For the past ten to fif­teen years, the music industry has been involved in a battle. And it’s been los­ing. Bit­Tor­rent is the music industry’s Viet­nam. There are just too many people who have become accus­tomed to hav­ing the music they want, when they want, for the price they want (which is noth­ing). The music industry can’t force people to pay for music any more. There have been some ser­i­ous efforts to sug­gest new busi­ness mod­els for the industry, but they’ve been deceiv­ing them­selves. And Spo­tify is show­ing us that they’re begin­ning to real­ise that.

So, what is it? In tech­nical terms, it’s an advertising-supported peer-to-peer/centralised music stream­ing cli­ent. Put simply, it’s iTunes for all the music you don’t have. After sign­ing up for an account on the web­site (free sign-up for UK res­id­ents. Invit­a­tion only for most of West­ern Europe, although there are ways around this), and down­load­ing the 2.5MB file, it takes seconds to install and get your­self up and run­ning. Open up the pro­gramme, and it’ll ask for your user­name and pass­word, and give you the option to save them. After a couple of seconds, the main inter­face is loaded. It looks simple, and it looks slick. And it’s fast. There are basic­ally four parts to the inter­face. Top left is your search bar. Under­neath that is a list of your playl­ists. Under­neath that is your “Now Play­ing” sec­tion, with an album cover and your con­trol. On the right is your cur­rent playlist/search res­ults. So, you search for your favour­ite artist, and although Spo­tify doesn’t have everything yet, they are con­tinu­ally updat­ing their cata­logue, so there’s a very high chance they’re already there. Double click on the name of the track you want to play, and almost instantly, the track starts. No buf­fer­ing, no down­load­ing, it just works. You can add tracks to playl­ists, queue them up, listen to them straight away, everything a stand­ard desktop-based media player lets you do. Except with a ten second advert in between tracks every twenty minutes or so.

And more. I can send my playl­ists to my friends, and within seconds, they have that playl­ist loaded in their Spo­tify. I can open playl­ists from sites that spe­cial­ise in Spo­tify playl­ist shar­ing. I can set up “Col­lab­or­at­ive Playl­ists”, which I can share with my friends, and we can add on tracks that we like together. Sites like Drowned In Sound and Pitch­fork are already all over it, with playl­ists you can open from their site, and listen to within lit­er­ally seconds. And we’re going to launch a new sec­tion tomor­row, a twenty track mix­tape every week.

So, why is this so revolu­tion­ary? Well, because there aren’t really any down­sides to it. It beats Bit­Tor­rent in that it’s legal, and it’s instant. It beats iTunes because it’s free and it’s instant. OK, so it doesn’t have EVERYTHING, but the cata­logue is so big that you could eas­ily just use Spo­tify, and down­load the tracks it doesn’t have through your favour­ite legal down­load ser­vice (7Digital is integ­rated into Spo­tify). If the adverts annoy you, it’s a rel­at­ively small monthly fee to get rid of them (9.99 in your local cur­rency), although they’re few and far enough between that I doubt they will. Admit­tedly, you need to have an unlim­ited, rel­at­ively fast inter­net con­nec­tion (they recom­mend a line rated at 256kb/s, and I’d say that’s prob­ably about right), and you can’t put it on your iPod, but they men­tion 3G on their web­site, so maybe, maybe, maybe, iPods will become a thing of the past. And we’ll all have 3G spotify-ed mobile phones.

Let’s all get involved. Let’s prove to the record com­pan­ies that they CAN give us free music, and that they CAN still make money. Let’s get all of the world’s music onto Spo­tify. Let’s wipe out copy­right infringe­ment com­pletely, while essen­tially keep­ing our music.

Spotify.com