a little difficult to swallow.

And a key difference is one of ownership, something which iTunes itself must overcome to a lesser extent. On iTunes, you own the music files you pay for, but there is no physical artefact (something very important to many music fans). But on Spotify, you own nothing. On the desktop version, that’s no issue. If you make a bunch of playlists and then unsubscribe you can still listen to your music, albeit interrupted by ads.

But on mobile – which is only available to subscribers – what happens when users choose to unsubscribe? £9.99 per month for the duration of subscription just disappears. Sure, that’s the nature of subscriptions in many markets. But when the subscription fee for Spotify is so high and part of such a competitive space, it’s probably something Spotify will have to consider someday.

I think most subscribers are agreed that Spotify and Spotify Mobile are great products. But the business model is not perfect and may not be scaleable. I can’t imagine too many more people forking out a tenner a month, and I probably won’t for much longer because it’s a lot of money when you begin adding it up over a year. There are other options already available, including an intermediate subscription, but I don’t think they’ve cracked it yet.

…but we like a nice shiny new bit of streaming.

Music business and technology blog Hypebot has commented on the results of a recent survey on the UK digital music market. From them, we can draw two conclusions: in the UK, we still have an attachment to the physical reward for buying music, and we’d rather stream licensed music for free than download it illegally.

The survey, by The Leading Question and Music Ally, found that 73 percent of music fans are still happy buying CDs rather than downloading, including 66 percent of 14-18 year olds. 59 percent of those surveyed (a sample of 1000) still listen to CDs every day.

If I learned one thing at university, it’s that moving music fans away from something they can hold in their hands to a piece of music with nothing attached to it is more difficult than it sounds. Music fans – and I can totally relate to this – are addicted to the physical artefact. In other words, we like having CDs (or LPs, I guess) and we like geeky stuff like liner notes and so on. I am a child of the original Napster generation, but I still have over 500 CDs alphabetically arranged on a bookcase. I bought a CD only three hours ago. Why? Because I can touch it, read it, move it. It’s part of a collection.

Furthermore, fans who subscribe to a paid service (like Napster or, in my case, Spotify) still buy CDs:

“Those who are paying for a digital music subscription service (such as Napster or Musicstation) spend more on CDs each month than most music fans (£16.87 per month compared to £11.37).”

That also puts me in a category of music streamers which spends more money than most music fans, which does not surprise me in the slightest. Ever since my favourite band at the time, Metallica, went after Napster, I’ve argued that my online musical activity merely served as a discovery engine for CD purchases. This remains true today.

Which leads me nicely on to the other main finding from the survey, which is that “UK Music fans are turning their backs file-sharing in favor of streaming and other ways of sharing music”. Again, this maps perfectly onto my own experience. Since signing up to Spotify I haven’t given Limewire so much as a second thought.

And the crux is this: if I want to listen to a particular track, I’d prefer to stream it (at will) rather than download it illegally. If I really like it, I’ll buy the CD. The quicker the music industry properly researches people like me and better understands our buying habits, the better suited it will be to deal with the digital evolution of the market. Simply shutting down all forms of filesharing is not the answer, and never was.

It’s official! MySpace, the social networking website of choice for many a young person a few years ago, is entering a period of serious and vital introspection. As a final year student just as Facebook began to take hold of the higher education market in the UK, I signed up for Zuckerberg’s monster and gradually phased out my MySpace account. It is now deleted. And when Facebook opened the gates to non-students MySpace users – anecdotally at least – began to move on. Everyone I know certainly did.

And sure enough MySpace – owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation – has been through a difficult week. First, Facebook overtook MySpace as the number one social networking website for users in the United States, a sure sign that the site’s decline must now be addressed. And then, that action began: new CEO Owen Van Natta announced that the company is cutting around 400 jobs, leaving behind a workforce of about 1,000.

It’s worth considering the natural life-cycle of the pre-Facebook social networking website. It seems to me that many sites have followed a similar pattern, including Friends Reunited, Friendster and, now, Myspace. Before Facebook, the successful social networking website typically launched, grew, became the next big thing, tipped and then got usurped. I say ‘before Facebook’ because Facebook is now so ubiquitous that it will break that pattern. But then we said the same about MySpace.

I also think the average web user is beginning to overdose on social networking sites. Had MySpace v Facebook occurred five years earlier, it’s possible that more of us would have retained both, joining Facebook along with everyone else while continuing to enjoy MySpace’s greater flexibility, youthfulness and focus on music. Today, the MySpace generation is increasingly eligible for LinkedIn, and we also have to balance our pure social networking with the latest and greatest which, these days, tend not to stand alone as fully-functioning social networks (Twitter).

So what on earth can MySpace do to save itself?

Read more