Spotify - The future of online music?

Posted by Joel Eaton on Tuesday 10 March 2009 at 11:30am
Tags: finding audio | music |

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Spotify is an online music streaming service with a difference.  On the one hand it provides a subscription based service where a daily or monthly pass can be bought and an unlimited amount of music can be streamed. However, in a bold new move a free unlimited streaming service is available to all. Obviously 'free' in this day and age always comes with a catch, and the one here is that between every few songs you are aurally gifted with an advertisement. The underlying question to the success of such a service is whether people will accept their personal listening time being invaded by the modern marketing machine? Whether in agreement with such practice or not, it is hard not to admire the ingenuity of Spotify and their way of reacting to the current trends in music listening and sharing. Specialist sites such as Boomkat and Bleep have long offered preview clips of tracks for free but is infiltrating music with ads a step too far? This issue has been a hot topic for years, as marketing and music have often gone hand in hand. From the soft drinks industry's 'I'd like to buy the world a Coke' back in the 70's through to their use of artist endorsement including Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. With hip-hop and R&B stars name-dropping designer clothing brands and companies paying big money for the advertising rights of songs, and even albums (ahem, Moby), surely we are already accustomed to advertising ingrained in commercial music, or is this idea a step too far for most music fans?

To run Spotify you need to install its front-end software (downloadable from the Spotify website), which doesn't look too dissimilar to a cross between Apple's itunes and Adobe's Photoshop Express, and runs on Windows and Mac OSX. It is designed primarily for personal listening as opposed to other streaming services such as Last.fm, which is more community orientated. Providing you with recommendations based on your recent searches and new content, the search feature allows you to search through millions of online songs with the rights all paid for by the advertisers. Although the search feature provides quick and accurate results, it is particularly restrictive in that you need to know what your searching for in the first place as there is no browsing or advanced searching features available yet.

So what music is available? Well, Spotify have climbed into bed with CD baby, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music Group, Merlin and The Orchard, some of the industry's biggest names. Also on the Spotify bandwagon is Naxos, the worlds leading classical music label. These deals have provided a wealth of music encompassing a wide range of genres catering for all tastes.  As a result Spotify's popularity is steadily increasing and with the ability to share playlists with others boxes are ticked for fans of online networking and the sharing of listening habits.

Spotify has found a simple and easy way of delivering music into people's homes for free and need to stay ahead of the game in order to hold onto and expand their market share. Early teething problems have already included some major security issues but hopefully these will be dealt with prevented from happening again in the future. Luckily they are already looking to the future with support for iphones and Android already in development, a far cry from the standstill adopted by many of the record companies in following market needs.

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