Hailed as a 21st century jukebox, explore its online library of millions
 of songs you can play through your computer.

Spotify was launched for public access in October 2008 and is already making huge inroads as the next big music streaming program. It works by storing a library with millions of songs in many genres which you can access for free and play through your computer. Rather than download tunes on to hard drives they are played once - similar to listening to the radio where you are the DJ.

Music can be browsed by artists, albums or created playlists as well as by direct searches. Although it is not possible to save the streamed music for use outside the application, a link is provided to allow the listener to directly purchase the material via partner retailers.

I guess the down side is that you do have to listen to advertisments every now and again that you can't skip throught, but it's a pretty small price to pay for free music.

No spots on Spotify

According to an article in the Sunday Times on 15 March 2009 in its first month, more than 250,000 people in the UK registered as users (the site has also launched in Germany, France, Italy and Spain). The Sunday Times states that Jamie Cullum, the jazz singer, is a fan, as is Mike Skinner, the British rapper also known as the Streets and U2.

Why Spotify stands out

Spotify’s novelty lies in the fact it is both free and legal. According to experts it also represents a new model of the way in which people will buy music and watch television shows and films in the future.

Spotify was founded in Sweden in 2006 by Daniel Ek, former CTO of Stardoll, and Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of TradeDoubler, both Swedish serial entrepreneurs. Spotify now occupies a suite of offices in Centre Point, a block that towers over Oxford Street in central London, as well as having a base in Stockholm.

The vision

Spotify is all about addressing the problem of illegal downloads which has plagued the music industry for years. When Apple’s iTunes came along it helped by charging a small fee for downloading music but a recent survey suggested that 83% of European iPod owners did not regularly buy music online, instead filling them with illegal downloads or copied CDs.

Spotify steps in by offering consumers the free music while also giving music companies revenue. The site offers three different membership options. Users of its free service hear an advert every 20 minutes, far less than on commercial radio, while for paying customers - a day pass costs 99p for 24 hours, the Premium account costs £9.99 a month - there are no ads at all. 10,000 tracks are being added a day.

Key Facts

• 
  There are a number of websites for sharing Spotify playlists and songs, for example Spotyshare.com and Spotylist.com where users can share, rate and download them. The application features Last.fm integration which allows the current track to be scrobbled without making use of the Last.fm software.
• A video demo released on Youtube shows how Spotify's huge archive of music will soon be ultra-accessible and available even when listeners are offline - say, on the London underground.

May 2009 press release

"Today is a proud moment for everyone at Spotify as we unveil our very first mobile phone demo at San Francisco's Google I/O. This is still very much a work in progress and is subject to minor change, but we thought it would be nice to give a little taster of our future plans.
We'll be announcing further details of this and other mobile app plans in the coming weeks and months."

As NME's David Moynihan observes, here's hoping that finally a viable way to enjoy music for free without ripping off artists has emerged on the internet...