To Shawn Fanning (founder of Napster) and Steve Jobs (founder of iTunes), you can add the name of Daniel Ek. All three, in their own way, have changed the music world. You know the first two, and soon you will know all about Ek.
As the founder of Spotify, a new music service based in Sweden (www.spotify.com), Ek has created a site that everyone from labels to publishers to bands to advertisers to punters are happy with.
Spotify is free and legal music. You install a simple bit of software and within seconds have a music library of around eight million songs. The site has been going since October and has already notched up its millionth user – and it’s not even available in the US yet.
There are two ways of joining:
if you opt for the free option, you have to hear about 20 seconds of ads every half of hour. If you go for the premium subscription (€10 a month) you don’t get the ads.
As of now, only the premium subscription is available in Ireland, but that’s only because a bunch of licensing agreements have to be signed. It should be available within weeks.
The beauty of Spotify, from a legal point, is that it just streams music – you can’t download any of the songs. As there’s nothing to “steal”, the labels are behind it and the bonus for them is that they get royalties (from the advertising/premium subscription revenue) based on how many times a song is played.
If you look at how many years sites such as YouTube and Facebook took to build up their audience, Spotify’s explosive growth in just six months can only lead you to believe that this is the online music service people have always wanted. We get free music, and the labels stop banging on about illegal downloading.
Spotify’s library will soon rival that of iTunes (some 10,000 tracks are added each day). Some of the smaller indies are still missing, and three big-name acts (Led Zeppelin, Metallica and The Beatles) are considering whether to allow their music to go up on the site.
Already being dubbed “the iTunes killer”, Spotify doesn’t seem to have Apple in its sights. Its founders seek to provide an alternative to controversial sites such as piratebay.org and any number of illegal torrents out there.
Things will get interesting between Spotify and iTunes when the Swedes come up with a mobile phone application, which they’re currently working on. Apple’s iPhone already allows you to use a Last.FM music application but whether it will allow a Spotify application remains the subject of conjecture.
When Spotify’s millions of songs can be accessed over your mobile phone or any hand-held device, all current devices will start to look a bit lightweight.
No big company wants a financial dogfight these days, and maybe this is the reason why a job vacancy for Spotify a few weeks ago was looking for software engineers to bring Spotify to the iPhone. This could be an exercise in muscle-flexing or it could be the beginning of another unlikely business coalition. In the past, Apple has prevented rival music services being available as applications on their devices. However, it does seem unlikely that it would agree to host such a big threat to its profitable iTunes store.
Future territorial battles aside, for now, everyone is thrilled with what Spotify offers. The free service (with its unobtrusive ads) is a minor miracle, but how long it stays that way in today’s climate is anybody’s guess. The site has been a phenomenon in Europe; how it will be changed by its entry into the US market could be a very different story.
