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Apparently you don't even need Premium. According to their Get Spotify page, you can "Take your music abroad" with the Unlimited plan for £4.99 (~$8) per month. Still a good share more than Pandora, at $3 per month, on a yearly basis. But apparently Spotify gives you better control over your music - you can actually pick songs! Instead of just waiting for them to come up on your radio station.

"Only downside is that Spotify isn't available in the US. Yes, you can proxy, but it takes gymnastics to get it working on your Android or iPhone, especially if you want a subscription."

Actually, with Premium (£9.99 per month) you can use it anywhere in the world, once you sign up within a member country. See:

http://www.spotify.com/uk/about/features/use-from-anywhere/

Everyone I know (in the EU) has switched to Spotify.

(This isn't a sales pitch, just a statement of fact :-P)

You mean like this?

Spotify - Fast, easy to use, very little drain on resources.

Why then did they approve the Spotify client?

Catholic priests are fucking immature assholes.

A priest, a rapist, and a pedophile walk into a bar, the bartender says "What'll you have, buddy?"

Six people were on a plane. A doctor, a lawyer a priest and 3 children. The pilot comes on the radio and says the plane is going to crash,and there are only three parachutes. The doctor yells out, " Save the children" The lawyer yells out "FUCK THE CHILDREN!" The priest yells out " IS THERE TIME?"

What's the difference between a rabbi and a priest?A rabbi cuts it off, and a priest sucks it off.

And a little song ot end it. http://open.spotify.com/track/4i8mXoDsPX99hfkCo0USg1

If you have more jokes like these I'd love to hear them...

is totally awesome.

I'm finding new music I like at a far faster rate than I was ten years ago. The biggest difference is that now, I have Rhapsody. (Just like the guy who wrote TFA mentioned that he has Spotify.)

I can find an artist I like, and there are links on the page. Hey, you like Genesis? Check out Steve Hackett, Brand X, and Mike + the Mechanics, and Alan Parsons Project and Yes; check out "Art & Progressive Rock"; check out playlists that other users made that relate to Genesis; in short there are literally dozens of links. Some of the links are tenuous and unlikely, yet I have used them to branch over to music I really like: Genesis to Peter Gabriel to Synergy (Larry Fast) to Zero 7 and Infected Mushroom.

Even if you don't sign up for a music service, you can do something similar with a large online store such as Amazon. You can only hear short samples, not the full song, but you can still navigate a web of connections.

It used to be that to even hear about obscure music, you had to subscribe to music newsletters or hang out in non-mainstream record shops or at least have a friend who did those things. Now you can click around from song to song, and if it takes you nine songs you don't like to find one you do like, you are still only out a couple of minutes. And if you are like me, and you listen to albums many times if you like them, it's totally worth spending a little time branching out. Add in a little bit of time looking bands up on Wikipedia and other sources, and you too can be as much of a music expert as someone who writes for a magazine.

The RIAA and the big labels fear this new world. They want to keep charging for music as if it were a scarce commodity. I read an interview with a guy from a studio, and he defended the high price of CDs: the price is fair because it's really hard to be a studio; you have to try to find new acts, and when you guess wrong, a whole bunch of CDs go into a landfill. Well, guess what: on the Internet, you can just provide the music, and if nobody likes it, it will just sit there; and if people do like it, you make pure profit. No CDs need be produced and then landfilled. The costs go way, way down with digital distribution. They want their costs to drop, while still charging the same inflated prices they try to justify on CDs; that won't work.

The future of music is: everything available on the Internet, at lower prices than if you buy CDs. Most artists will not bother to sign their fortunes over to big record studios; they will retain control of their music, and deal more directly with the customers. There will still be middle-men, but fewer of them, and they will make less money (which doesn't sound good if you are a middle-man but sounds pretty darn good to me). And absolutely nothing will go out of print. If an album sells two copies a year, it has paid back the costs of letting it sit on a server and it is already slightly in the black.

I remember, when I was in high school, how truly huge and popular certain bands were. Whether you liked them or hated them, you recognized Styx or Van Halen when you heard them. In the future, new bands may find it impossible to reach the same level of success and recognition, because everyone will fragment themselves into small sub-markets. It will be hard for any one act to capture everyone's full attention and hold it for more than a very short time.

steveha

(I'm being silly. Of course I'll be contacting my MP about this.)

Zend Studio is based on Eclipse, which is written in Java, with portability in mind from the start. So it's not a very good example of "Windows software [which] can run on Linux".

