P2P music streaming startup Spotify has removed the “invite only” barrier from its streaming music service in the UK. Till now it’s been keeping growth in check with an invite-only subscription method. Since it started in Sweden it has that market pretty much sown up, although, bizarrely, it remains invite-only in Sweden. But invites have been spreading across the planet like wildfire for this very simple to use service. And others are using it whether they are in the UK or not.
However, it has even warned users that if it can’t take the traffic it may put the invite-only hurdle back in place. “We want to make sure that everyone who uses Spotify gets the same fast, uninterrupted experience so providing a stable service is our priority,” the company says on its blog. “If growth happens too fast and it starts affecting quality we may have to re-instate the invitation system, hopefully this won’t happen.”
The service has licensing deals with the Big Four record labels (EMI, Warner Music, Sony BMG and Universal) and other smaller players. It’s P2P client streams in Ogg (quality equivalent to 192kbps MP3) instantly with no delays. The business model (for the free version) is unskippable ads every 5/6 tracks but a monthly subscription wipes these out.
Spotify has wowed users with its catalogue but as the service has grown it’s started to attract more interest from the music industry and not in a good way.
As one users comments on their blog: “Just like to say, i’m using spotify less and less since you’ve been removing music constantly. 50% of my playlists are now gone.”
I use the free version and I never experienced any ad.
“Just like to say, i’m using spotify less and less since you’ve been removing music constantly. 50% of my playlists are now gone.”
When will the music industry wake up and get a new business model to fit in with the internet age? The companies involved seem to be their own worst enemy.
Spotify is great and you have to experience it to understand this.
Yes, they had to remove tracks the other week, but now they are adding tracks in a furious manner. In todays update there was 52.000 new tracks and the last update was this Monday!
It’s getting more important with webpages that act as a filter for the Spotify users. How do we find what is new in Spotify?
Sure, Spotify themselves now publish google docs of all updates at their blog, but it’s still a bit hard to grasp it all. Therefore I recommend Spotify users to visit the Spotinews blog.
http://spotinew....wordpress.com/
Apart from the deals with the Big Four , Spotify also has Merlin, The Orchard and CD Baby on board so far, and will probably add to that in the future.
Spotify is fantastic and it scrobbles to last.fm. A match made in music heaven!
This is great news for us in the UK. The ads sort of annoy me though, so I’ve been using http://songraptor.com
Ads every five out of six tracks?!
I love Spotify, I get the same wow feeling as with Skype.
I don’t think Spotify uses P2P, but I am not 100 % sure.
It is an amazing program, elegant, easy to use and you rarely experience an ad.
Lets just hope it sticks around..
I’d like to try it, but it’s still unavailable in my country (Belgium).
Spotify is really great! Don´t understand the artists who doesn´t want to be on spotify.
The killer app for me would be the mobile version of the spotify. Apperantly its in the making, I guess to be continued.
Spotify has grown really big here in sweden because its so simple to use and you have the biggest collection of music available always, without having it cluttering your hardrive. I think this kind of music service is here to stay, its only a matter of time before the big labels comes back and its only a matter of time before this replaces traditional labels, I think artists will sell their music directly to services like spotify in the future and get more cash in their pockets for their music than ever before.
Spotify is really the best music piece of software I’ve recently experienced. The interface is just perfect to me and I like the fact that they are transparent on their blog about the problems they’re having with the record companies as well as the lists of the new albums they’re putting in.
I hope everything will go well for them. Almost the first time that I would feel ready to pay 10 euros / month for unlimited listening…
Raphael
Reallly looks like a fantastic service. And the intro video theme made my smile stretch from ear to ear. Absolutely fabulous!
I really like this service. Just need spotify and awdio.com on my computer to be happy
I managed to get one of those beta invites a few weeks ago, and I must say the Mac OSX app was amazing! With a good internet connection, the entire music library of the world is at your fingertips whenever you want it.
The only downside I could find was that some of the songs were geographically restricted, and as a UK resident I couldn’t play them. But since its all free, I can’t really complain, can I!
Last.fm is good for recommendations and discovering new music. But Spotify is good if you have a specific artist or songs that you want to listen to.
I love Spotify sooooo much good music. The issue I have is with the streaming, every so often it stutters and sometimes grinds to a halt which is really frustrating but I guess this is an issue with my providers bandwidth? I’m with Tiscali anyone else suffer from this? My connection is 7-7.2 Mgb which I thought was quite good!
Spotify is a FANTASTIC thing for music. The fact that it has gathered 1 million UK users in a month means you need to pay attention to it.
Unsigned artists can get their content on through http://www.dittomusic.com who upload you for free.
I think this could be absoloutely massive exposure for unsigned artists and im looking forward to seeing my bands music on there in the next few weeks.