reverberations: sound news from around the world

Spotify approved for apple iphones

I have only met a few people this month who haven’t heard of Spotify, and I’m expecting that number to decrease sharply with the news that it is now an approved application for the Iphone. For those of you who do not know Spotify (where have you been?), it is the new way to listen to music; most of the commercial music in the world is streamed online through an easy web interface. You just download it and off you go, you pay nothing but there are adverts every so often to cover the artist royalties. The platform is legendary, but there are some things that you will not find on there yet, for example The Beatles and Led Zeppelin have still to sign up. Also to avoid listening to adverts and to have it unlocked for the Iphone you must be a premium member paying £9.99 per month.

The amazing part of this story is that Apple have allowed Spotify to be an Iphone application at all. You would have thought that the obvious competition between Itunes and Spotify would have meant Spotify being blocked entry into the massive Iphone marketplace. However reports suggest that the dialogue has always been positive despite a clear potential for Spotify to take away a chunk of Itunes’ customers.

The Spotify App itself has had rave reviews. The sound quality is excellent, the streaming speed on 3g is almost as fast as wifi meaning you can actually stream songs in realtime. It also syncs to your desktop via wifi – no need for a usb cable. The real bonus is the offline playlist function which allows users to store playlists for 30 days when they are not on the internet. This makes Spotify on the Iphone ideal for going on the tube or on the plane. What’s more you can temporarily store up to 3,333 tracks to listen to, which is an unbelievable amount.

The only question now is how users respond to this potential paradigm shift in music consumption: Ownership of music (Itunes) at a higher price individually, or the temporary storage and enjoyment of thousands of tracks at a constant price per month. It begs the question “does the ownership of music mean anything anymore” Spotify clearly is saying “no it’s time for a new model”, and Itunes seems to be saying “people will always want to own their music – lets see what happens”. We at The Sound Agency are eagerly waiting to see how it swings. We thank Spotify for taking the cutting edge one step further with this App, and commend Apple for allowing a stage to be set that will inevitably take us all forward in the way we listen to and pay for music.

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