And finally, the prayers of all music lovers in the region have been answered. The moment we’ve all been waiting for is almost here. Deezer, you’ve been a good friend for all these years but this is where our paths diverge. Wait a minute, let me take a step back, for all of you who don’t know what I am talking about, let me explain. The way we’ve consumed music has changed over the years. I’ve been a huge admirer of great music and good tech ever since my childhood. I started off with AIWA walkman, moved to multiple Sony walkman, CD players and then to the very first MP3 player Creative Nomad II (I had the 64 MB version). The way music was acquired and transferred to the Mp3 players or Mp3 CDs was always cumbersome. Back then, downloading music through Napster and Kazaa was the norm. Transferring music to Mp3 players was still not for the faint-hearted until the advent of the iPod. iPod made it so much easier for everyone to sync their music libraries and that kind of kicked off the digital music revolution.
Fast forward a few years and digital music streaming services like Spotify and Deezer were born. With fast internet, downloading Mp3 music was no longer required as you could pretty much stream the highest quality music at any time. These Digital Music streaming apps let users stream music, create playlists and offline tracks that can play without the internet. Subscribing to these services provides access to millions of songs and helps discover new music by tuning into well-curated playlists and all of that for as little as 9$ monthly (Whatever happened to the music CDs that used to cost 10$ per CD? such a rip-off).
The Middle East digital music scene has been ruled for years by Deezer and Anghami, however, all of that is about to change and you can see Deezer trying their last bit to get as much mass adoption as possible by insane amounts of Advertising. I’ve been a subscriber of Deezer for over 6 years, mainly because I use the SONOS music system at home and Deezer works really well with SONOS and since Spotify wasn’t available in the region there wasn’t any other better option. However, that’s about to change as it seems Spotify is launching in Dubai in the next few days or weeks and boy I’m excited! I am going to make a quick switch to Spotify as soon as it launches and there will be a follow-up post on how to migrate easily from Deezer to Spotify. You must be thinking what’s the big deal with Spotify? Well for starters, they’ve got much better-curated music playlists but the main reason for me to make the switch is because of “Spotify Connect” which essentially is a music client embedded into many speakers like the Libratone Zipp. Spotify connect allows speakers with the functionality to play music directly over wifi without the need for your phone to be constantly streaming music (this is what the Bluetooth speakers do). Not only does this allow you to use your phone while listening to music, the music is of much better quality as Bluetooth was never meant to play music, to begin with (I know..there is AptX and AptX HD but still WIFI Music sounds way better…)
Stay tuned for more on SONOS and WIFI vs Bluetooth music.
This blog post is Written by Dhaval Desai who is the founding Director of MobiiWorld, one of the Top ranked Digital Agency on DesignRush.
