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==Death==
==Death==
Roberta McSpotify, also known as Roberta from Spotify, was found [[dead]] in her flat on [[29]] [[April]] [[2009]], reportedly from [[swine flu]]. This is said to be the explanation for Roberta's colleague, Jonathan, providing voiceovers for Spotify Premium adverts. Roberta's death has resulted in many elaborate [[conspiracy]] theories; some suggesting Jonathan choked her to [[death]] and subsequently [[raped]] her deceased [[corpse]] in an impulsive bid for power. More information is expected to be released following an [[autopsy]]I blame [[Schmo]].
Roberta McSpotify, also known as Roberta from Spotify, was found [[dead]] in her flat on [[29]] [[April]] [[2009]], reportedly from [[swine flu]]. This is said to be the explanation for Roberta's colleague, Jonathan, providing voiceovers for Spotify Premium adverts. Roberta's death has resulted in many elaborate [[conspiracy]] theories; some suggesting Jonathan choked her to [[death]] and subsequently [[raped]] her deceased [[corpse]] in an impulsive bid for power. More information is expected to be released following an [[autopsy]].


== See also ==
== See also ==

Revision as of 03:39, 29 April 2009

Spotify
Original author(s)Spotify Ltd
Stable release
0.3.14 (revision 45614)
Preview release
Android8.6.96 / December 30, 2021; 2 years ago (2021-12-30)[1]
iOS8.6.96 / December 31, 2021; 2 years ago (2021-12-31)[1]
Operating systemMicrosoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X (Unix possible using Wine)
TypeMusic
LicenseProprietary
Websitehttp://www.spotify.com/

Spotify is a proprietary peer-to-peer[2] streaming music program that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums with almost no buffering delay.[3][4] Music can be browsed by artists, albums or created playlists as well as by direct searches. Although it is not possible to save the streamed music for use outside the application, a link is provided to allow the listener to directly purchase the material via partner retailers.[5] The program/service in its free version is only available in parts of western Europe during the ongoing beta programme although the subscription model should be available in almost all countries.

History

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, Sweden. The headquarters is located in London, and research and development is located in Stockholm, Sweden.[5] Spotify currently has more than one million users.[6]

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 licencing deals with many major music labels.[7]

The first step towards opening free accounts for public, without invitation, was taken on 10 February 2009, when Spotify opened free registration within the United Kingdom.[8]

On 4 March 2009, Spotify announced that personal data including email addresses and birth dates of members of Spotify prior to 19 December 2008 were "potentially exposed" by hackers exploiting a bug in the system.[9][10] Spotify later announced that any affected users have been personally emailed by Spotify[11]. The team creating "Despotify", an open source clone of Spotify, later announced that it was they who had discovered the security hole, and that only around 40 users' details had been revealed, mostly members of the Despotify or Spotify teams. [12] While it is possible that other groups could have have used this approach to gain user information, it is unlikely given that Spotify fixed the issue within a few hours of the exploit being made public.

An announcement by Spotify also pointed out that any potential hackers would only be able to obtain salted encrypted passwords. Hackers would still have to have targeted specific accounts and used brute force attacks on these passwords.[13]

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, but this may change in the future[2].

Audio streams are in the Vorbis format at q5 (approx ~160kbit/s)[14].

Cost and availability

Spotify is funded by advertisements and can be downloaded from the Spotify website in three ways. It is available free to use in some countries (with some notable exceptions) and is funded by advertising played periodically by the Spotify player at intervals in between songs. Adverts also occasionally appear in Spotify's graphical interface. Alternatively the user can pay a monthly fee of 9.99 € (roughly $12 USD, £10 GBP, 99 NOK or 99 SEK) and there are then no advertisements in the client window or between songs. Payment of the fee changes the user's status to "Premium user"; this allows the user to listen to previews and some songs before non-premium users. A user may also purchase a "day pass" for 9 SEK (approximately $1.1 USD, £0.99 GBP, 9 NOK or 0.8 EUR) for 24 hours of ad-free music playback (basically 24 hours of the premium service).[15] Paid services are available only to those able and willing to use a credit card.[16]

Spotify Premium is available in Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and the UK. The free version is only available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain, and in some of those countries an invitation is required.[17]

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.

Since February 10, 2009 Spotify has been available to anyone in the UK without receiving an invitation.[18] The service is not currently available in the United States or Canada. Spotify Founder, Daniel Ek, has expressed a desire to change this, however he has announced no time frame as yet.