And I don't think wine is a poor way to run windows software under linux. More and more software developers recommend using wine to run their windows software under Linux (Spotify works really well under wine/linux). And I played WoW under wine for years without any issue.

There is information on their blog about this, which includes the following statement in one of the posts (by a spotify employee): "Rest assured we're working on the Android version. Keep an eye out on the blog for updates!"

Another bit that was lost in the original article is that you need a premium account to use the iphone app (current cost is 99SEK .. approx $13).
I did like this part in the blog post:

Spotify on the iPhone will include many of the features our users enjoy on the desktop, with the added advantage of letting you listen to your playlists even when you haven't a network connection, for instance when on a plane or the underground.

I'd really like to see it brought to North America and specifically Canada, where I can use it. It's really spectacular and more of the revolution in music listening than anything we've seen in a long while.

Can't you just get premium membership to use spotify anywhere in the world?

The iPhone app can cache up to 2000 songs for offline play. See http://www.spotify.com/blog/archives/2009/07/27/spotify-for-iphone/

Free music IS NOT the way to go. Warez IS NOT the way to go.

However, streaming music services certainly ARE. Spotify has been around for an year in europe now and its getting close to US launch soon. Everyone I know has stopped pirating music because of it, and personally me and my friends paste spotify links to listen to good new music. And same thing is with my gf, specially because she's been away at her home town this summer. But we like the same kind of music so we paste those link on facebook. Easy and convenient.

I'm actually happy record labels have started to support these things. Great respect for them for that, because thats exactly what we need and want in these days. And they still get the compensation in ad revenue or premium membership. We cant buy every album, because theres just certain amount every person can spend on music per month. But we can listen to them with flat rates or ads. And everyone benefits, including record labels.

Actually they already do and every other record company does aswell. Lossless is probably just issue with the music stores. They also provide music to spotify and equivalent where users can listen to music for free or pay premium (9 euros a month) to listen to everything without ads. Speaking about spotify, it's said to getting close to US release soon, so americans can also enjoy the service we europeans have been enjoying for a year now :)

There are a number of regions availableâ" the default option is 'all'. You can, if you wish, make your application available only in specific regions (for instance an app for Nasza Klasa might initially be made available only in Poland. An app for Spotify might not be made available in the US or Canada where the Spotify service just isn't available at all. In short: don't get your panties in a bunch, it's an opt-out system rather than an opt-in. It's there so developers of locale-specific apps don't have to deal with irate customers who bought an app they couldn't use at all (because they didn't read the info properly).

For folks who can't access Pandora, have a look at Spotify. It's a similar idea to Pandora, but gives you more control over which tracks you listen to. I don't like it's "artist radio" as much as I like Pandora's stations/channels, but building playlists more than makes up for it. It runs in a client rather than a browser; works perfectly for me on Mac (10.4) and Kubuntu 8.10 (running inside WINE).

The one con relative to Pandora is that Spotify has audio ads; I've never counted but it's something like one 10 second ad every 10 songs. Not perfect, but much better than listening to a real radio station. On the upside, you can pay for a day or a month of ad-free listening.

There's also Magnatune which is a good source of DRM-free independant music. Not great as a radio station, as the free streaming is very basic, but I've got some good music from them.

Now that they have payment model instructed too, why not expand it outside US aswell? Last.FM radio has something similar too, they had to start charging non-US/CA/UK users because there wasn't enough advertisers in other countries to make it profitable. That being said, we have that awesome Spotify here, but I'm sure there would be lots of old non-US Pandora users that would pay a little to listen to it again.

I use Spotify at the moment to listen to music on my home PC, but I may just get into Magnatune. Thanks for pointing them out.

OK it's not exactly like-for-like, but you can listen to an insane amount of music using Spotify - it's not a download service, but you can listen to whatever you want, whenever you want, and it's all ad-funded. I've not looked back since I signed up (I'm just waiting for Android & Sonos versions!)

try spotify.

Or IMEEM, which now has an iPhone app (although I haven't tried it).

try spotify.

The market will adapt, more and more devices will have some kind of internet connection. Personally I use my cell for all my "mobile" music listening and with Spotify coming to cells I soon won't have any real need for music files. Spotify has already cut my music file downloading (legal or otherwise) by at least 75%.

I'm willing to pay for good enough internet services (like Linux Weekly News for example) though, but this is like a punch in the face. Most of the content in last.fm is fucking user contributed!

