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Spotify – The Future of Music on the Internet?
Posted by Rowan Wilkinson on March 3, 2009
For a long time illegal downloading of music on the internet has been savaging the music industry. A continuous battle between the major record labels and the illegal download sites and internet service providers has been raging for the best part of the last decade and still nothing seems to be changing.
While governments and record companies seem to chase their own tails instead of providing any realistic answer, some forward thinking private companies are implementing their own solutions to the problem. One that is creating quite a lot of buzz at the moment is a service called Spotify.
Spotify is a music streaming application that you download onto your computer. It’s being hailed by some predominant music piracy-focused blogs (e.g Torrent Freak) to be a feasible alternative to downloading music illegally.
The service works as follows – Spotify has cut deals with all the four major record labels (EMI, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony BMG) and a number of smaller labels which means all the music is accessed completely legally.
Spotify make their money and pay the labels and artists by giving users three sign-up options. You can either sign-up with a subscription fee of £9.99 a month or you can use it completely for free but every 20 minutes a short audio advert plays between tracks. There is also an advert free day subscription option of £0.99.
Once signed up, users can then search Spotify’s music library and stream songs instantly on demand. They can then create and share playlists that they save to their personal Spotify music library.
I decided to sign up for the free service to see what all the buzz is about and I have to say that I am very impressed.
The service visually resembles itunes but in my opinion looks sexier and functions much more smoothly.
The speed at which the music can be searched and then streamed is second to no other streaming service I have encountered. There is no buffering, it literally plays at the click of your mouse.
The range of the music library is vast considering that the service was only launched back in October 2008. A few of my searches were unsuccessful and some genres of music are more sparse than others but this is a problem that will definitely get better with time. In my opinion most record labels small or big and in whatever genre will soon be fighting over each other to get their music into Spotify’s music library.
The adverts that play every 20 minutes are not as intrusive as you may think. They are all advertising other music and they only last for about 20 seconds or less. The ads always play between songs so they just resemble brief radio ads. In my opinion this is a small price to pay considering the potential of this service.
Unfortunately, as of yet, the music you save to your playlists can’t be copied onto any portable devices like mp3 players or such like. Playlists can be sent to other users or friends by email or other applications but you can’t download the music into your computer’s music library. This is the main obstacle that Spotify has to overcome if they really want to provide a realistic alternative to illegal downloads.
As already mentioned, Spotify was launched very recently back in October 2008 so it is still in its infancy. It is not available in the US yet but extension into untapped markets is planned for 2009.
The potential of this service is huge. Spotify’s music library will grow and grow by the day and there are plans for a mobile phone application and hopefully following from that they might address the issue of letting the songs be saved and then played on portable music players.
Whether Spotify will affect the future of illegal downloading remains to be seen but as the service recently broke the one million user mark in only five months a lot of bloggers and commentators are positive.
Check it out. I would love to hear other people’s opinions on it.
If you re interested in finding out more about spotify or the illegal download situation check out –
About Spotify:
Wikipedia Entry
Spotify About Page
Reviews:
cnet
Duke Listens
The Lefsetz Letter
News:
Cnet News
Financial Times.com
BBC News
March 4th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
I like Spotify too. It’s great the way you can make a playlist very swiftly and then place it on your desktop so that you can access it instantly or e mail it to friends. I am not sure I agree about the downloading. Surely the point is that you can’t download – that’s how they can keep it legal because it means you can’t sell it on or use it commercially. But why do you want to download. downloading just overloads your hard drive. Instead, you keep your playlist on the spotify servers: you can access them then through anything that has internet connection – computer, mobile phone, ipod etc, hook up to a good sound system and you’re away. What worries me tho’ is that the ads – now as you say very unintrusive – will get more and more intrusive, forcing people to take out the more expensive monthly packages. I suspect that is in part the business game plan. Get people using it, make it indispensable for them and then make the ads uncomfortable so that they will migrate to more expensive deals. But that’s later. It’s great at the moment.
March 5th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Thanks for the comment Rory. The trouble is that nowadays people want to be as portable as possible with their music. Unless people can play the songs on an ipod or other mp3 player then illegal downloading will continue. Spotify applications for mobile phones is an interesting way of getting around this as mobiles obviously can connect to the internet. You never know though, at some point maybe ipods and all mp3 players will connect to the internet as well.
March 6th, 2009 at 5:13 am
Signed up yesterday and spent most of the day making playlists instead of researching word-of-mouth for my research proposal. Oooops!
I agree there’s huge potential for this and indeed the adverts aren’t so bad. The service can only get more valuable as more users and record companies get on board.
I can’t see it replacing my iTunes any time soon but as a suppliment its great. The ability to share playlists easily is a big plus, but as you say portability is the key.
I’ll be sending you some playlists soon.
March 6th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
i love to download free music online. in the past few years…i think i bought less than 10 cds. i only buy it if i really like the signer and want to support him/ her. i think there is no way to stop download free music, especially there are so many free services and informations we can get online nowadays.
i think the future of the music will be in the internet. if the music company wants to keep on their profit, they should keep an eye on this.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Thank you for the information! I will sign up very soon!
Spotify will not stop pirating and illegal music downloads in my opinion. But I believe that it will reduce illegal music downloads. According to your explanations it is so easy and comfortable to use that people will apply it for their daily use at home. The disadvantage is that they cannot download the music to their MP3 players, which is one key issue you’ve identified. But they can find a solution for that problem, because Spotify features all resources which are necessary for that.
The problem of the music industry is that they don’t pitch customers to buy music and they don’t offer enough incentives for purchasing music legally. But this problem cannot be solved by introducing thousands of laws which cannot be checked. They should not rely on the help of governments, the record labels have to find their way out of the crisis. Spotify could be one way. If they are smart, they will recognise it. Furthermore, the music industry should recognise that it is not possible to stop illegal downloads unless they give music away without charging. Therefore, they should put emphasis on minimizing pirating. The solution: Spotify!
March 25th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Great post, I didn’t know anything about Spotify before. I think it can be useful for some people, but honestly not for me. I just buy music on iTunes in order to put it on my iPod but if I should buy an iPhone I would sign up for the service. However, I think it was high time that the record labels do something against the illegal downloads.
) and you get it directly and it isn’t sold out.
I also can’t remember when I bought my last cd, because the online solution is much more comfortable. You can buy the music at anytime, it is available 24 hours 7 days a week (in Germany the shops are closed on sundays
February 15th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
I just purchased voip service via iconnectvoice… I have to say that I highly recommend them, great customer service.