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If you’ve  already seen my first mobile blog post then you will already know that I bought an iPod Touch 64gb this week and that one of the first things  I installed on it was the iPhone wordpress app.

It wasn’t the first though – that honor goes to Spotify Mobile.

Of course to use Spotify on a mobile or iPod Touch you need to pay the £9.99 monthly fee to upgrade to the premium service. (but you don’t get anymore annoying adds interrupting your listening!)

A few of my friends remarked that I was a bit crazy spending so much money on a new iPod Touch when I already had a perfectly good 80gb iPod. And if you take it a face value then it looks like it is.

However I’d already put an iPod Touch 64gb on my ‘maybe buy’ list on gubb.net a couple of weeks after Apple announced it.

It was something I’d been waiting for since the iPhone 3GS was announced back in June. Obviously they waited a while to announce the new iPod Touch range to try and get people to buy an iPhone. Now that’s not the sort of marketing I would have expected of Apple a few years ago and it annoyed me. (So why haven’t I got a new iPhone 3GS? Why go for the iPod Touch 64gb? Well I have nearly 40gb of music in iTunes - and yes it is ALL paid for so it’s just a case that there isn’t yet a iPhone that meets my needs).

So it was a purchase I was considering. I was waiting my 30 day cooling off period before making a decision on buying it or not.

To fill 40gb on an iPod you need to buy a lot of music albums. I have and have probably started to buy more in the last few years.

So it was turning into an expensive habit.

So when Spotify  announced an offline mode back at the start of October that made me think twice. I’d been using Spotify since January this year (yes I was lucky to get an invite then ) so when they announced this I was tempted to upgrade. But I waited a while to see what play lists I had added to Spotify over the last six weeks. It turns out that there are quite a few albums being released that I would have been tempted to buy anyway (anyone would think it was nearly christmas or something!) Spotify offline allows you to store upto 3333 tracks on three different devices. Now your average album is around 12 tracks long. So that makes 277 albums I can store offline on my iPod touch.

 

Of course you only have to reconnect online every 30 days to revalidate your account. But  you can change which tracks you store in offline mode at ANY time you are connected to the internet.

Anyway lets look at the costs involved.I probably buy around 30 albums a year. Even if you account for them costing around £8 each if I didn’t buy an album again and just relied on Spotify I would save £240 per year.
Of course it isn’t as simple as that as you have to factor in the cost of the subscription and the initial outlay for the iPod Touch.

If you look at the cumulative costs and savings over 1,2 and 3 years it turns out to be

Year 1

• Costs: iPod Touch £300 and Spotify subscription £120 = £420
• Savings: £240

Year 2

 

• Costs: Year 1 £420 and Spotify subscription £120 = £540
• Savings: £480

Year 3

• Costs: Year 1 + 2 £540 and + Spotify subscription £120 = £660
• Savings: £720

So after 2 years it’s almost at break even point. After 3 years I would have saved £60! If I were to replace it with a newer model after 3 years I would actually be starting from a better position that I am now!

So if you are putting off what might be an expensive purchase it’s always worth weighing up how you are going to use it. You could surprise yourself. With interest rates at such a low amount and returns on savings accounts so slow it maybe worth thinking outside of the box …

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