The World's Greatest Music ServiceSpotify streams every song you'd ever want to hear for free—and it's not for American ears.
Posted Thursday, July 16, 2009, at 4:53 PM ET
Have British kids stopped stealing music? A recent survey of 1,000 music fans in the United Kingdom found that about 26 percent of teenagers admitted to using file-sharing networks during the previous month. That number is surprisingly small—a year and a half ago, the same poll found that nearly half of teenagers were regularly pilfering songs. The survey suggests that instead of hitting BitTorrent for music, kids are now hooked on streaming. More than two-thirds of the teenagers said they use sites like MySpace Music regularly; 31 percent said they listen to music at their computers every day.
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StumbleUponThe survey caused a stir in the tech world, where it's long been assumed that file-sharing is on a constant upward climb. Indeed, the finding is somewhat dubious. As others have pointed out, the research presents survey data, not actual traffic stats from file-trading networks. Authorities in the U.K. have also been cracking down on file-trading. A recent government report outlined a series of harsh steps that ISPs should take when they discover piracy—including running monitoring software on people's lines to determine what they've been downloading. It's possible, then, that the survey participants, wary of getting caught, simply lied about their file-sharing habits.
But there is one legitimate reason to suspect that Brits have changed their thieving ways. In the last few months, they've had access to the best music-streaming service in the world. It's called Spotify. And if you had it on your computer, you'd probably quit BitTorrent, too.
Spotify is what iTunes would be like if Apple decided to give everything away for free. The service, which launched late last year, is a stand-alone desktop app that has the look and feel of Apple's ubiquitous music player. Instead of showing you the music that you own, Spotify presents you with an enormous catalog of free tracks. At the moment, there are more than 3.5 million songs, and Spotify adds tens of thousands every few weeks. You can arrange them in all the ways you're familiar with from iTunes—search for any song, artist, or album; make playlists; list stuff by popularity; or just set the whole thing on shuffle. The free version of Spotify is supported by advertising; 30-second spots (some of them quite annoying) play after every few songs. You can avoid the ads by buying a monthly subscription, which goes for £9.99 (about $16.50).
Ready to sign up, my American friends? Not so fast. Spotify is available only in the U.K. and a few other European countries; if you live anywhere else, the service presents you with an apology when you try to subscribe. Why isn't Spotify everywhere? Licensing restrictions—the deals that the company cut with record labels that allow it to stream songs in only certain countries. The company says that it's working to provide access to more people, but at the moment, much of the world is in the dark.
I tested out Spotify this week by using a proxy server—a way to trick the service into thinking that I live near Big Ben rather than in a foggy corner of San Francisco. I was instantly hooked: Spotify didn't have every song that I searched for, but it came pretty close. I found tons of old stuff, plus a great deal of new releases—seven of iTunes' Top 10 top singles were available on Spotify (including "Man in the Mirror" and much of the rest of Michael Jackson's oeuvre).
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With Spotify, you're just renting the music. If Spotify (and, for that matter, Pandora, Rhapsody, or any other streaming content service) crashes, or goes bankrupt, or their servers lose power, or someone files a lawsuit and they get shut down, then, poof! your music is gone.
The appeal of Napster, the torrents, and other illegal file-sharing systems, and the appeal of the legal download sources like Amazon or the iTunes store, is that once you have acquired your music, it is (generally) yours. Sure, iTunes used to have a DRM cap, but that would go away if you burned a CD and reloaded it; and anyway, Amazon and Napster and the others didn't have DRM. You found your music, you got your music, and then, if you followed intelligent backup procedures (not that I have often done so, trusting instead to the hope that my hard drive never dies) you had your music forever.
Sure, $20 (10 pounds)/month for unlimited popular music isn't bad But I'd rather pay $20 for 20 iTunes or Amazon songs each month and know that, barring my own idiocy, those songs would permanently be mine.
-- winterking07
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Lala.com is a service similar to Rhapsody where instead of a monthly fee, you pay by the song (usually 10 cents for a song or 80 cents for an album) for unlimited streams forever. You can upload your home music collection to their servers (I currently have nearly 7000 tracks available from their servers) and listen to it from anywhere. Though my portable mp3 player bit the dust a couple years ago, I haven't felt the need to get another one because I can use Lala to listen to all my stuff at work, at friend's houses, anywhere there's an internet connection. AND, they let you listen to any album or song once for free -- full tracks, no 30 second samples. They also have great deals on DRM-free mp3s of new albums -- I recently bought the new Mars Volta, Silversun Pickups, and Dead Weather albums all for $3.99 each. Spotify sounds like a great service, but while we US folks are waiting for it, check out Lala.
-- MattW
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