What appears to be the new craze, Spotify, with a free library of over 8 million songs, is backed by all the major record labels... including Nuclear Blast!

This means that, with a simple download, it is possible to listen to ANYTHING you want, whenever you want, for absolutely nothing. The only limitations are that, with the unpaid account there are adverts, and that it is impossible to download the songs, subscription or no.

A simple search found the entire disco of HammerFall, Edguy, Blind Guardian, Iced Earth, Iron Maiden, etc... alongside pop, rnb and other genres.

Personally I'm for it: I can see it has a good use for parties and general listening... What are your views?

WTF? "Not available in your country yet"?
Anyway, I think the idea is great. Still... you can call me oldfashioned, but I prefer my music right next to me, if not on a CD then at least on my very own harddisc.

Agree with that... a CD is much better than to listen on them on the internet. Truly much better quality on a cd than on a mp3 file...

Actually I don't agree with that. I don't hear a different between a CD and a mp3 with a bitrate of at least 192kbit/s. To me it's just a psychological thing.

Of course it sounds better on a CD than on mp3! My soundsystem has much better sound quality than my mp3-player.

But anyway, CDs deliver a bunch of songs as a whole. On your PC you won't hear Lore of the Arcane going fluently into Trailblazers, on the CD it sounds like one song, just like Carved in Stone.

Just noticed that Lore of the Arcane doesn't feature on Spotify... but it has everything else

As for the sound quality, it is often the same and sometimes better depending on bit-rate, speakers, etc. It is quite simple to connect a PC or mp3 player to most modern sound systems, so you can appreciate the quality

That's no problem at all. On most mp3 player (software) you have a setting to skip the break between 2 songs, so fluent change is no reason

I prefer buying CDs as well. But I don't want booklets, I want to rip it as often as I want and I want quality. Most stuff (NOT ALL!)on the Internet often has bad quality. When I turn my sound system loud the quality difference can be clearly noticed, especially the bass sounds crappy. Another thing that bugs me with online stores is Digital Rights Management (DRM) which should act like copy protection often prevents playing the files on other machines or mp3 players.

Amazon is going to sell DRM free mp3 files here in Germany soon. Depending on the quality and of course the price of the files I might use that, at least I will test.

To the gapless playback thing:
It depends on what Media Player you use. Not every player is capable of playing mp3 files without a gap between them.
I can recommend Songbird as a great media player. It's open source and free and highly costumizeable

Aaaanyways, I will point you all in the direction of Spotify. Whatever your views on digital music give it a look and tell me what you think - is it good for bands and artists? I think so. It gives them recognition and would encourage people to look further into them, one way or another - iTunes, CD, or whatever. It's no worse than listening to the radio I think

I edit audio very often, I can see the quality infront of me

Normally there are like big blocks of sound when you mix them together on a cd.

mp3 normally you don't have a big block, it is compressed so much the blocks are destroyed