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
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StumbleUponIn the years since music went digital, I've experienced several moments of wonder. I was there when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod. I remember when the iTunes Store finally made it possible to buy any song I wanted. And I couldn't get over the first time Pandora introduced me to terrific music I'd never heard before. But nothing has matched the excitement I felt, back in the fall of 1999, when I learned from my college roommate about a service that seemed to have absolutely every song ever recorded, all for the taking. Napster was great not only because you could get any song you wanted for free but because you could get music that you didn't know you wanted. I would spend hours just looking for new stuff—if you found someone with one song you liked, you could check out all the other music he was listening to and then use those songs to find other people with similar tastes. No music service since has been able to replicate that sense of liberation—the feeling that all of the world's music was yours.
But Spotify comes pretty close. To be sure, it's not the first streaming service to hit the market. Rhapsody, which can stream millions of songs to your computer or other devices, launched in 2001. But it's not free—the service, which has attracted hundreds of thousands of loving fans, goes for $12.99 a month. Napster itself later turned into a similar subscription app. Last year, MySpace launched a streaming site that offers millions of songs for free. MySpace users took to the service—it now serves billions of songs a month—but I've found its cluttered, clunky interface too annoying to deal with.
Spotify, by contrast, is the least hassle of any streaming service I've ever used. Because it runs on the desktop, it's more responsive than MySpace's Web app, and it lets you browse music more easily. When I searched for songs by Nirvana in MySpace Music, I was presented with Nirvana's cluttered MySpace page—not what I was looking for. In Spotify, I got a huge track list, arranged by album, of all the Nirvana songs in the catalog. This included the 2005 compilation album Sliver: The Best of the Box, packed with demos and outtakes, including a 1985 demo of "Spank Thru"—the only recording ever released by Fecal Matter, Kurt Cobain's first band. The demo doesn't sound too great (Cobain slurs through the song), though that's the point—the surprise is that this guy would later become who he was. Listening to Spotify, I had several such moments of surprise; I found alternate versions of old songs, and new songs by old favorites, and dozens of songs that I'd long forgotten about.
A word of caution: My enthusiasm for Spotify is in part a product of special circumstance. Apparently because I sneaked in through a proxy server, Spotify didn't serve me any ads at all; I'm sure I'd be less cheerful about it if I'd had to suffer through a commercial break every 15 minutes. I'm guessing I'd probably still keep listening, though; after all, that's fewer ads than radio. The other big hitch: You can't listen to the music away from your computer. The good news here is that back in May, Spotify showed off a soon-to-be-released mobile version that works on Google's Android platform (and even when you're out of range of a cell tower). And where there's an Android app, there will surely be an iPhone version as well.
Will Spotify ever come to America? At the moment, that's unclear. Music labels have been asking Spotify to pay exorbitant fees to stream music in the U.S.; even if it does make it across the pond, then, a local version would probably be overwhelmed by ads. The labels would be wise to remember, though, that country-specific restrictions rarely work anymore. My colleague Juliet Lapidos recently purchased that awful Catcher in the Rye "sequel" even though a federal court has banned its publication; she got it from Amazon U.K. Meanwhile, even though it's meant only for Americans, people across the world have found ways to hack into Hulu. And so what if Spotify's not technically open to Americans? I'm listening to it right now, for free, and I can see the Pacific Ocean from my window.
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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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