Modern music phenomenons are happening almost every day in the new world that has been rendered, downloaded and reproduced for us, the hungrily waiting listening public.

iTunes of course being the biggest player in the music game, blasted previous king-pin Windows Media player off the court. Wired.com reported that there are 200,000,000 iTunes users.
This staggering number I believe could be cut down enormously due to a new musical revolution called Spotify.

Spotify, is a name that may repulse you to the core, as it does with me; But the service it provides is unprecedented. It’s AWESOME.
Spotify ends the music ownership era. What I mean is, why would you buy music? Spotify presents you with almost every album available on iTunes and more.
You don’t need to buy music because it’s all provided for you, for FREE. If you want to pay for it, because you have some moral feeling of giving something to the bands forget about it! This is perfectly legal, and the bands get money from the adverts. If you don’t want adverts, or just have loads of money, you can buy the Premium edition of Spotify, for £9.99 per month, which isn’t even expensive.

SO, how can it be free? Well Spotify is riddled with adverts, like a prostitute’s riddled with STI’s.
But they don’t make it less usable, most people I think will put up with it, considering the incredible service their receiving. Your music is interrupted every hour, with a quick audio ad, and on the main Spotify screen a long, thin banner pops up on the right hand side. It doesn’t obstruct your listening of viewing pleasure.

What’s wrong with it? To be honest, there’s not a lot to complain about. It hosts a very user friendly, and good looking user interface, it’s a fantastic idea, and it’s backed by most of the major record labels. It doesn’t have some big named bands such as the Beatles, Metallica, ACDC and several others, but Spotify say they’re working hard at getting them.
The biggest downer for me is I can’t get this music on my iPod. I can only listen to it if: I have a computer on, and an internet connection. Hopefully someone will soon end this problem, otherwise we’re not writing our farewells for iTunes just yet.

To summarise, Spotify is a really fantastic program, it’s free, good looking, has a huge catalogue of music and is better than Last.fm, which I hate because it doesn’t have playlists, it lags horribly for me and you can listen to one song from most bands, the rest are 30 second previews. Download it, and let me know what you think of Spotify and this article below in the comments.

Thanks iTunes. You wasted 6MB of my hard drive with another terrible Free Single of the Week.

This week was just the final straw for me. Adding herself to my personal list of hated Singers/Song writers/Bands/Artists/Rappers is Speech Debelle.

First things first. I’m not a big Rap or Hip Hop fan, but some of it I can bear; I can listen to Kanye West, Eminem and a few others, but COME ON! Speech Debelle is the most recent artist in a long line of horrible free Singles provided by iTunes, and this one really takes the cake as the worst free single EVER!

There have been 2 free singles I have really enjoyed, one of which, Frank Turner’s Reasons not to be an Idiot, is a fantastic single! And has since appeared on an advert for Sky Movies which I got very excited about. When I downloaded it I thought maybe there was going to be a change in the apparent law of iTunes, which states no free single can be decent. The second, was Black Wax by Dananananaykroyd, a stupid name but a really nice, fun song.

This may seem to be a pointless, angry rant, and until this point it is. BUT if you, like me, think that iTunes need to improve their free singles of the week, as I do, then rate the songs. If you hate the song, don’t be afraid to give it a single star, you are saving musical ears by giving it one star if it deserves it, because then hopefully people will know not to download the trash iTunes provides for us. When ‘Reasons not to be an Idiot’ was the single of the week, it achieved five stars, an incredible feat considering how many people download the song and all of those people have a wide taste in music, and a true eye opener to some of the great music out there.

To conclude, iTunes improve yourself, keep rubbish like this out of the single of the week reserved list.