I’ve been a whisker away from signing up to Spotify Premium in the past, with the promise of all-you-can-eat music enough to lure me to the Spotify home page – but never quite enough to persuade me to part with £10 per month.

But this morning’s announcement – a cut-down version for £4.99 per month that brings music to your PC but not to your phone – has finally brought my dust-ridden credit card out of retirement.

This is a watershed moment: it marks the point where I officially stop buying CDs and move to a brave new download-only age. Although if I’m entirely honest, the past year hasn’t seen many CDs added to my collection (five if you must know, and all of those were Christmas presents).

Fifteen years ago, when I was but a fresh-faced university graduate, things couldn’t have been more different. I spent hours each week in the local HMV, listening to the new CD singles and pondering which to buy. My shelves still heave with the weight of discs sitting there, unlistened to for a decade.

How much more convenient to have music on demand. If I want to listen to the new album by The National, I can. Or a friend tells me about a band I’ve never heard of; all I need to do is head over to Spotify and type in their name. Or I can flip back to my youth and swoon to the sounds of The Cure (still the best band in history, just for the record).

So yes, I’m persuaded. And I’ll be fascinated to see what everyone else thinks. Over the past few weeks, we’ve had a poll on the website gently ticking away, asking whether or not PC Pro visitors would ever sign up to Spotify Premium for £10 a month.

You can see the resounding answer above: 82% said no, 12% yes, and a paltry 6% already do. Will that change? That’s up to you, so head over to the home page and take part in the new poll – which asks the same question but this time the price is £5.

The highlights of my bleak two-hour trawl of our nation’s capital involved four people claiming not to speak English, despite the English-language novels sticking out of their pockets, half a dozen “not interested, never heard of online music, don’t want to hear about it, go away before I set the hounds on you”, a couple of “got a meeting”, two “late for buses”, and my personal favourite – one woman who looked like Nicholas Anelka, telling me “not to follow her” after my opening gambit of “hello, sorry to bother you, I’m a journalist with PC Pro and…”

Needless to say, after a couple of hours of this soul destroying work I trudged back to the barn, slumped in my seat and quietly reflected – through sobs – on what had happened. I’ve done these things before and normally people are quite happy to have a chat with a slightly dishevelled, Ringo Starr-voiced journo. I can only assume it’s the issue. The bald facts are that a lot of people download music illegally and they probably felt I was trying to herd them straight into a confession and subsequently the clink. Which is fair enough – but I beg you, if ever you see a slightly gangling, youngish man, with a slightly vacant expression and wayward hair approaching you with a tape recorder in the street, give him a minute of your time, or at least, a funny excuse.