Spotify Software Review: Legal Music Streaming through your internet

[Answers4PC]

Spotify: What is it?

 

Spotify is a fresh method in which you are able to take pleasure in listening to free and legitimate music. All you are required to do is make an account and streaming music player and you are good to go! If this not so clear to you at first, visit the Spotify Introduction Page and Video

 

Spotify allows you to listen to anything and everything out in the music charts right now including U2's new album ( No line on the Horizon ) You also may be pondering on whether below 18 year olds are able to use this new piece of technology and perhaps is it safe? Well. Spotify allows children as young as 12 years old to utilize this brilliant new music streaming program. In addition, Spotifys payment company is PCI- certified. PCI- certified is a worldwide industry approved standard guaranteeing an agreement to severe security standards.

 

Spotify Requirements:

 

-Spotify advises you to have at least, Bandwidth which is around 256 KB/S as it uses 3G connections.

- Spotify can be run on Mac OS X 10.4 or following systems Windows XP or later. Also, it can run Spotify in Wine on Linux.

- Spotify utilizes as much disk space in order to use less bandwidth so it is ideal that you have around 20-30 GBs free

 

How and who started Spotify

 

Spotify was started in 2006 in Stockholm, Sweeden. It was founded by Daniel Ek, former CTO of Stardoll. Earlier this February, the CEO himself was interviewed by" the Locals, the Sweden's news in English" Some interesting questions were handed to him and he answered them very clearly and precisely.

 

Here are some clips from the interview:

 

Spotify was yours and Martin Lorentzon’s brainchild, did it come about quickly from a chat you both had or was the idea a long process development?

 

It’s something we’d been thinking about for a while. One thing that became obvious to us post P2P was the fact that people consumed more music than ever from a bigger diversity of artists. The influences in terms of what they were listening to were coming more from friends than from radio stations. They were consuming music like crazy but weren’t necessarily paying for that music. The underlying demand for music was bigger than ever. [The reason] we set up Spotify was to cater for that demand but to also, at the same time, create a functioning revenue stream.

 

What do you make of the success so far?

 

We love the fact that so many people have taken Spotify to heart and are enjoying the service. Our ultimate aim is to provide the world’s biggest catalogue of music that’s quick, simple and fun to use.

 

 

What have you got planned for 2009?

 

A whole bunch of stuff. We’ve got some unbelievably cool exclusive content available for our users coming up over the next few months, plus we’re also going to provide our Spotify Premium subscribers with some special extra services. Watch this space.

 

Complete Interview with Daniel Ek

 

Appealing Features

 

Pricing plan is ideal

Spotify is free to join, stream and listen. Also, there is an additional optional fee of 99p which gives you no ads for 24 hours. In addition, there is a premium package of 9.99 per month for no advertisements at all!

 

Spotify URL's

Any URL posted anywhere on the internet and if you have Spotify will enable to stream it straight away! Albums and Artist Spotify URL's look similar to these:

 

spotify:artist:21E3waRsmPlU7jZsS13rcj

spotify:album:0uXiie7MeDzL9Em5ywSaip.

 

Spotify Playlists

You can utilize the Spotify Playlists to share them any other Spotify user.

 

Easy to use interface:

Spotify have produced a easy to use search engine, for example you can discover an immediate list of artists, albums and tracks that match to your search.

http://www.here.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/spotify-prince.jpg

http://www.here.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/spotifyalbum2.jpg

 

Spotify Blog:

Spotify have made a blog where they can speak with their fellow users and make them of aware of any new updates coming.

Spotify Blog

 

Exclusive Pre-Releases

Even singers are enjoying Spotify so much, they are releasing singles and albums early on Spotify for example, Anthony Hamilton released "The Point of It All" on here.

 

Many more features to come as Daniel Ek said himself in the interview.

 

Live Screenshots of Spotify:

 

Home Interface with suggestions

 

http://www.markparrott.com/files/mp/Spotify%20One.jpg

 

Radio Stations with "like" artists

 

http://www.markparrott.com/files/mp/Spotify%20Four.jpg

 

Artist Page ( able to scroll down to see other songs/albums)

 

http://www.markparrott.com/files/mp/Spotify%20Two.jpg

 

Artist's Biography/History

 

http://www.markparrott.com/files/mp/Spotify%20Three.jpg

 

Advantages:

-Free

-Easy To Use

-Able to share playlists with other users.

-Legal

-Listen to anything and everything

 

Disadvantages:

-If using free version, the ads can be rather annoying.

-Cannot keep the albums/singles

-Can use much of your internet's bandwidth.

 

Conclusion:

 

There is no doubt that this is the best music streaming service since Pandora. Spotify is a rare application which is going to be a competitor with Itunes and Amazon MP3. The disadvantage of not being able to keep the singles/albums can be sorted as youy can listen to the playlist you have made all the time! Though still in Beta, there are many new features to be added. Great application so far! Well worth a try What is there to lose? Its free :D

[Eban]

Sounds f*cking awesome !

 

I'm gonna try it right now

 

Thanks and Thanks

 

Eban

[Eban]

Crap ! We need to be invited to subsribe for free ...

 

I'll try it when it will be available for everybody.

 

Eban