Music streaming services help discover new artists, genres and albums which quietly shelter songs that often fails to find mainstream mention. Songs only you can claim to have excavated, and later savour in a vacant or pensive mood.
The recent launch of Amazon India's music streaming platform Amazon Prime Music triggered the memory of a brief, blissful dalliance with a music software in college. Like it always is, one cherished mix-tape from a godsend friend maketh a music maven. In my case, a lovingly curated jazz and blues compilation CD sparked off the urge to buy an mp3 player in 2006. The Chinese mp3 player held the cracks of an American music software which became my secret library, a hulking directory and a treasure chest for a mind-bending range of music I did not know existed.
For all intents and purposes, Rhapsody (which later became Napster) was a first-of-its-kind on-demand music streaming service which offered access to unlimited songs for a fee. Sadly, the service was not available in India. But a user like me sitting in Kolkata could still access the website, sift through categories, artist information, playlists and similar song/album suggestions, with 30-second snippets of the chosen song. The last option was the clincher. Thirty seconds was enough window for me to gauge if the song was worth exploring further. Snatches of a promising ditty on Rhapsody would be keyed in on YouTube which would obligingly play the full version without any disruption. In about a year's time, I was walking around with an enviable collection of songs tucked in my nifty little mp3 player; a source of pride and joy, a collector's item painstakingly produced. This phase of looking for new music on Rhapsody, listening them up on YouTube and downloading the chosen ones in mp3 formats lasted for about two years before a wicked sibling deleted the software in his bid to deep-clean the desktop. A period of gut-wrenching despair followed. I emerged from the darkness in about three weeks but the loss of this august music companion left a deep-seated wound. I was bitten by the bug of discovering music online.
Rhapsody's untimely disappearance led me to comb the cyberspace for lookalikes. And there were many. I stumbled upon the British music website last.fm which was instructive while it lasted. I liked the way they curated the landing pages of musicians/songwriters where one would first have to see an artist's best possible songs. There was the online radio-like website called 8tracks which assembled mood, theme and genre-based playlists. Grooveshark was sassy in design and fiercely good in sound quality. Apple music had and still possesses a staggeringly large music collection. But I fell out of love with Apple once they stopped making iPods and have never really been interested in getting an iPhone. Indian music streaming apps like Gaana and Saavn did not offer many options and their interface was unappealing, but I hear they are very popular. By trial and error, I hopped from one music service to another, trying to recreate that first rush of love I felt of Rhapsody. Swedish online music service giant Spotify has been on the radar for quite some time now. Reports have been doing the rounds since last year that they will launch in India soon. How soon is something I am still waiting to find out.
But Amazon Prime Music, which launched this Wednesday, looks exciting. The ad-free service is going to offer "millions of songs", the tech behemoth promises. It is available to all Amazon Prime members, with no additional cost. Launched in the United States in 2014, the India version of Amazon Music is leaving no stone unturned to beat out competition from a host of existing music streaming services. It has tied up with 8 national and over 300 regional record labels apart from letting Indian users access its entire global music collection. A preliminary investigation on my part on Thursday was both uplifting and disappointing. A search for an obscure song by American-Canadian singer Rufus Wainwright led me to many unheard of albums but I could not trace a much-loved rendition of Que Sera Sera by French music producer Wax Tailor.
But there's something in the air. If the future of media is streaming, let's hope Amazon Music rekindles the joy of discovering hidden gems on the web.