I have discovered Spotify.
First things first. This is not an ad, Ihave not been paid to post about Spotify, I don’t work for Spotify, and I have no other reason for posting about it other than I think its a great idea.
As you have no doubt heard, the record industry is getting its knickers in a twist about the internet, and the fact that people are using it to share music, for free, cutting them and their wallets out of the equation. Calling for more and more draconian measures from government, threatening seemingly random people with lawsuits, and adding intrusive DRM software to their CDs have done nothing to stem the tide of free music sloshing around the internet.
A load of paid download services have sprung up, iTunes being the most notable, and whilst they are popular they usually include some form of licensing in the files obtained. This licensing restricts the use of the files to either a specific machine or particular devices. Some believe that this is a bad thing and that once downloaded you should be able to listen to your music on whatever device you want and so download the free (in both senses of the word) music illegally.
This is kind of beside the point though but it illustrates the problem that the record companies are facing. They can no longer rely on their old business model to provide them with a guaranteed income. Selling CDs is not as profitable as it used to be (though it is still profitable, make no mistake) and all their bluster and legal posturing has done nothing to stop their product being freely distributed around the world. Something new is needed. That Something, in my opinion, is Spotify.
Spotify is a peice of software. It behaves just like any other media player; you open it up, pick a track, album or personalised playlist, hit play, and listen to tunes that you have selected. The difference is that you don’t own the music, it does not take up space on your hard drive. The music is streamed to you over the intertubes, much like an online radio station, except you get to choose the music.
“What’s the catch?” I hear you ask. Well for a start Spotify is invite only at the moment (but more on that later) and more catchy is the fact that Spotify is ad supported. Now before you get all uppity about it I have to say that having been using it for a few days now I must have heard an ad every 10-20 songs. Thats a great deal less than a commercial radio station where you don’t even get to choose the songs. It also shows banners in the player’s window, but you can minimize it so you don’t even see them. If you really object to the ads and don’t want to hear or see them at all you can pay £9.99 a month not to hear them, or you can have an ad free day for £0.99. One small point, as Spotify is still in beta testing (what isn’t in these days of Web 2.0?) the ad supported free version is only available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain. In most other countries Spotify Premium is available for purchase. Expect that to change though as testing is widened.
The most impressive thing about Spotify though is the sheer number of tunes that are available for you to pick from and organise into your own playlists. Its as simple as putting a band name or track title into the search box in the client, right clicking the result your looking for and adding it to a playlist. I’m hoping that more and more artists and labels choose to sign up with Spotify as their userbase grows, there are some which are unavailable such as Metallica (big surprise there), Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, ACDC and a few others. I’m sure they’ll come around eventually though.
One thing which is distinctly lacking from Spotify are the social web tools which seem to be everywhere on the internet at the moment. There is an option to create collaborative playlists but no indication as to how you share those with the wider world. Spotify does support scrobbling via Last.fm however though I feel they would better leverage their product if they did something similar themselves. A friends list with an indication of what they were listening to would be a start and possibly some way to display links to favourite tracks or playlists on a blog would be nice too. I like being able to build my own playlists from their extensive catalogue but would like it even more if I could share those lists effortlessly with the rest of the world. If the functionality is there its not obvious, and in the age of the social web it needs to be.
All in all I reckon Spotify is the future of internet music, I’m very happy with it and may even consign my MP3 collection to DVD so it no longer takes up space on my hard drive (40GB which I can put to better use).
Now, the contest. I have 10 Spotify invites up for grabs. So if you want to try it out for yourself (check that its available in your country though, Spotify’s license for the tunes doesn’t cover everywhere I’m afraid) all you have to do is list your top ten tracks and why they’re your top ten in a post on your blog with a link to Spotify and to this post (I know, I’m a link-whore 
). Post a comment here linking to your blog when the post goes live and the first 10 get invites, its as simple as that.
