Technology you should know about (Sept2009)…..
Posted by Simon Salvin on 24. Sep 2009 on Internet, TechnologySpotify is the new legal way of listening to music from the internet at either no cost or low cost.
The service has taken so many subscriptions that the free service here in the UK has now returned to ’Invitation Only’. Still the pay services are available at 99p per day or £9.99 per month.
So, what is it and how does it work?
Spotify is a streaming service, so its like a radio, but you choose the playlist, by paying for the service there’s no adverts and royalties are paid to the record companies and artists making this a totally legal way to listen to all your favourite tunes. The music is streamed at 320kbps making it a high quality.
The free service has now moved back to Invitation Only status as the advertising played between songs pays for the royalties and currently is rumoured to be just covering the costs.
The service has also launched its service on the iPhone, a surprise as it seems to be direct competition to Apple’s itunes service. However the service cannot run in the background which renders all other functions useless unless you stop the music, perhaps this was one of Apple’s stipulations to pass the app for release. The iPhone version is only available as a subscription service at £10 per month. It is also available on the Google Android platform. For those of you asking ‘What’s Android?’, no not those robot things from Star Wars, it’s Google’s mobile phone operating system.
A website formally named savespotify.com recently changed it’s name to avoid legal wranglings with Spotify. The site now known as savestreamingfiles.com allows users to record the music streams provided by Spotify and other music streaming services.
Spotify commented on the site as a ‘crude technology’, and stressed it was taking steps to protect its service and users.
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