If you live in Europe, you have surely heard of or already use Spotify, the on demand streaming music service. Spotify, a company formed and based in Sweden has taken Europe by storm, and will definitely do the same thing once it comes to the United States. With $250 million to date in venture capital funding, this company is going to make a lot of noise, and with good reason. It’s a one of kind type service that has little competition, and everything going for it. The backing of the majority of the big record labels also helps.

Spotify is a lightweight desktop client that gives you access to millions of artists and their songs. It’s as simple as searching for your song and playing the track. The library of audio is quite impressive. On most searches I find almost every track and or album ever made. The sound quality and clarity is on par with just about any CD. Songs que up almost instantly, no lag or delay.

This in no way, shape or form compares to Last.fm. This puts Last.fm to shame and has completely replaced last.fm for me. Last.fm is not an on-demand music service, it’s more of a radio station where if you are lucky and cycle through 500 songs, the song you are looking for might play.

I love all genres of music and one of my favorite bands is Steely Dan.  I was pleasantly surprised when I found 455 tracks listed, pretty much every song the band has ever recorded and then some.

Being a big electronica fan, the first name that I searched for was  DJ Tiesto.  No surprise there, 347 track listings found. I found the majority of the Tiesto songs I was looking for, however there were a few I did not find, but the rest made up for it.

Armin Van Buuren,  another favorite of mine has a whopping 727 track listings. I also found 553 track listings for Paul Van Dyk. Did I already mention how solid and impressive Spotify’s song libraries are?

The nuts and bolts:

Spotify is not available in the United States, yet. Thanks to a special friend I was fortunate enough to get a press version for testing. Sorry I have no invites to hand out, you’ll just have to take my word on how great the service is, or read Louis Gray’s recent review of the service.

Spotify has two service offerings, a freemium version which displays ads in between songs and a premium ad free version which comes at a cost of 10 British pounds  a month. There is also an all day 24 hour pass available for one British pound. I’m curious to see what the premium version will cost in US Dollars.  Is this a service I would pay for? Absolutely!

Why Spotify will be a game changer:

Spotify’s library of songs is close to four million. The desktop application is fast, responsive and as with iTunes  it gives you all the pertinent track and artist info. You can easily create and manage play lists. There is a social component that will allow you to share your favorite songs out to Facebook or Delicious. The streaming rate is approximately 160kbp, premium subscribers get a bit rate of 320kbp.

It’s on-demand only:

If a song is in the Spotify library, you can easily play it as many times as you like. You can not download the track, nor buy it (at least in the press version I tested). There is a purchase now link when right clicking over a song, it’s my understanding this feature only works in a few European countries.  Once Spotify comes to the United States, it’s probably safe to say you will be able to purchase songs on the service via iTunes. It’s only a matter of time before these two companies break bread and some type of licensing deal is put in place. Spotify also has an iPhone application,waiting for Apple’s approval, though the chances of Apple approving it are slim at best.  If a song is not in the Spotify library then you are out of luck, but in my testing, and only with big name bands, I found that they all had songs on the service. The music on Spotify is fully legal and licensed before it makes it to the service, so you can imagine when I searched for The Beatles I found no track listings, as with iTunes. The Beatles catalog of music is off limits for the time being due to licensing issues.

It’s not often a quality product like this comes along, but when it does, it’s like a speeding train that no one will be able to catch, that’s Spotify. The service is hands down the best on demand streaming music service on the internet.  That’s all folks, over and out.

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