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Spotify
Original author(s)Spotify AB
Stable release
0.4.3.426.g698a58c3 / May 10, 2010; 14 years ago (2010-05-10)
Preview release
Microsoft Windows: 0.4.6.1.g4c4ce4c9
Linux: 0.4.6.67.g9b4fb29[1] / Microsoft Windows: June 30, 2010; 14 years ago (2010-06-30)
Linux: July 14, 2010; 14 years ago (2010-07-14)
Written inC++
Operating systemMicrosoft Windows, Linux, Apple Mac OS X, iOS, Android, S60, Telia digital tv
TypeMusic
LicenseProprietary
Websitehttp://www.spotify.com/

Spotify is a peer-to-peer music streaming service with desktop applications available for Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

Developed by Swedish startup "Spotify AB", the proprietary, DRM-based software allows unlimited streaming of selected music from a multitude of major and independent record labels including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group and Universal with virtually no buffering delay.[2][3] Music can also be imported from either iTunes[4] or directly from local files.[5]

An ad-supported version of the software is free to download in Sweden, Spain, Norway, Finland, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.[6][7]. For a monthly fee, users can upgrade to a "Premium" account, which offers higher bitrate streams, offline access to music and use of Spotify on mobile devices running iOS, Android or Symbian.[8] Currently only consumers with a Paypal account or a credit card issued in one of the launch countries can activate a Premium account. A "Day Pass" was available, which gave unlimited advertising-free listening for 24 hours; this option was removed when Spotify "Unlimited" was introduced in May 2010.

Music can be browsed by artist, album, record label, genre or playlist as well as by direct searches, and a link allows the listener to purchase selected material via partner retailers.[9] Launched in October 2008, Spotify has approximately seven million users as of May 19th, 2010; about 250,000 of these are paying members.[10]

History

alt text
Spotify's headquarters at Birger Jarlsgatan 6

Spotify has been developed since 2006 by a team at Spotify AB, Stockholm, Sweden. The company Spotify was founded by Daniel Ek, former CTO of Stardoll, and Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of TradeDoubler, in Stockholm. The headquarters are located in London and research and development is located in Stockholm.

Spotify was launched for public access on 7 October 2008. While free accounts still remained available by invitation only in order to manage the growth rate of the service, the launch meant that paid subscriptions were opened to everyone. At the same time, Spotify also announced licensing deals with many major music labels.[11] Spotify reported a USD 4.4 million loss for the year of 2008.[12].

The first step towards opening free accounts for public without invitation was taken on 10 February 2009 when Spotify opened for free registration in the UK.[13]

Due to a surge in registrations following the release of the Spotify mobile service, Spotify closed its open registrations in the UK on 11 September 2009. The free service is now invitation-only,[14] although it was possible to bypass the invitation system for several months by opening the registration page directly. This loophole has now been closed and the registration page requires an invitation code.[15] Subscriptions may still be purchased without an invitation.

On 4 March 2009 Spotify announced that there had been a security flaw in the Spotify service, by which private account information (including email addresses and salted password hashes) of members registered prior to 19 December 2008 were potentially exposed.[16][17][18][19]

On 28 January 2010 Symantec Anti-virus marked Spotify as a Trojan horse, disabling the software across millions of computers.[20][21]

Technical function

The contents of each client's cache is summarized in an index which is sent to the Spotify stream hub upon connecting to the service. This index is then used to inform other clients about additional peers they can connect to for fetching streamed data for individual tracks being played. This is accommodated by each client, upon startup, acting as a server listening for incoming connections from other Spotify users, as well as intuitively connecting to other users to exchange cached data as appropriate. There are currently no official details from the developers about how many connections and how much of a user's upstream bandwidth the Spotify client will use when streaming to other users; the Spotify client offers no way for the user to configure this.

Audio streams are in the Vorbis format at q5 (approx ~160 kbit/s)[22], or optional q9 (approx ~320kbit/s)[23] for Premium subscribers, the highest streaming rate for any online service.

Revenue model

Spotify is funded by paid subscriptions, adverts in the Spotify player for non-subscribers and music purchases from partner retailers.

In February 2009, the advertisements for non-paying users were reported as lasting 15 seconds[24] though in May 2009, Neowin reported that the approximate length has increased to 30 seconds.[25] The interval between advertisements is not constant.

