Move over, Pandora. There's a new music service in town--well, in some towns anyway.
TorrentFreak has an in-depth write-up of a new music streaming service called Spotify, which shows an awful lot of promise--so much so that the music piracy-focused blog sees it as a viable alternative to downloading pirated songs for free.
Spotify is a lean, downloadable application that lets users stream music instantly from its library--a library built with the blessing of EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and some smaller record labels. That, of course, begs the question: how does it make money? Spotify offers two ways to use its service, a free service sponsored by ads, and a paid subscription service.
Once downloaded, the service allows users to search its music catalog by artist, genre, or title, and stream the tracks on-demand any number of times.
One of the cooler features is the ability to create and share playlists (a la the now-defunct Muxtape). And the service recently added the ability to scrobble the songs you listen to through Spotify on Last.fm.
That's the good news. Now for the bad news: It isn't officially available in the U.S. yet (though a Digg commenter did provide a way for people to try it out Stateside, at least temporarily). Right now it can be accessed in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. And the company plans to roll out its service to new markets in 2009, according to its Web site.
Judging from comments on TorrentFreak, Digg, and TechCrunch, the service seems to have impressed people who have tried it with its speed, usability, and depth of songs (though it's taken dings for sound quality, frequency of commercials, and lack of portability). I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but as a music fan who got pretty fed up with the repetition of songs on Pandora's artist radio stations over the holiday break, I think this looks very promising.
As for TorrentFreak's claims that Spotify is so good that it might stop piracy in its tracks, I'm skeptical. This is a streaming service, so the songs are only available to you when you're online and connected to it. It doesn't work with portable music devices, so you can't take the songs with you on the subway or to the gym (or, for me, drop it into the iPod dock hooked up to my stereo). And since the songs aren't downloaded to your hard drive, they're not in your grand collection along with the rest of your music. Spotify might have a decent-size library, but it doesn't have all the songs I've ripped from vinyl, or the latest album from a favorite local band that happens not to have signed with a label yet. Going back and forth between a local library and a centralized library like Spotify would be annoying.
Having everything in one place and being able to take it with you wherever you go is the goal for any music fan. And until Spotify offers that ability, I don't see it magically wiping out music piracy altogether. But it does appear that this group is on the right track, from the perspective of music fans, bands, and music labels.
Has anyone spent a good deal of time with the service yet? If so, what say you? Is Spotify the wave of the future, or another Web 2.0 dud in an already cluttered arena?
Disclosure: Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET News.
U2
(Credit: U2.com)The next time U2 manager Paul McGuinness wants to rant about music piracy on the Internet, he may have to add his own boss to his list of targets.
Four songs from the Irish rock band's forthcoming album found themselves on the Internet after U2 front man Bono was caught playing the songs a bit too loudly on his stereo at his villa in the south of France, according to a report in The Sun. An alert passerby on the beach is credited with recognizing the iconic singer's voice and recording what he was hearing. He then supposedly posted the recordings to YouTube, but the tracks don't appear to have stuck around long on the video-sharing site.
The songs--thought to come from a forthcoming album called "No Line On The Horizon"--include the title track, "Sexy Boots," "Moment Of Surrender," and "For Your Love."
McGuinness, who wants to fight file sharing by forcing Internet service providers to ban people who pirate music, suggested earlier this year that Apple and other makers of digital music players were wrongly profiting from their "burglary kits." At the time, he placed much of the blame on tech companies, but also pointed a finger at record labels that "through lack of foresight and planning allowed a range of industries to arise that let people steal music."
If this tale rings true, it wouldn't be the first time U2 has lost control of unreleased music. In 2004, just before the release of their last album--"How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb"--the band reported that a CD containing unfinished music from that album had been stolen after a photo shoot in the south of France. The band announced it would release that album immediately if tracks from the CD were leaked online. But when songs from the album began appearing online a few months later, the band said they were finished versions, not songs from the stolen CD.
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