I also used to pay for Spotify but I cancelled my account when they suddenly decided to drop just about all independent and small-label bands that they didn't have formal on-paper contracts with. 90% of my crust-punk and power-noise/industrial playlists went red because of that, and they still haven't re-added a single band that were dropped. At the same time they also implemented region-based limits.

Back to CDs I guess... or.. err.. what.cd? I dunno...

Spotify officially support WINE and it runs with WINE almost as good as running it natively in Windows. When using desktop effects (Compiz/KDE4), maximizing the window is buggy and there are no window shadows but other than that it runs great.

*snip*

Internet service provider liability

92A Internet service provider must have policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers

(1) An Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer.

(2) In subsection (1), repeat infringer means a person who repeatedly infringes the copyright in a work by using 1 or more of the Internet services of the Internet service provider to do a restricted act without the consent of the copyright owner.

*/snip*

Interpret it as you will, I personally don't see it as a "I'm an idiot MPAA lawyer and I say that whoever was on 123.231.6.250 at 1850hrs NZDT downloaded the latest Britney music video on the youtoobsmachine so therefore he/she/it is guilty!!! Jail for a trillion years!"* like the FUD being bandied about. It's flawed and retarded, sure, but it's not a sign of the apocalypse. Maybe some of the wannabe-faux-lawyers here can decipher it otherwise?

As I read it, the idiots at *AA still have to complain with a cease and desist orgy, the ISP's will just be legally bound to give multiple warnings before disconnecting a user.

As it currently is in NZ, a few ISP's will send you a warning and you simply respond with "NZ is none of their business or juristiction, tell them to bugger off and read the Berne Convention" and said ISP's will tend to leave it at that. Other ISP's shrug and say "not our responsibility Mr RIAA-tard, so kindly go and stab yourself in the face with a cricket bat." This change seeks to sort this situation out to make things clearer for all parties involved, it's just a shame that it seemingly puts too much power on the side of the accuser. Still, not as much power as the uninformed blogots seem to think.

My personal feeling is that there is a disconnect between the *AA, their friends and the consumers. They want to keep throwing physical media at us. What did the SACD vs DVDA battle show us (and DCC vs MD before that)? People were satisfied with mp3's or CD's. "Good enough" is exactly that, especially when "good enough" goes hand in hand with "easy". HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray was the same deal: Plain ol DVD is good enough for most people. Once they bump up to a 50"+ screen, then sure, the resolution vs viewing distance is required. Apart from that, the only interest I had in either format was as a mass storage media. And I still don't want to sit through 10 minutes of "Downloading is stealing" BS when I just want to watch the damn movie that I paid for.

The *AA crowd missed the boat on capitalising on the internet as a delivery platform, and because of their litigious nonsense, we're probably 5-10 years behind where we should be. Assuming an appropriate platform would have driven a higher rate of broadband expansion than we've had. Spotify without the stupid country requirements might be a good start.

* Jail for a trillion years in NZ is like three months real jail time

Paying not to see or hear ads?
I do that for music.

The service is available for free in a bunch of countries, provided that you have an invite (and they're easy to get).
By free, I mean I get to listen to Ogg Vorbis -q5 music, licensed from the big labels, with more smaller labels to come, in return for listening to a 30 second ad every twenty to thirty minutes.

Now, me actually liking the service, wanting to see it succeed, I pay roughly $12 per month in order to have the ads removed.

I'm sure there are people out there balking at the thought of paying a few bucks to remove ads from a service, but really -- it's less than the cost of two QP Cheese meals per month, and the service itself is outstanding.

Right now, I have some 2.16 million songs covering a whole lot of genres from the '40s up until things yet to be released this year (paying subscribers occasionally get to listen to entire albums a few weeks before street release).

Could the service be better? Absolutely; it could have more songs and somewhat higher quality (I have the bandwidth to handle FLAC or other lossless formats, so that would be nice), but I figure my monetary contribution means the company gets more revenue compared to the ad solution, and they can spend it improving the service.

After they've properly tackled the music service, they'll add music videos, TV shows and movies.

If I have a choice between seeing and hearing ads on this service, or subscribing to have the ads removed, I will do so.

The execution from the entire Spotify team has been nothing short of excellent.
They've got the music industry on board, and they're *USING P2P TECHNOLOGY*

Ludde of uTorrent fame is one of their p2p developers, so the music industry is now actually working with one of their traditional enemies.

In the interest of full disclosure, my relation to the service is only as a customer.
A rather satisfied customer, at that.