Users could purchase a "Day Pass", which provided 24 hours of playback without advertisements, although this option was removed in May 2010. Alternatively, payment of a monthly fee upgrades an account to "Premium" status, which removes advertisements, increases the bitrate to 320kbps and allows usage of mobile clients for iPhone OS, Android and Symbian devices. On December 2 2009, Spotify launched "Premium e-cards" (premium codes), which upgrade an account to "Premium" status for 1, 3 or 6 months.[26]

In March 2009, Spotify began to offer music downloads at £0.99 per track in partnership with the 7digital music store.[27] This feature was moved from a context menu to an explicit "Buy" link in mid-October 2009. {{citation}}: Empty citation (help) In May 2010, Spotify introduced "Unlimited", which allows unlimited advert-free playback for one month for half the price of "Premium"; however, it does not include any other special feature of Premium.[28]

Availability

Availability of Spotify across Europe
Map showing the availability of Spotify across Europe as of May 2010.

Spotify is currently only available in Sweden, Spain, Norway, Finland (including the Åland Islands[29]), France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. In Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Switzerland the Premium service was offered until July 2009, but never the free version. Currently only customers with credit cards issued in one of the above-mentioned launch countries can buy a Premium account.

Spotify Founder, Daniel Ek, expressed a desire to launch Spotify in the US before the end of 2009, although Spotify has yet to be launched there.[30]

Spotify Open

On May 19th, 2010, Spotify announced the launch of a new model, Spotify Open. The version is available to anyone without an invitation, but listening time is restricted to twenty hours per month, and listening beyond that requires payment.[31]

System requirements

The system requirements for the desktop version are Windows XP (or newer) or Mac OS X 10.4 (or newer). Preview build of Linux client for Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 10.04 was made available on July 12, 2010, currently restricted only to Premium and Unlimited subscribers because of a problem with displaying ads [32]. The program can also be run on Linux and FreeBSD using Wine and the Spotify website has a section devoted to this topic.[33] As of version 0.4.3, it's possible to also play back local MP3 and AAC files, though this does not work in Linux because Spotify is "[...] blocking codecs with the identifier “WINE-MPEG3″ until the Wine system works satisfactorily."[33]

Cache size and location is configurable. 1 GB or more disk space is recommended. {{citation}}: Empty citation (help) On Mac OS X, a G4 processor or higher is required. A user must set up an account in order to use the software. This account can be used on several computers, but music playback is limited to one computer at a time.

Features

Catalogue

Users can access approximately 8 million tracks[34] via searching for artists, albums, titles, labels and genres, and gives users access to tracks from many major and independent labels. Some artists have opted not to be added to Spotify at this time. [2][35] Additionally, some artists are missing in certain regions due to licensing restrictions imposed by the record labels. For example, Oasis are currently unavailable to listeners from United Kingdom-based IP addresses. However, cover versions of the music of these artists can be found on Spotify with a full-text search.[36]

Playlists

Users can set up playlists and share them [37], or edit them together with other users (see collaborative software). For this purpose the playlist link can directly be dragged into an email or an instant messaging window. If the recipient follows the link, the playlist will be downloaded into the Spotify-client of the recipient. Like normal links, the playlist links can be used everywhere. The same principle also works for single tracks, which can be used via drag and drop on applications and websites at will.[38] There are a number of websites for sharing of Spotify playlists and songs where users can share, rate and discuss them.[39]

Last.fm integration

The application features Last.fm integration which allows the current track to be "scrobbled" without making use of the Last.fm software.

Radios

Spotify also includes a Radio feature available to free, unlimited and premium accounts, which creates a random playlist of songs chosen based on specified genres and decades. An Artist Radio feature creates a random playlist of songs by artists related to (and including) the selected artist.

