Today I came across two interesting articles: first one by patricksmusicblog in which he talks about how much should albums cost, and the second one by thedailyguru regarding Björk’s decision to keep off Spotify her new album. So I’d like to say something about it.

If you live in a third-world country you know it is ridiculously expensive to buy a physical album right after its release. I’ve paid up to $50 for a single CD/Vinyl and believe me it’s not healthy to your pockets, and I’m talking about regular albums here, not a first pressing of Black Sabbath’s Masters of Reality or something like that. If you don’t live in one of these countries, to put into perspective, the average person here in Colombia earns around $3100 a year. Well, you might say there’s always the option to buy in local stores, but record stores don’t get the album after 1 or 2 months and that’s only if the artist/band is famous. I’m not saying music should be free but at least from my point of view, streaming services like Spotify are a great solution because they allow us to give back at least a penny to the artist instead of just going to a torrent site and getting a pirate copy of the album. I don’t know how “harmful” to the music industry streaming services might be up there in the north or Europe for that matter, but I believe I speak on behalf of a lot of people from third-world countries, or at least South American countries, when I say Spotify is one of the best things that’s happened to music lovers from this side of the world.