Thank heavens for the infinite pleasures of GOD’S Jukebox

... otherwise known as Spotify, the music app this week valued at £21bn that lets converts like TOM LEONARD listen to everything!

THE Swedes have long had a big impact on our ear drums. They invented the telephone handset, dynamite and ABBA.

And they also created Spotify, the digital streaming service that has not only shaken up the industry, but revolutionised the way we listen to music.

oh, the sweet sounds coming out of the Leonard household nowadays, thanks to those sagacious Scandinavians. Where once there was room-toroom mushy pop, we now have our 17- year- old daughter exploring Puccini’s arias.

And in what must count as one of the internet’s greatest achievements, Spotify has managed to wean our 16-yearold son off rap music and on to the far more mellifluous tones of Johnny Cash.

Meanwhile, I — like countless others whose record collections are a dim, but treasured, memory — have been rediscovering lost gems every day.

If our experience is anything like that of the 157 million other Spotify users, one can understand the excitement hovering over the New York Stock Exchange yesterday as the company made its stock market debut in a highly anticipated flotation.

It ended its first day of trading valued at around £21 billion. Pretty good for an outfit that has never made a profit.

It has attracted such intense financial interest by luring 71 million customers to use its premium subscription service. The operative word here is ‘subscription’. Decades after music makers and lovers widely predicted the internet and its culture of piracy would kill off recorded music by giving it away free, the art form has in some ways never been healthier.

The world is awash with music and Spotify deserves much of the credit.

You could call it God’s Jukebox, an almost infinite lyrical line-up through which you could flip for years and not reach the end.

Subscribers can access more than 40 million songs, videos and (if you’re in the mood) podcasts by artists from all over the world and all over history.

Sibelius to the Sex Pistols, the jazz greats Django Reinhardt to the not-sogreat Pinky and Perky, squeaky-voiced singing puppets from the Sixties. It’s all there, as I’ve found, waiting to be joyfully (or not so joyfully) rediscovered or encountered for the first time.

There are essentially two ways of accessing Spotify — for free or by paying a monthly subscription. The former — used by 86 million people — is supported by advertising like commercial radio stations so your listening is interrupted by adverts.

Youcan’t play specific songs in the order you like either and you cannot skip more than six songs an hour.

The ‘premium’ service is ad-free but costs £9.99 a month for a single user while a ‘family plan’ for up to six different people living at the same address, each with their own musical profile on the site, is £14.99 a month.

unlike people listening to Spotify for free, premium subscribers can listen to anything they want as well as download songs so they can play them offline. using Facebook, it’s possible even to see what your friends are playing and Spotify produces endless suggested playlists based on what users are choosing.

Wireless technology means you can listen to Spotify almost anywhere — connected to your car speakers, through headphones while jogging and, of course, while pretending to work on the computer.

In one of the greatest ironies thrown up by the digital revolution, Spotify has also gone from being derided as the great Satan of the music industry to being hailed as its saviour. Spotify is funnelling billions of pounds from subscribers to music companies, song writers and performers.

Although established musicians will still grumble that they’re not making as much money as in the good old days of vinyl or CDs, before Spotify came along ( spawning various imitators), they once faced the bleak prospect of making no money at all.

Starting in the late Nineties, pirate websites allowed people to download music with record companies or artists getting nothing unless they took legal action. It was only in 2014, thanks to the advent of Spotify and copycat rivals, that the international music industry’s annual profits started to go up again after a 15-year freefall. Admittedly, Spotify is starting to take a bigger and bigger cut of the revenue it receives from subscribers but, for the moment, the music industry — faced with extinction not so long ago — isn’t complaining too loudly. The venture was launched in Stockholm in 2008 by two Swedish entrepreneurs, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. They decided, as Mr Ek put it, to offer something that was ‘better than piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry’ by offering an alternative either to illegal music downloading or companies such as Apple that made users pay to download songs and albums which they then owned for good. Inevitably, the big issue was whether the industry thought it was being compensated enough. Despite Spotify insisting its longterm goal is to ensure artists are properly remunerated, some loudly counter that they are being ripped off. To stop customers listening to them for free, some of the world’s biggest pop stars — led by Adele and Taylor Swift — withheld new releases from Spotify until the company agreed to restrict access to their music to paying subscribers only.

other stars say Spotify’s actually rather effective in helping them reach a huge audience. British megastar Ed Sheeran — one of Spotify’s most streamed artists — has credited the website with promoting his main business, which is playing live.

And even the biggest superstars have now had to bow to the muscle of a company with so many millions of users.

Having pointedly taken down all her songs from Spotify in 2014, huffing that she was ‘ not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment’, Taylor Swift quietly put her music back on the site last year.

The refuseniks are trying to hold back an unstoppable tide. Streaming service revenues now account for 60 per cent of recorded music sales, with Spotify as the market leader. It claims to have so far paid out more than £5.7 billion in royalties. Music quality purists and hipsters may still opt for CDs or vinyl but more and more of us are streaming music off the internet, not just because it’s cheaper but also because it’s so convenient. And then there’s the endless choice. What’s bad for egotistical multi-millionaire pop stars is undeniably good for ordinary music lovers. After all, once you’ve stumped up the subscription, you’d be mad not to listen to as much as you can — experiment, explore and widen one’s listening boundaries, as music teachers might say. or just rediscover what might have been lost forever. I parted company with my large record collection some years ago after a tragic misunderstanding with a cleaner. Many other vinyl owners probably scratched theirs to death or binned them when CDs arrived, only to find that some of them were never produced on CD. You are unlikely to find them on Spotify.

ONCEyou find them, you can ‘ spread the joy’. We have a family Spotify subscription. My wife and I went to some trouble to indoctrinate our children with our musical taste when they were young and malleable, only to have it cruelly rejected when they got a little older and decided they knew better.

They obviously don’t, and Spotify has allowed us to regain some lost ground, making a few innocent suggestions which they have been able to take on board painlessly just by typing the band and song names into a computer.

Spotify has also been a learning process for me. Thanks to Spotify, I can now say that I understand why Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours — which I never once listened to on the simple grounds my sister owned it — is one of the bestselling albums of all time.

As for Swindon, that muchmocked town should be revered for spawning XTC, a wonderfully eccentric and talented rock band which I, and countless other callow teenagers, ignored because they were so defiantly uncool. Spotify has all 12 of their albums and I’ve listened to every one for the price of an old 12in single.

The boundaries of my old record collection seem feeble now. Spotify offers albums of lawnmower noises, animal growls, bus and Tube train sounds and ‘relaxing music for cats and cat lovers’.

It also recruited a New York gynaecologist to put together a ‘ birthing playlist’ featuring songs ‘scientifically designed’ to alleviate the anxiety of women in labour.

It includes under Pressure by David Bowie and Queen, Don’t Panic by Coldplay and — for the calm after the storm — Bach’s unaccompanied Cello Suite No 1.

From labour wards to the Leonard household, we’re all sitting back and letting the Spotify revolution waft through our lugholes.