Spotify - Free Legal Music

[03laceys]

So after watching the news today i went straight to their site signed up and downloaded the programme, ummm looks like itunes "I hate itunes", but still went ahead and after only 5 minutes i had a playlist with over 100 of my favorite songs. I decided to play them to see if there is any lag i.e buffering, or computer speed, result no lag unlike windows media player. Overall i thought it was a great programme in which i will be using daily.

Note you must listen to an ad every 20 Min's or pay for an upgrade!

 

Their description.

 

What is Spotify?

Spotify is a new way to enjoy music. Simply download and install, before you know it you?ll be singing along to the genre, artist or song of your choice. With Spotify you are never far away from the song you want.

There are no restrictions in terms of what you can listen to or when. Forget about the hassle of waiting for files to download and fill up your hard drive before you get round to organising them. Spotify is instant, fun and simple.

Because music is social, Spotify allows you to share songs and playlists with friends, and even work together on collaborative playlists, Friday afternoon in the office might never be the same again! We?re music lovers like everyone else.

We want to connect millions of people with their favorite songs by creating a product that people love to use. We respect creativity and believe in fairly compensating artists for their work. We?ve cleared the rights to use the music you?ll listen to in Spotify.

 

The daily telegraph (UK newspaper) interview with the founder and CEO

 

Spotify has been drawing a lot of attention over the last few months. The online music service gives you free access to its vast catalogue if you listen to around a minute of advertising every half an hour and for ?9.99 a month they'll turn the ads off. Just download the iTunes-style player, install it on your computer and you're ready to go.

Two things make the service a success: the depth of the catalogue and the speed of audio streaming. I've coupled it with Airfoil and AirTunes to stream the audio to my living room speakers and it works very nicely.

 

Some of the recent additions to the Spotify player

The big questions for Spotify are the business model and the extent to which the record labels will support what is, after all, the kind of service that would have appalled them just a year or two ago.

Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, says the labels have been very receptive: "When the labels eventually saw the extent of the service, they got a much better idea because Spotify's content is so quick to access. That has been an immense help when trying to figure out the business model behind this."

He says Spotify is now adding around 10,000 tracks every day. For example, Naxos, the classical label, added its catalogue yesterday. However, different licensing deals across Europe mean that not every track is available in every country. Indeed, they were forced to withdraw a number of songs from their catalogue last month. This is a potential stumbling block, as are the deals with labels themselves.

Daniel says that the labels don't get exactly the same deal, something that could cause friction in future if a particular label decides they should be earning more. "As a rule we can't talk too much about the specific deals agreed with the labels," he says, "but, yes, the deals are similar. Generally they look at which of the different types of services offer them the most uptakes ? as they should do as it's about compensating the artists."

Things are complicated by the decision of certain bands to opt out of Spotify. The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and Metallica are all refusing to be included. Any service that comes without AC/DC and Metallica gets my vote but others may be put off. Then there are artists, such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, who have no label and do their own deals.

"Right now, due to our huge scope and the level of work that lies purely in adding our labels' entire catalogues (we?re only a third of the way through even now), we haven't struck any independent artist deals, although we?re definitely open to it," Daniel says.

Assuming the record labels don't change their minds and kill Spotify - and I hope they don't - there?s the question of the ongoing viability of the business model. In the second part of this post I'll write about Daniel's response to that.

There are two versions of the service: the free, ad-supported version, which requires you to listen to around one minute of advertising every 30 minutes or so, and the paid-for version, which removes the advertising in return for a subscription of ?9.99 per month.

The attraction for advertisers, says Daniel, is the guaranteed 'clean' environment. "What I like most is the <censored>ogy between something like YouTube and us," says Daniel. "The content on Spotify is different from the content on YouTube, as you don?t know on YouTube if it's a clip of a guy picking his nose or it's quality content. To pitch Spotify to an advertiser, they know that they are in a clean environment with high quality content."

We may be in the midst of an advertising downturn but Daniel says this has not caused any problems: "Whether it's down to the uniqueness of the service or the fact that that people just love the idea of playing around with a universal jukebox, interest has remained incredibly strong."

