Spotify, is the name of a new revolutionary subscription music service. The service is available to its users via an application (currently supports Mac OS X, iPod Touch/iPhone, Windows and Android), which is very iTunes-alike. The concept is simple: all the music in the world available in your finger tips. LEGALLY. You just go ahead and search for a song/artist/album and voila!
It literally contains millions of tracks from almost every artist you can think of. Once you select a track it plays almost instantaneously at high-quality (premium users get an even better streaming service at 320kbps where available). You can also create multiple playlists which, if you are a premium member you can take offline (i.e. listen to even if Internet service is unavailable — handy if you’re travelling or on the mobile).
It also has a really nice artist info page, containing all available to Spotify discography, plus a short biography. It has also an artist radio: it composes a radio station with music alike to the artist you picked (like last.fm or Pandora). It also has a more generic radio feature, where you pick the genre plus the year range of the music you’d like to listen to. Pretty neat.
Now a little about the company: apparently the record labels own 18%+ of the company, so I guess thats one of the major reasons of the huge library that is available via Spotify. This seems to be a step forward, as record labels are realising they can’t fight piracy; instead change their methods of selling (or in this case renting) music. Why the record labels did not support such models earlier?! If this succeeds could send piracy into extinction.
Of course, all of these come at a price tag: £9.99/month. However, for all of the music of the world readily available LEGALLY I do not mind paying that, but for those of you that don’t like that there is also a free service (lower music quality plus no offline playlist support) if you manage to get an invite.
