Petteri Pyyny
20 Jul 2009 5:39
It is so rare nowadays to see any cool web-based service to be first available in Europe rather than in the U.S. that Spotify is really worth mentioning even for just that (yes, we'd really, really like to get Hulu..). However, this music streaming service that has been dubbed as the "music piracy killer" and has received almost universal praise from its users, is finally planning to expand to the United States in Q3 or Q4 of this year.
Spotify is a music streaming service with quite massive selection of music, available in Ogg Vorbis format (using q5, appx. 160kbps encoding for its free service and 320kbps for its premium service), with simple-to-use GUI and ad-supported monetization model. Spotify's ads run less frequently than what you'd expect with commercial radio and you can get rid of the ads completely by signing up to their premium service (that costs €9.99 per month or €0.99 for 24h period).
As the service provides very good quality, legal, audio streaming with rather massive music selection, it has already become extremely popular in the countries where it is available (Spotify is currently available in the UK, Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Italy and Spain) -- partially cutting down the interest towards illegal music downloads. Our Finnish users have been praising the service for couple of months now and most of them seem to be extremely happy with the audio quality as well as with the usability of the product. Spotify has also announced that they're developing client apps for various mobile platforms, expanding the service beyond PC desktop.
Couple of screenshots from our recent -- Finnish language -- review of Spotify, giving you an idea of the client app GUI:
Fig 1. Searching for music with Spotify
Fig 2. Lazy man's option -- use "radio" to just randomly listen specific genre or decade.
Fig 3. Building playlists..