Since I’ve been posting a lot about Spotify lately, I thought I’d ask the question; what kind of music are you into?

I’ve been compiling a few playlists myself, which is more fun than I remember. I haven’t has so much fun creating playlists since the days of Napster and mix-CDs. iTunes playlists always felt like a chore somehow.

This is my primary playlist, that I can shove on any time of day/night, my mainstream (or Popular Music) list. Then if I’m feeling a bit ghetto, there’s my Rap playlist. Old skool and Reggae playlists for those chillout sessions. When I’m working I like to put on some Classical piano music. The great thing about Spotify is that you can create collaborative playlists. I opened an R&B playlist, Cherelle and Ruk have pretty much done all the hard work for me .

cr ~ Pop
cr ~ Classical
cr ~ Rap
cr ~ Old Skool
cr ~ Reggae
cr ~ R&B

I really like Spotify. I recommend it to everyone, I use it all the time, yet I won’t pay for it. This makes me feel rotten, just a little bit, so I’m going to justify myself.

This has nothing to do with liking the product, or even about affordabilty, this is purely to do with justifying the cost.

I think the PS3 Slim looks nice, I want one, but I have an Xbox360 and an over-powered PC for gamer, so although I can afford one, I can’t actually justify the purchase to myself. This is the exact problem I have with Spotify. I never used to pay for music, so now that I stream my music I’m not saving any money and although I am loyal to the product, the pricing is too high for me to put my hand in my pocket.

Now if the £100 bought me a lifetime license I might consider it. Of course I’d be worried about the service shutting down, as we’ve seen in the past with pay-and-go music download services – similar business model, where you rent DRMd music instead of straming it. In these cases customers were left with no music when the system shut down, which would of course be the same result with Spotify.

£100 a year is just too much to pay for music, especially for the Napster generation. Not only do we want everything now, and everything for free – but we’re accustomed to it.

Again, don’t get me wrong, I will pay for products. I buy iPhone apps all the time. I even bought a Spotify day pass for 99p when I was ‘DJing’ at my friend’s BBQ.

So how can Spotify encourage more of us to purchase their packages? Drop the prices. A 50% drop in prices would bring Spotify to the level of most other web apps. £35 – £50 a year is an amount that people see comfortable to shell out for a web application. £100 isn’t. Simples.