Daniel Davies

Its very easy to talk about the web's advancements and how genious inventions have revolutionised the way we interact and use the Internet. Unfortunately, there are two big industries that are really yet to "crack" the web so to speak, and both face grave danger unless they are able to modernise and respond to the digital demands of their customers. The two industries in question are the music and film industries, and copyright restrictions make their ability to embrace the web and provide free content almost impossible.

Since the initial conception of file sharing both industries have been spending too much time and money fighting their customers and stopping piracy, rather than looking at truly viable ways to digitalise and embrace technology. Technology that will in fact present their media to a far greater audiences, faster, cheaper and against far more targeted demographics. What attempts there have been are so plagued with evils such as the defective by design DRM that to call them viable, legal, alternatives to Limewire and Bittorrent is laughable.

Spotify is a new service, and I genuinely believe they have cracked it. Free music, any time - no limitations on which tracks you can hear, how often you can listen, No reductions in quality either. If like me you listen to most of your music on your computer, and just want to be able to type the name of any artist, album or track and within 5 seconds be listening to it you will just love Spotify. Similar love will certainly be felt if you're looking to find new bands, experience some different genres and find out more about what you're listening.

Here's a brief run down. Spotify is a music streaming service which you can download on a Windows or Mac machine. Its a very light weight client, but slickly styled to blend in to your desktop and is really interactive. You can begin typing what you want in to the search box - the search is powerful and I've found everything I want to listen to with great ease. From there you can just play the search results in order or shuffle them. You can pause, rewind, listen as many times as you like and build yourself a play list of the stuff you like.

Once you're feeling a little more adventurous you can create a station - very similar to last.fm and Pandora - but much more feature rich and without the limitations of those services. As I said the client is highly interactive - every thing can be clicked for more info. Albums, artists, genres, etc can all be turned in to a customised channel which goes, for the most part, a little more beyond the mainstream artists to uncover some real gems.

So what's the catch? Well... every so often (I'm yet to spot an exact pattern) you will hear a sound byte, probably advertising the Xbox 360. It lasts around 60 seconds. Its a little repetitive, but its a very small price to pay for a fantastic free service. The skeptic in me still screams this is not a viable business model. I question how much money these guys are going to be making from the adverts, but its not that dissimilar from the advertising models practiced by radio and television stations - so perhaps it will last. There are of course paid options which will remove the adverts for you, so if it does bother you that much you can pay the subscription. £9.99/month (less than the price of a chart CD) will give you unlimited access ad free; bargain.

There's still a long way to go for Spotify (it is still in beta after all), but its showing great potential. I'd personally like to see some intelligence, like Pandora or Last.fm, that could allow me to 'yay' or 'nay' a suggested track and have future suggestions reflect this preference. Some way to participate in a community is always good too - share my channels on my blog, or be introduced to other users listening to same things as me. Gimmicky and non-essential perhaps, but I'm a big fan of that kind of thing.

If you are planning to try Spotify yourself then you will need an invitation. This shouldn't be too hard to get though, I'm sure a quick Tweet of "Any one able to send me a Spotify invite, please?" would do the job. If you know me then get in touch and I can arrange you an invite. This is a really cool service - highly recommended.