Spotify!

Hello again! It's been a while since my last post, but I have been exploring the virtual world for technological gems to bring back to you and I am pleased to say I have found plenty on my travels! Articles soon to appear here consist of....

AudioBoo
Twitter
Tr.Im
Phorm - revisted
Google Street View
The LHC
OLEDs
The Sun Getting Dimmer
Visual Basic

and any more interesting bits I come across!


For today though, I will be looking at the musical revolution that is Spotify. Spotify is almost an entirely new tool for use online, in its simplest form, it is a standalone program which allows you to listen to a very large quantity of songs, for free, from your PC.
At this point I should enter a few qualifications to the previous paragraph, firstly, the "revolution" is not entirely unknown, many of us will be aware of Last.FM which provides a similar service, but within your web browser and by no means with the variety (or style) that Spotify provides. Secondly, while the service is free, as is the program to download, there are the occasional adverts which get played between entire songs. Note the word entire, if you are searching for songs and listening to little bits of many at a time, you will experience no advertisements.

I would just like to mention here a very interesting discussion I have come across concerning internet advertising, and more specifically, is it theft of the service if you turn the adverts off? Click here to view James Cridland's Blog

Spotify runs as a program from your desktop and is able to minimise to the system tray so as to stay out of the way, it has a very useful playlist function which allows you to save all your favourite songs in the appropriate playlist and listen to it at you leisure. (Incidentally, you can listen to my playlist of favourite songs by downloading and installing Spotify, then clicking here).

Spotify solves the major problem of wanting a song but not knowing what it is, you can simply search the lyrics on google, and then get the song on Spotify, it has undoubtedly quenched a vast musical thirst of my own!

However, as with all new toys, there are of course limitations and improvements that could be made. For one, I would love to see and option saying "Buy this song"*, or even better once you have made a playlist "Buy this playlist". By clicking this you would purchase the song (via paypal for example), and be permitted to download a DRM free file (like iTunes now does) to listen to and more importantly, put onto mobile devices such as an iPod.
Speaking of iPod brings me to my next improvement, a Spotify app in the app store, this truley would be an astounding app (assuming similar functionality), the ability to have all the music you could desire literally at the touch of your finger.

In summary, Spotify has truly given me a (so far) brief musical education and I have no doubt I am going to learn a great deal from it. I highly recommend the program and am certain you will not regret giving it a go. Download Spotify from Spotify dot com here.

***Update***
As per the comments on this blog, you can actually right click on a song and buy it from 7digital.com! Great news, but it doesn't work on every song, or playlists. Still good for the odd song though! Thanks for letting me know Afront.