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On Spotify

posted July 7th, 2011 in Music

So it’s official: Spotify is coming to the US. I’d heard something to that effect last weekend, when MetalSucks claimed that a well-informed insider had confirmed that the last holdout, Warner Bros., had finally gotten on board with the service.

On the one hand, this is pretty exciting. I’ve been waiting a while for a way to access Spotify after hearing about all the great stuff it can do from people on the other side of the pond. Specifically, a musician I follow on Twitter would frequently post Spotify playlists for music he was into at the time or thought other people should check out. And of course, the press ravings make it sound pretty excellent, with nice text-bites like “the celestial jukebox” and “a magical version of iTunes in which you’ve already bought every song in the world.”

On the other hand, I’m a little dubious about the end result. For a long time, Spotify was free and ad-supported, but looked to make most of its money off of getting people to pay for an upgraded solution that included offline access to music. Of course, that offline access to music is only good if you’re paying for the subscription, so that means it’s DRMed, which (deservedly) usually gets a knee-jerk reaction. But after realizing they weren’t really going to stay afloat on that model, they changed to try to get more conversions: the current free version is only truly unlimited for 6 months, and then switches to a limited version with only 10 hours of listening time per month and a max of five listens per track.

So let’s compare that to the various music services that exist or have existed in the US, based on my understanding of them (which means I’m not going to do the research to doublecheck these, so feel free to let me know in the comments if I’ve missed something):

Ruckus Network : Free, ad-supported, DRMed music service. Ruckus was initially available only to students at certain universities but eventually opened to everybody with a .edu address who was willing to put in a graduation date. Unlike Spotify, there were no audio ads, just usually a really annoying ad on the landing page and then banner ads throughout the rest of the site. And I guess the Ruckus downloader/player had ads, too, although you didn’t have to listen to music through that interface. I thought it was great, but it never really took off, partly because they never worked out (or, never released) a way to take your music on mobile devices. Actually, the real problem was that it was all based on Windows Media audio files, which basically cut out any Mac users and precluded songs from even being played on an iPod. I think you could authorize two or three machines, and had to reconnect to the service once every 30 days to reset your DRM licenses. It went dark in February 2009 without warning, presumably due to lack of revenue from ads.

Spiralfrog: Basically the same thing as Ruckus, as far as I could tell, although without the .edu limitation, and with a much (MUCH) dodgier interface. Nothing ever wanted to download, the library was more limited, and it didn’t even centralize the downloader with a media player. Still, it was a nice holdover…for about a month, before it went dark, too.

Zune Pass: No free model that I’m aware of; for some fee ($15/month, maybe?), you get unlimited listens on PCs and Zune-compatible devices, plus 10 tracks to keep. So if it’s $15, you basically buy a CD and then pay $5 for unlimited listening to anything else. Better than Spotify’s paying to take it on the go but losing it if you ever quit subscribing… but of course, still relatively few people have Zunes or Windows 7 Phones, and the DRM is (again) implemented as Windows Media audio files that the iPodders can’t play.

Rhapsody: My understanding is that this is kind of like Spotify except again with no real free model to speak of, and none of the social sharing features.

So really, what it seems like Spotify has over the apparent best-by-features of those is social features, a limited free model, and presumably DRM that will be more general across devices. That said, I’ll probably use the free version as long as I can, but I can’t imagine ever wanting to pay for it. (But then again, I’m one of those semidinosaurs who still prefers to have a physical CD whenever possible.)