Spotify: Free Music at Your Fingertips
This article is by Quite Useful contributor Ric Roberts.
The Swedish company Spotify provides a service which offers a new way to access virtually any track you can think of, for free, on demand… and legally! They recently started their public beta in the UK. For me, it’s almost impossible to describe just how amazing this service really is. As a true music lover, I honestly haven’t been this impressed by a service or application in a long time.
To start listening, all you need is a broadband connection and the Spotify client. You need to sign up at their website to download it.
Using the application is simple: search for your chosen artist, track or album, to start listening straight away. With my 8Mb/s broadband connection, everything happens pretty much instantaneously - there’s no perceptible difference in responsiveness between using Spotify, and accessing my iTunes library on my computer — I think the key here is Spotify’s crafty use of p2p based technology. The music is encoded at an adequate, though maybe not ideal, 160Kb/s. Hopefully this will improve in the future.
There are few omissions from Spotify’s music library, but they’re adding new tracks all the time. As I write this, there are apparently about 2 million tracks available, with 5000 being added this week alone.
My main worry with Spotify is whether they can survive long enough to make a profit. The free service is supported by adverts in the form of visual banners in the client, and unintrusive audio adverts. These are very infrequent and only occur between tracks: so there’s no interrupting your favourite tune mid guitar solo. For an advert-free experience, you just need to pay about tenner a month; you can also purchase a day pass for under a quid.
Spotify must have shelled out a pretty penny for access to all the digital music licenses, and I can’t see these fees or ad-income covering that outlay in the short term. If the adverts become so frequent that they become annoying, then users will leave in their droves, so it’s a fine line to tread. I sincerely hope that Spotify can find the right path through this minefield. Twitter seems to have done alright so far without a business model, so there’s hope!
You might be thinking, “but I don’t like listening to music on my computer”. For the last year or so, I have been using Apple’s Airport Express to stream music from iTunes to my hifi over my wireless network. In its standard form, Airtunes only works with iTunes, but Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil lets you stream any audio that your computer produces. Used in conjunction with something like Airfoil, not much comes close to the Spotify experience. If their rumoured iPhone app comes to fruition (and if Apple allow it into the App Store) the phase iTunes-beater might not be unwarranted.
