The streaming music service Spotify have been mentioned here a lot of times. It’s now out of Beta and officially launched. I got around 30 invites with my account. They are now all gone. Everyone I have given it too have ranged between “Oh-my-god-I-can’t-beleive-how-good-it-is” to “This-is-everything-I-have-been-waiting-for”. I will do a more detailed review of Spotify soon. But the general impression I have is that this could be, as Stone roses sing, The One.
Of course Spotify will live or die depending on how good their catalouge can be. As of now they have deals with all the majors and a lot of big digital distributors for thousands of indie labels. The catalouge is far from complete, but impressive enough. The knock-down feature so far is the ability to share playlists. Might sound underwhelming to share playlists, but it’s the simplest of tricks that works the best.
As a current evaluator of what range the Spotify catalouge has as of today, the fresh list of The Rough Trade Stores Top 50 albums of 2008 list is a good test.
Spotify has currently got 23 of 50 albums. Far from everything. Rough trade is a niche boutique though with quality music only, underground stuff that sometimes are so underground they are under the underground and then some - and then six inches more underground.
Here are a playlist with all of the 23 albums: The Rough Trade Stores Top 50 Spotify Playlist
3 Comments
1 Sebastian L Ahl wrote:
Spotify Isn’t the One for me.
I have to switch between iTunes and Spotify every now and then. Spotify can’t play my favourite internet radio. Spotify can’t play the songs my friends have done. Spotify can’t play in my mp3-players. Spotify can’t write the songs to a cd so I can play it in my car or DJing in the way I used to do. I also see that my favourite songs dissappears from Spotify every day.
But hey, I like Spotify anyway and I think it will be a very good complement to all other music players.
2 Mattias wrote:
Sebastian: I agree with every one of your remarks and have some other things I wish Spotify could do. However I think all of the features will be available at some point.
Do you think there will be a lot of different music players ahead people will use? I think one streaming service will take over and be the major one. Just like Facebook, Myspace, Google and so on dominate their areas.
3 Sebastian L Ahl wrote:
Absolutely.
Today we have different OS (Windows, OS X, Linux etc), e-mail clients (Outlook, Mail, Thunderbird), word processing systems (Microsoft Word, Open Office Writer), and video players (Quicktime Player, VLC, WMP), search engines (Google, Live Search).
It always seems to be room for several options, even if the original purpose is the same.
I think the human brain would like to have only one ultimate option for everything, but the market won’t allow it.
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