System requirements

The system requirements are at least Mac OS X 10.4, Windows XP or a newer operating system. It is also possible to run the program in Linux and FreeBSD using Wine, and the company gives advice on how to get the best results with Debian GNU/Linux. [19] The cache size can be limited by the user and the memory location of cache can be chosen. At least 1GB of free space is recommended for the cache.

Features

Users can access 6 million tracks[20] (or around 2.7 million for UK users)[21] via searching for artists, albums, titles and genres. Spotify features a large and constantly growing library of music, giving users access to tracks from all major labels as well as numerous independent labels. However, some major bands are either very under-represented or are completely missing from the library, including AC/DC, The Beatles, Metallica, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.[3]

Users can set up playlists and share them, 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.[22] There are a number of websites for sharing of Spotify playlists and songs, for example Spotyshare.com and Spotylist.com where users can share, rate and download them.[23]

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

Spotify also includes a Radio feature available to both free and premium accounts, which creates a random playlist of songs chosen based on specified genres and decades.

Users from the UK, France and Spain can also buy selected tracks, if available, from Spotify's download partner 7digital.[21]

Future directions

An iPhone Spotify application is currently in development[24], which would allow users to access the music catalog and stream music over Wi-Fi. A version for Symbian S60 and Android is also thought to be in development.

Despotify

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

The software can be run on most mainstream operating systems, and should work on all systems compatible with POSIX and ANSI C that also have CoreAudio or PulseAudio installed.

Spotify have blocked usage of Despotify for 'Free' and 'Daypass' accounts, but those with a 'Premium' account can use Despotify if they wish. The Despotify team won't attempt to circumvent the block. The code may, however, be forked by others to attempt to do this.[25]

Despotify appears in IT Pro portal covering the "spotify" user data issue.[26]

Death

Roberta McSpotify, also known as Roberta from Spotify, was found dead in her flat on 29 April 2009, reportedly from swine flu. This is said to be the explanation for Roberta's colleague, Jonathan, providing voiceovers for Spotify Premium adverts. Roberta's death has resulted in many elaborate conspiracy theories; some suggesting Jonathan choked her to death and subsequently raped her deceased corpse in an impulsive bid for power. More information is expected to be released following an autopsy.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "Announcing Alpha & Beta Programs". community.spotify.com. December 4, 2018.
  2. ^ a b "How exactly does Spotify utilise my internet connection? (Spotify Customer Support)". Retrieved 2009-03-25.
  3. ^ a b "Welcome to nirvana". The Guardian. 2009-01-16. Retrieved 2009-01-28.
  4. ^ "Musiktjänsten Spotify lanseras". Dagens Nyheter. 2008-10-07. Retrieved 2009-04-24.
  5. ^ a b "website: background information". Spotify. 2008-05-18. Retrieved 2009-02-03.
  6. ^ Spotify reaches one million users at Spotify blog
  7. ^ We've only just begun! at Spotify blog 2008-10-07
  8. ^ Spotify now available to everyone in the UK at Spotify blog 2009-02-10
  9. ^ Hackers break in to Spotify The Guardian, Wednesday 4 March 2009
  10. ^ Spotify user details compromised in major hack at vnunet
  11. ^ Updated security notice Spotify blog Wednesday 4 March 2009
  12. ^ Despotify FAQ - "criticism"
  13. ^ Spotify security notice Spotify blog Wednesday 4 March 2009
  14. ^ "Spotify FAQ". Retrieved 2009-03-16.
  15. ^ "website: Products overview". Spotify. Retrieved 2009-02-03.
  16. ^ "website: You are Buying Premium". Spotify. Retrieved 2009-04-22.
  17. ^ What countries is Spotify available in? at Spotify.com FAQs
  18. ^ "Spotify now available to everyone in the UK". Spotify. 2009-02-10. Retrieved 2009-02-13.
  19. ^ Spotify under Wine, Spotify Ltd
  20. ^ Schweizer, Kristen (April 9, 2009). "Swedish Virtual Jukebox Charms Pirates for Universal, Warner". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2009-04-09.
  21. ^ a b "Spotify's free music model - binge until your ears are fat!". Daily Music Guide. Retrieved 2009-04-16.
  22. ^ "FAQ: Share music". Spotify. Retrieved 2009-02-03.
  23. ^ "Blog: Sharing is good, share your spotify playlists". Spotify. Retrieved 2009-02-16.
  24. ^ http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/02/23/the-day-itunes-died-spotify-is-working-on-a-killer-iphone-app/
  25. ^ "2009/02/26 - Update regarding the usage of 'free' or 'daypass' accounts"
  26. ^ http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2237872/spotify-hacked
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