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