Users from the UK, France, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands can also buy most tracks, if available, from Spotify's download partner 7digital.[40]

Mobile versions

A Spotify application for Android was demonstrated at Google I/O on May 28, 2009[41], and then an iPhone application was officially announced on July 27, 2009[42]. Apple approved the iPhone app one month later on August 27, 2009[43]. The applications allow Premium subscribers to access the full music catalogue, stream music and even listen to music when disconnected using the Offline Mode (which is also available on the desktop version for premiums users). The mobile versions of Spotify were released onto the iTunes App Store and Google's Android Marketplace on Monday September 7, 2009,[44] while a Symbian version was made available on Spotify's website on November 23, 2009.[45] A version for Research in Motion's BlackBerry smartphones is in development.[46] mySpot is a freeware client that supports Windows Mobile. The mySpot 0.85b application provides access to the Spotify service on the Windows Mobile platform via an intermediate proxy. It requires a QVGA, VGA or WVGA device running Windows Mobile Professional (Pocket PC) 6.0 or higher.[47]

Social features

On April 27, 2010, Spotify gave each user a profile page and allowed users to connect to their friends on Facebook to share playlists and view friends' most listened to artists and tracks.[48]

Community

A community of websites, blogs, applications and tools exists to support Spotify.[49] Community resources include Facebook and Last.fm groups, Twitter bots and user forums, tools to display lyrics and services to list and notify users about new releases.[50].

Spotify has also led to an array of editorial content integrating playlists into articles. Popular music website Drowned in Sound is among the most notable examples, running every Friday as 'Spotifriday' which involves a playlist of the site's content during the week shared with readers. {{citation}}: Empty citation (help)

Criticism

Despite its popularity, the service has recently come under fire for failing to compensate independent artists fairly. Helienne Lindvall of The Guardian reported that "indie labels... as opposed to the majors and Merlin members, receive no advance, receive no minimum per stream and only get a 50% share of ad revenue on a pro-rata basis." [51] Swedish musician Magnus Uggla - who is on major label Sony Music - wanted to pull his music from the site, stating that after six months he'd only earned "what a mediocre busker could earn in a day".[52] Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet recently reported that record label Junior Racing had only earned NOK 19 ($3.00 USD) after their artists had been streamed over 55,100 times.[53]

Luke Lewis of NME points to problems with the Spotify business model, saying he was "convinced the 'free' aspect of Spotify is unsustainable" and that if "Spotify is to have a future, it needs to be a viable business".[54]

Despotify

Despotify
Original author(s)#hack.se
Written inC
Operating systemLinux, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, MacOSX, Windows
TypeClient, Library
License2-clause BSD license
Websitehttp://despotify.se/

Despotify is a free software client for Spotify. Its authors remain anonymous, but write on their website that they are a group of Swedish computer science researchers and security professionals who "believe strongly in the right to tinker with technology".

The software can be run on most mainstream operating systems with POSIX support and for which there is an ANSI C compiler. It also requires Core Audio, Gstreamer, libao or PulseAudio to be installed. There is also a Despotify-based client, Spot, for jailbroken iPhones.[55]

Spotify have blocked usage of Despotify for 'Free' accounts, but those with a 'Premium' account can use Despotify if they wish. The Despotify team have said that they won't attempt to circumvent the block. The code may however be forked by others to attempt to do this.[56]

The Despotify library has language bindings for Python and Ruby. It depends on OpenSSL, zlib, libvorbis.