He says Spotify has the added advantage of offering targeted advertising, something commercial radio, for example, can't do. He says: "We can facilitate a number of other things for brand advertisers such as mood targeting. We can also target demographics more clearly than offline media channels. In light of a financial crisis, the focus should be on providing the ad industry with a value that they don?t currently get. Those services that can provide that value will survive and those that can?t will have a hard time."

I'm sceptical that advertising can work for Spotify. Daniel promises that "any advertising will always be lower than anything commercial radio offers to the listener, and significantly so" and it?s hard to see how such a low-ad environment can turn into a significant income.

That has a knock-on effect for subscriptions too. Why would you pay to turn off the ads if they are so unobtrusive? All Daniel will say is: "We have some rather unique services to offer our premium subscribers in the near future. I'm afraid I can't be specific just as yet, but is it too much of a tease to say we think it?ll definitely be worth the wait?"

There's plenty of scope for new features. Spotify is quite sparse at the moment, deliberately so. "We want to provide tools so that social networks can work with us and so that developers can build interesting things on top of Spotify," Daniel says.

So far, users have been building sites to aggregate shared playlists, there's an Adobe Air application for finding shared playlists and somebody has built an app to turn an iPod Touch into a remote control.

The feature that's most in-demand from users is a mobile client. Having the service on a mobile would be a huge feature but Daniel says they want to perfect the desktop version first. "Our philosophy is to create a product that's reliable and works brilliantly so today we're focusing on building a great product for the computer," he says, "but when the time comes we'll look into a solution that will work just as smoothly on mobiles and other devices."

Another big demand comes from America, where Spotify is not yet available, but a US version of the service may also have to wait. "A Spotify launch in the US is absolutely part of our plans, but we want to fully establish ourselves in Europe before that happens," says Daniel.

"We have to ensure the infrastructure grows smoothly and steadily so users continue to enjoy Spotify fully. The same goes for user numbers, which is why we're opening up the service gradually, with the UK being the first country in which we've removed the invite system and opened up access to everyone. Negotiating rights from country to country can be an incredibly complex process, too, but we're confident we'll get there soon enough."

Daniel won?t say how many users Spotify has at the moment, whether paid subscribers or free, but he insists it is growing "at a rate of knots".

Whenever someone tries a new way of doing things in the online media world, it's tempting to wonder whether we've at last found 'the answer'. The truth is, as Daniel points out, there probably won?t be just one answer to selling content online, whether it's music, film or even news.

"I like to look at the music model in a similar way to moving images ? it's normal to go to movies, as well as watch TV and still buy dvds/Blu Ray and click on YouTube clips," Daniel says. "We've yet to see if there will be one dominant method of consuming moving images, and I think the same can be said of music. I also think one of the psychological bridges that needs to be crossed is that of music ownership. People have different views on the subject and it?ll be interesting to see how perceptions evolve in time."

One thing he is sure of is that Spotify is doing something unique: "I feel that today there's still an underlying problem in simply playing whatever content you want, when and as many times as you want it, and that's the problem Spotify's looking to solve. I honestly believe that we don't have a main competitor as no one's delivering music to users in quite the way we are."

BBC news video

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7913586.stm

Their website

http://www.spotify.com

 

Have you tried spotify yet?

What are your views?

Do you like it?

If you havn't tried it will you?

[Dave]

Re: Spotify - Free Legal Music

My sister was using this on my network (Yes im kind to my sister and let her on my network) but it lagged my network for some reason :S so i had to kick her :P not sure it might of just been a bad time for the network connection to the web but it was lagging :).

[03laceys]

Re: Spotify - Free Legal Music

 

My sister was using this on my network (Yes im kind to my sister and let her on my network) but it lagged my network for some reason :S so i had to kick her :P not sure it might of just been a bad time for the network connection to the web but it was lagging :).

This programme has caused no lag to me, by on your network i presume you mean your internet connection.

If so are you sure a programme was not running in the background,

A virus was not on the computer,

Your speed was down due to the ISP.

[Cronus]

Re: Spotify - Free Legal Music

Excellent service, not available to the US though.

[POG1]

Re: Spotify - Free Legal Music

its 'program' not 'programme'

[03laceys]

Re: Spotify - Free Legal Music

 

its 'program' not 'programme'

Thank you for pointing that out i would go back and change it, but i can't.