It’s impressive how quickly Spotify rose to semi-ubiquity, taking the throne of streaming music almost unchallenged.  For those who haven’t heard of it, Spotify is currently a paid or invite-only service which seeks to move all your music listening to the web: you call up a track and it will stream it for you at full quality from its immense song library.  While it hasn’t and probably won’t dethrone iTunes in the digital music world, it’s become a matter of habit to overhear its adverts peppering playlists at smaller coffee shops, workplaces and social gatherings; one has to wonder where this confluence of technological innovation and increased availability of high-bandwidth broadband internet services will leave traditional bricks and mortar retailers in years to come.

There are still a lot of questions surrounding streaming services like Spotify.  First of all, it’s far from certain that as a business model it is sustainable; predictably, artists and labels alike have had their issues with the amount of royalty they receive per track, and it is still very much a fledgeling concept.  Whether it will prove durable enough to stand up to the online retailers like iTunes, Amazon and 7digital remains to be seen.

So far, I don’t know a single person who relies entirely on Spotify for their music.  I don’t know ultimately if the hesitation for people to switch entirely is down to an attachment to somehow ‘owning’ the music as you can a physical CD or a digital audio file, concerns about audio quality, a perceived shortcoming in the breadth of Spotify’s library content (at the time of writing it has around 6 million tracks to iTunes’ 11 million), or a simple lack of real demand for such a service.  Personally, my 60-odd gigabyte iTunes library more than covers most of my listening needs, and anything I don’t have I am happy to get from one of the many online stores, so I don’t have any real ‘need’ for a service like Spotify.  That said, I sometimes find myself out and about with my Asus Eee 901 netbook and it’s 20GB of total internal storage, and for those few times when I would like to listen to music on it I rely entirely on online streaming music services.

It would seem that Spotify has a lot to prove if it is to live up to its promise as the Next Big Thing.  Pandora and Last.fm have both had their spotlight moment and while they haven’t done away with more traditional music consumption habits (if that was ever their intention), they have most certainly transformed the digital music playing field and shown that there is a nascent business model there waiting for mass market acceptance.

Spotify is still in its infancy; its free service currently requires an invite, and despite this the uptake has so far reached an impressive 7 million users according to the BBC in January1.  Other services have grown to around 20 million active users before plateauing, which should be something of a benchmark for Spotify.  Furthermore, the marketability of its free service depends entirely on it building a sustainable ad business, and it remains to be seen what percentage of its overall subscribers will sign up for the premium service (currently the number hovers around 5%).

No Spotify invite, no problem! 

The one remaining problem with Spotify is its invite-only policy.  If you find yourself thinking “Where do I sign up?” but don’t know anyone with a free Spotify invite to throw your way, don’t despair.  There are several Spotify-like services which are a little more accessible, depending on where in the world you are.  If like me you are in the UK, you’d be wise to take a look at Grooveshark.  While I can’t find out much about the size of its library, a quick search of its library yields fairly respectable results and its library is growing through user uploads every day.

Grooveshark runs primarily in an in-browser Flash interface (shown above), is free, does not require sign-up and is supported by ads in the browser rather than the more annoying audio ads.  At $3/mo. or $30/yr. the ad-free subscription service with one or two other fringe benefits such as a desktop client is very reasonable indeed.  Bear in mind however that as a service there are question marks surrounding its content, sustainability and model: most of its music is sourced from user uploads and there are big copyright infringement question marks surrounding this, although Grooveshark are very confident that their service is 100% legal, and none of their users has ever faced legal action from Grooveshark or any third parties for uploading unlicensed content.

Alternatively...

Personally, I’m a long-time Last.fm subscriber.  This might be something to do with the fact that a very cool hacker friend of mine was very closely involved in the early stages of its inception, but to this day I carry on paying my subscription fees as it not only fulfils my need for streaming music, but integrates this with a fantastically well-designed framework for music discovery and some really cool subscriber-only features that, while fairly superfluous, are undeniably cool (see chart below).

A crop of my recent listening trends from http://playground.last.fm

Last.fm has become an integral part of my daily routine.  All my devices ‘scrobble’ to Last.fm (a neologism denoting the service’s unique music indexing and submission method), meaning that as time goes by it builds up an ever-improving profile of my listening habits, which I can choose to share with select friends through its social networking facilities.  It then uses these to recommend me new music, show me what my friends are playing, and even give me listings of upcoming gigs.  I’ve discovered an awful lot of new music this way over the last four or five years.



So, whichever service you choose, there is an awful lot of choice out there.  Most, if not all of these services operate some sort of free trial policy: while ad-supported, Last.fm and Grooveshark are free for life, as is Spotify if you can swing an invite from a friend or colleague.  On a personal note however, I still think that the vast majority of my music playing for a long time to come is going to be confined to the more familiar domain of iTunes, MPEG-4 audio files and even more startlingly, the occasional compact disc.  Whether this is down to some attachment to archaic listening habits and formats I’m not sure, all I know I’m certainly not in any rush to trash my local music library just yet.