Greg Grimmer: The editor’s decision is final

In his latest monthly column for Newsline, Greg Grimmer, partner, Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer, returns from his holiday and ponders the increasing success of Spotify.

So back at my work station after the annual sojourn to the beach, same old, same old, back at the agency, but no! What’s this? A new music phenomenon has hit the workplace. ITunes and the ubiquitous iPods are no more.

Spotify is the new music repository of choice amongst the EC1 Adverati.

Spotify, for those yet to experience it, is a freely available, legal, digital music site containing every conceivable version of every track ever made. It hopes to be commercially successful by selling both ads and subscriptions and is certainly making good inroads into the hearts and minds of the twenty-somethings I share my working hours with.

After quickly realising that there aren’t enough hours in the day to hear all the tracks I want to hear, I spent a water cooler moment with a bevy of aforementioned twenty-somethings where I butted into their conversation about their favourite Spotify playlist. Not only was I left bewildered by the names of the tracks and the artists that they were listening to, they were also befuddling each other with the names of obscure R’n’B artists, Swedish MCs and Swahili beat combos.

It was then it struck me that we are potentially going to lose another human collection point.

In the previous millennium you could tell the type of company you had walked into by their choice of Radio station. XFM or Kiss for a trendy marcomms agency, Heart or Magic for happy go lucky 9-5 office and LBC if you were in the London Carriage Office.

The programme directors at every radio station would blend the right amount of new music and classics from a certain genre to keep their given audience happy over as long a period as possible. Obviously the DJs and presenters have their part to play but most certainly a misplaced Dire Straits track or careless use of a Van Morrison ‘classic’ could result in the tuning button being turned and precious listeners being lost to a competitor.

This is the problem with Spotify. As with anyone being forced to listen to compilation tapes from an old boyfriend – or in modern day parlance borrowing someone else’s iPod – you will soon find yourself hitting the shuffle button with increasing regularity.

In an era of unlimited choice we need the editors, the programme directors and the schedulers to make choices for us ESPECIALLY in a joint Viewing/Listening situation (think Saturday night ITV), or indeed in the written media daily email round-ups or weekly summaries of key events – How may times have you seen busy business executives cite The Week as their favourite publication?

The talent to spot the connection between consumer and content, and crucially the connections that link content with content, be it audio, visual or written is imperative to the final enjoyment of that content.

There are of course some technologies that do this well but they currently tend to exist in the e-commerce world (I’m thinking Amazon’s and iTunes’ ‘you may also like this’ feature) but generally in the world of linked content there is still a great deal of human involvement and I for one see this as a positive.

The programme director and editor are professionally employed to make sure they entertain, educate, and evolve their readers’ and listeners’ tastes and knowledge.

I use the XFM playlist to update my own personal playlist with new music in the genre I like, otherwise I would still be listening to Clash B-sides when I’m sixty (come to think of it I may well be doing that anyway). Spotify may well carve a large niche in music listening but like EVERY media that has come before it is unlikely to kill the media it sets out to replace. Radio stations and programme directors are likely to be with us (thankfully) for some time to come.

Do you agree with Greg? Send us your opinion – [email protected]