For a long time, one option for the music business to save themselves has been to offer an ‘all you can eat’ option for music – pay a monthly fee and listen to all of the music you fancy.
Initially resisted by the Music Biz like it was the devil’s spawn, they’re clearly more open to it, as that’s exactly what Spotify is.
It’s a player with more than a passing resemblance to iTunes — good idea, because some people don’t like to think outside the limited experience — that uses Bit Torrent to pass tracks around, saving Spotify a ton of money on bandwidth.
It’s been in Beta for an age and has just gone public offering pay-for accounts.
Big thanks to Amo for bringing it to our attention and sorting out us an invite.
Loads of music
We put living music deity, ‘Brian Eno’ into the search and found 250 songs on the service! Any service with that many Eno songs has to be quality in our book.
Label support
There’s some pretty big players fro the music biz, with Universal, Sony BMG, EMI, Warner music, Merlin and The Orchard to name but a few.
Three usage models
There’s three ways that it can be used, Free (ad supported); Daily fee of 1€ / £1 / 9SEK; or Monthly fee at 9.9€ / £9.90 / 99SEK.
Ad supported
Visual ads don’t really work for a music player, as you drop the music player into the background and the adverts would never be seen. Spotify are using audio ads. In the short amount of time we’ve been using it, we’ve heard an advert for Xbox. They’re not too regular, so it doesn’t get on your nerves.
Sharable URIs
If you come across a track that you’d like to share with someone else there’re two ways to do it – an HTTP URL and a Spotify URI.
So, if I really wanted you to hear the track that they used as the theme music for the old BBC2 TV show, Arena, I could send you the follow link
http://open.spotify.com/track/1juykmcxZFyBh2mcUuA0Mw.
Buyable tracks
We see that there’s an option, to buy tracks from an online service. We’ve found a few pointing to iTunes, but suspect that the record labels would be more than happy for this to be opened up to the competition.
Radio service
The radio service has a pretty novel interface, the decades that the tracks are to be selected from are selectable, as are the music types.
From this basic information a stream of tracks are picked for you by Spotify – neat.
Summary
Wow, this is some polished service. Clearly the year plus that it’s been in beta has been well spent.
It’s got a ton of tracks; from what we’ve seen, it works flawlessly and has a number of ways to get using it straight away.
Highly impressive. iTunes needs to worry.
Score: 91%
I´ve been using Spotify (I live in Sweden) for a while now and its truly fantastic! Deezer,Jango,Pandora,Rhapsody, last.fm,Grooveshark, Imeem, Youtube, Myspace,Itunes and the others (illegal bittorrent) are all interesting attempts att trying to get music on to the Internet, but it hasn´t truly been done proper until now. Spotify is in my opinion the first real music service to enter the Internet, and thats something to celebrate, since I know a lot of music lovers has been waiting far too long for this.
Music and Internet has finally met thanks to Spotify. Cheers for that!
I totally agree, Spotify is a step in the right direction. It offers tons and tons and tons of music, a neat UI and an awesome streaming performance.
But… There are some serious drawbacks. Currently, Spotify cannot compete with iTunes’ way of managing your music. I love smart playlists that work great on my ratings, last play dates, play counts, genres, …
How do my audiobooks fit in there?
And by far the biggest issue: It’s not portable! There is no concept how to bring this to an iPod, Zune, …
How could anybody in this days come up with an approach for a music service that’s not portable?!
Glad to see that others are enjoying Spotify too.
@Koon – I’m completely with you on the portable side – and without great bandwidth to mobile devices and an ‘all you can eat’ data plan, it’s not going to work with portable devices, by it’s very torrent-delivered nature.
I’m on a trip at the mo to FOWA and realised before leaving that I wouldn’t be able to listen to Spotify – and felt sad about it.
That’s a pretty strong indications that it’s a good App if I was concerned about losing it after using it for just a couple of days!
As far as giving it useful iTunes features … that’s just a matter of adding bells and whistle functions isn’t it? Achievable if enough people ask for them.
Hi!
We thought it would be great with a place where you can share your Spotify playlists, rate them and and enjoy others. So we made one: http://spotylist.com Check it out!!
Here is a freaking brilliant playlist that you may enjoy while checking it out: http://open.spotify.com/user/leonard/playlist/1tS2RXS5tKDbAwQVsPdkMY
See you on the flipside!
Peace // Adam & Philip
Have you tried MUkoTE? It mutes ads in Spotify and it’s free (postcardware)! http://cosechapropia.blogspot.com/2009/08/mukote-11.html