Spotify - The swedish msuic streaming service

Spotify is a service for music streaming. The music can be listen to for free or by payment. Streaming is technology where the media(the music) is downloaded and playing on the computer without being saved. This makes it able for Spotify to have control over the music and track the numbers of plays on every song so that the artists and the label-records can get money for their music.

Spotify was started april 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. The parent company is registered in Luxemburg but have 3 offices in Sweden; Stockholm, Göteborg and Borås. The Swedish offices are owned by the dother company Spotify AB. The company have according to rumors taking in 15,3 million euro in risk capital.

To run Spotify you need a Spotify account and a client. If you do not pay or just pay for the "day pass" you need to listen via Spotifys own client. But if you have the Premium version you can listen from that client you prefer. The other clients can be clients on other platforms like mobile devices. The first spotify client that not was developed by spotify was despotify. Despotify is a CLI (command line interface), that means that the program is controlled and show information with only text.

  • The free version of Spotify offer streaming music from their own client. The client run at Windows, Mac and Linux (if using Wine). This version is financed by advertising.
  • Day pass is nearly the same as the free version but have no advertising, the day pass is bought with intervals of 24h and cost 9kr.
  • The premium version have more functions than the day pass and the free version. Exactly like the day pass the premium version do not have any advertising. But it have more functions like:
    • Higher bitrate
    • The possibility to use other clients
    • No ads
    • The possibility to use clients on other platforms (like iPhone and Android)

Mobile devices
As previous mention you can use Spotify on mobile devices if you have the Premium version. The only mobile device that have a Spotify application today is iPhone but Spotify have been showing a similar application to Android. The application is nearly the same as the standard but have a few differences. The most interesting function is the "offline playlist" function that make Spotify work even if you are offline. It means that you can make your playlist to a offline playlist when you are home and have Internet access. Later when you sitting in the car and cannot access the Internet you can also listen to the playlist.