I really like the video presentation on Spotify’s new-ish Web site. It does a good job explaining what the service is all about and how you might want to use it. Glorious old vinyl and analog media serve as the starting point for their story, but hey, where’s the 8-track cassette tape above?

A lot of people would say mass music consumption began with turntables and vinyl and lived in 45 minute chunks. Now music has moved into the digital realm and has become largely unbound by the constraints of physical media. It’s incredibly convenient to walk around with several thousand songs in your pocket, all efficiently organized into playlists and folders. Although I can’t help but feel we’re missing some of the physical artifacts of years past. Sure, no one’s really complaining about lugging around cartons of records and tapes (especially djs). But I think many people miss the whole experience of going down to the record store and flipping through the album covers. Last weekend I was reminded of this while squandering away my afternoon looking for a good foobar player skin to display the album artwork for my cobbled together mp3 collection. The once impressive 12-inch by 12-inch album cover artwork has now been relegated to a tiny 100 pixel x 100 pixel thumbnail image. In many cases we’re using digital services like Spotify and Lastfm to share and discover new music with others rather than meet up at the record store.

Despite the almost invisible nature of digital music (you can’t really see or touch your music collection anymore because it exists as a series of compressed ‘files’), in many ways social media has emerged to improve this relationship. Now most recently with word of Facebook Music, I imagine our listening experience is set to take another drastic evolutionary step.