Than 50 years ago? Than Napster-days? Do Spotify, Vevo, ThisIsMyJam, etc. actually make sharing any song you're into easier than before or is it harder to scour a plethora of platforms to find your song in a freely shareable form?

Hmm, this whole thing gets tangled up in DRM and the shift from owning to access for me. I could easily search for a song on YouTube and share, it connect Facebook to Spotify and share what I'm listening to.

But, I think we've lost the magic. Mixtapes (even in CD form, but not as much) have magic in them. Even having a friend over to listen to music (who does that anymore) had a certain magic to it.

We've traded that magic for ease and like many things, when you remove the friction it becomes a little less interesting.

Yes. It's also much much MUCH more accessible today than it was 50 years ago.

I'm going to go ahead and disagree with Rick here. One of the most popular features on Spotify is the ability to make and share playlists.

You can also see on places like Soundcloud where people are commenting on each little piece of a song, so that now songs are these much larger social experiences.

I can find most of my music easily - on YouTube, or streaming a sample somewhere. I remember the MySpace days where I would scour and scour and then hope that MAYBE just MAYBE I could order that British CD from Amazon. Now my favorite crazy bands (Clor, The MaeShi) have their albums at my fingertips on Spotify/Rdio. None of that digging that came before.

I'm not being facetious when I say that Spotify has revolutionized my life. That said, I'm not sure music is any more shareable than it was 15 or 30 years ago. But I know that it's not any less. Music is the most earnest, abstract projection of self.

I'm of that set on the edge of 30 -- I was 14 when I adopted Napster in 1998, and I shared the magic of mixtapes my older sisters' boyfriends had made them before then. Mixtapes are how I discovered Elliott Smith, and mixed CDs are how I discovered myself.

I remember vividly what it was like to craft a mix. I made mixes for people that I edited into one long track so that the mix receiver couldn't skip a second of the carefully crafted story I was trying to tell.

I think some of the art of mixing is lost on platforms like Spotify or YouTube. The hunt for the music is definitely gone. Everything is accessible to everyone. But if you take the selfish pleasure of the crafting of musical opus' out of the mix, I think you could argue that music is definitely more shareable. The barrier to entry is less than it used to be.

But still, I feel a sense of sadness for that Napster-era explosion of discovery. I still have a friend from Napster who lives about an hour away, and though we were coasts apart it was sharing/swapping music over the web that solidified our now 15-year old friendship.

That is the magic of music.

Also, there is a bit of share-hacking happening in the music business. Mike Doughty, who is one of my favorite musicians, has just launched this little experiment:

To me, if you were charting the spreadability of music, it peaked with the mass adoption of the mp3. Now that we've moved on to streaming services, it's been a lot harder for me personally to share music I love with my friends. Especially the more eclectic artists in my catalog. I'll look on youtube first, and if I can't find it there I move on to services like Spotify. But half the time, my friends don't use that service so I can't make the share happen.