Spotify delivers the future of music now

LOS ANGELES — On a recent afternoon during driving down Beverly Boulevard, I had 15 million songs sitting in the little tray between the driver and passenger seat. If they were on LP or compact disc, the entire assortment — available via the Spotify application I’d installed on my phone previously in the day — would fill dozens of tractor trailers and weigh thousands of tons. Sitting straightway to my morning coffee, the collection jiggled as I hit a bump, nevertheless the music coming out of my stereo didn’t skip a beat.

The arrival of Swedish-born

With the arrival of Swedish-born, London-based cloud service Spotify on American shores July 14, along with the progress of Google Music, and the impending launch of Apple’s iCloud music service, this year will be remembered as the year in which keeping our own copies of music, be it physically on CDs and LPs, or digitally as MP3s on our hard drives, became a decision, not a necessity, for both casual fans and music obsessives.

What, specifically, is Spotify? It’s an application that offers users access to high-quality streams of music from throughout history, one whose catalog includes the holdings of the world’s four largest record companies and an evenly monolithic consortium of independent labels. It’s currently available by invitation as an application you can download to your computer, smartphone, or Web-connected home audio system.