Spotify: You should check it…

Image by kristoffintosh

This is something that we’ve all been raving about in the office in the last few months. For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet here’s a short summary.

Spotify is probably the largest thing that has happened to the music industry in a long time, brought to us by some intelligent Swedes, it’s a pretty big deal. Co founded by Martin Lorentzon (co founder of Tradedoubler, digital marketing agency) and Daniel Ek.

It’s basically a peer to peer music sharing service that allows almost instant listening with minimal streaming of almost any artist or album that you can think of (apart from Oasis).

It’s still in beta but is available to most people in western Europe. I think they have plans to roll it out in the US and Canada soon. It’s not possible to download the music from the service and is perfectly legal.

It’s not just another Limewire, Kazaa or Napster. It differs to these illegal peer to peer file sharing services in the fact that you can’t download dircetly from Spotify. Instead, you have a link to one of their preferred partners where you can buy the music legally.

Along with Last FM and Myspace this is another great way to find out about new music that you may want to buy, or just a good way to listen whilst on-line. The free service makes its money by from advertising serving up short 2 minutes adverts every 30minutes or so. You can purchase a premium version that is uninterrupted. It’s not too annoying though.

Another nice feature is the ability to create collaborative playlists, you can get together with your mates and put compile them. We quite often have a ‘Friday tunes’ playlists in the office that anyone can submit music to play in if they’re a friend of the user.

I heard they’re in the process of creating a Spotify application for iPhone which will also be a nice touch, similar to that of Last FM’s.

Many would argue that buying music is no longer the product of the industry, this new platform supports purchasing material more so than others, providing links to buy the music from partners whilst promoting the artists to potentially thousands in a new channel.

Download and register here

Watch it hit the mainstream and go large…