See also

References

  1. ^ Previews - Spotify
  2. ^ a b Salmon, Chris (January 16, 2009). "Welcome to nirvana". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2009-01-28. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  3. ^ "Musiktjänsten Spotify lanseras". Dagens Nyheter. 2008-10-07. Retrieved 2009-04-24.
  4. ^ "Spotify Updates with iTunes Library Importing, Social Integration".
  5. ^ "Spotify local".
  6. ^ What countries is Spotify available in? Spotify.com FAQs
  7. ^ "Spotify Free - A world of music". Spotify AB. Retrieved 2010-04-16.
  8. ^ "Spotify Premium - A world of music - Ad free, mobile, offline". Spotify AB. Retrieved 2010-04-16.
  9. ^ "website: Background information". Spotify. 2008-05-18. Retrieved 2009-02-03.
  10. ^ "Article in Aftenposten, May 19th 2010 (Norwegian)".
  11. ^ We've only just begun! Spotify blog. October 7, 2008.
  12. ^ Spotify doubled its loss last year Swedishwire.com, 17 August 2009
  13. ^ Spotify now available to everyone in the UK. Spotify blog. February 10, 2009.
  14. ^ https://www.spotify.com/blog/archives/2009/09/10/back-to-invites-for-a-while-in-the-uk/
  15. ^ https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/
  16. ^ Spotify security notice. Spotify blog. March 4, 2009.
  17. ^ Updated security notice. Spotify blog. March 4, 2009.
  18. ^ Muncaster, Phil (March 5, 2009). Spotify user details compromised in major hack. vnunet.
  19. ^ Despotify, Criticism. Developers of the open source Spotify client Despotify explain about their findings.
  20. ^ http://aka-community.symantec.com/connect/forums/spotify-detected-trojan-horse
  21. ^ http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/spotify_defined_as_a_trojan_by_symantec
  22. ^ "Spotify FAQ". Spotify. Retrieved 2009-03-16.
  23. ^ http://www.spotify.com/blog/archives/2009/06/25/bumping-up-the-bitrate/
  24. ^ McCormick, Neil (February 24, 2009). Make way for Spotify: a big digital jukebox in the ether. The Daily Telegraph.
  25. ^ Harrison, Elliot (May 2, 2009). Spotify review: The iTunes killer? Neown.net.
  26. ^ Spotify e-cards announced Spotify blog, 2 December 2009
  27. ^ "Expanded "Buy From" feature and a Spanish translation". Retrieved 2009-10-20.
  28. ^ "Article in Aftenposten, May 19th 2010 (Norwegian)".
  29. ^ Nu fungerar Spotify på Åland
  30. ^ Williams, Stephen (July 20, 2009). Euro Music Site Bound for America. The New York Times.
  31. ^ "Article in Sydsvenskan, May 2010 (Swedish)".
  32. ^ Spotify for Linux
  33. ^ a b Spotify under Wine. Spotify.com help pages.
  34. ^ "Spotify track list in order". Retrieved 2010-03-14.
  35. ^ Spotify FAQ: Missing arists, Retrieved on June 15, 2009
  36. ^ Spotify Search for Beatles, An example for music that can be found in Spotify although it is officially not included.
  37. ^ ShareMyPlaylist A polular playlist sharing service. http://sharemyplaylists.com. April 2010.
  38. ^ "FAQ: Share music". Spotify. Retrieved 2009-02-03.
  39. ^ "Blog: Sharing is good, share your spotify playlists". Spotify. Retrieved 2009-02-16.
  40. ^ MacLean, Allan (April 11, 2009). "Spotify's free music model – binge until your ears are fat!". Daily Music Guide. Retrieved 2009-04-16.
  41. ^ Blog: Spotify mobile demo at Google Android I/O. Spotify mobile demo at Google Android I/O Spotify blog. May 28, 2009.
  42. ^ Blog: Spotify for iPhone. Spotify for iPhone Spotify blog. July 27, 2009.
  43. ^ "Spotify app approved for iPhone". BBC News. August 27, 2009. Retrieved May 23, 2010.
  44. ^ http://twitter.com/eldsjal/status/3667069562 Spotify CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Twitter Post
  45. ^ "Spotify for Nokia and more". Spotify blog. November 23, 2009. Retrieved 2009-11-23.
  46. ^ "Spotify Planning BlackBerry Addition In Premium Mobile Tilt". paidContent. 2009-10-27. Retrieved 2009-11-29.
  47. ^ http://www.1800pocketpc.com/2010/04/15/myspot-0-85b-a-spotify-client-for-windows-phone.html#more-12119
  48. ^ "Spotify - the next generation".
  49. ^ "Unofficial Spotify resources". Spotify. Retrieved 2009-11-06.
  50. ^ "Blog: Spotify Resources". The Pansentient League. Retrieved 2009-05-05.
  51. ^ Lindvall, Helienne (August 17, 2009). "Behind The Music: The real reason the major labels love Spotify". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2009-08-17.
  52. ^ "Uggla furious over Spotify and Sony Music". Entertainment Blade. Retrieved 2009-08-13.
  53. ^ "55 100 avspillinger ga 19 kroner". Dagbladet. Retrieved 2009-10-12.
  54. ^ "The Problem With Spotify". NME. Retrieved 2009-09-11.
  55. ^ [1]
  56. ^ "Update regarding the usage of 'free' or 'daypass' accounts". Despotify. February 26, 2009.
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