Spotify launches in Europe
Spotify - a British/Swedish music streaming service - launched a couple of weeks ago in Europe offering a huge music database with pop music as well as jazz and classical. Not exactly a new concept but Spotify offers such high-quality service that it could very well threaten online music stores like iTunes and Amazon. After a few weeks of intensive trial I'm convinced it could mark the transition from mp3 to streaming music and consequently the beginning of the end of both (illegal) p2p downloading as well as of buying online music.
Getting started
is fairly easy. Make an account and download the client to your computer. It automatically detects the music that's already available on your hard drive including playlists you've made in iTunes. It's all imported in the Spotify player. Also it connects automatically to your Facebook friends who use Spotify. They show up in the upper right of the player window. From there you can graze through their playlists and the playlists from others they've subscribed to. You can hop from one to another on and on, the browsing possibilities are endless enabling you to discover new music and people's playlists you like.
The end of owning music
The Spotify player is quite basic compared for instance with iTunes that has a lot of possibilities to categorize your music collection just the way you want it. And that's actually the hardest part of getting used to for an old geezer like me. The concept of owning music simply disappears with all music all the time available "in the cloud". My digital music collection currently consists of some 1000+ albums using over 60 GB of my hard drive and carefully backed up to an external hard drive. This collection was carefully compiled over the years by ripping old cd's, downloading music and categorizing it all in iTunes according to my "system". One of the fun parts of owning music - grazing through your collection - disappears when there's no more need to store anything locally. Then again, the trick ultimately lies in knowing Music rather than owning music so I guess we'll have to figure out a new system that helps remember the old stuff we (used to) like.
Different plans
The basic open subscription is free and allows 20 hours of streaming per month accompanied with ads both in audio (every 15 minutes or so) as quite large banners in your player screen. The €5.00/m unlimited plan releaves you from both ads and streaming limitations. The €10.00/m premium plan ads better (actually terrific) music quality (320 kBps in ogg vorbis-format) and the possibility to sync with a mobile player (currently Android, iPhone and Symbian).
Syncing with smartphone
One of the great advantages of having Spotify on your smartphone is that it syncs your music instantly without the need to ever connect it to a home computer. Compared to the hassle of syncing your iTunes music to your mp3 player that's quite a relief! You can choose to listen to it streaming (if you have decent data connection and a flat fee contract) or make your playlists available off-line by just syncing it over the air.
To enjoy online music and watch movies and tv shows I recommend a cheap netbook that's connected to stereo and tv set. To improve sound you could consider a DAC like the V-DAC from Music Fidelity
