New site to consider: Spotify

This is the first of many blog postings where, as Rick told you, we’ll be letting you know all about the cool new services and products that we have come across.

First up is an interesting new music service called Spotify. Spotify is an easy to install ad-funded music download application that allows you to access a huge number of music tracks instantly.

So what’s new about that? Well it differs from the likes of Last.FM, which has been around for a few years now, as it is not just a web-based service, but rather an application model that can be added by music fans to their desktop on PC or Mac. Users can access music as often as they want – all for free and streamed virtually instantly with no buffering time. Free to consumer and 100% legal, the service allows fans to listen to complete tracks rather than just excerpts. They can then go on to purchase the track to play on their MP3 player.

Of course as the user makes the choice of whether to add the application, advertising can be much more targeted, and will be broken down by postcode, sex, age, class, type of track and genre of music. Predominantly the age bracket of users will be 15-24 and ad formats available include audio and display (banners and towers – GIF format), with a first option on new formats for launch partners.

What’s interesting is that services such as Spotify are coming along at a time when, in order to combat piracy, the government is starting to talk to Internet Service Providers to look at ways of charging consumers an annual ‘tax’ – of up to £30 a year - to download legally as much music. Spotify is an alternative model – free streaming where you only pay for the tracks you actually want.

The service will be launching shortly and there looks set to be some interesting opportunities for our clients, so if anyone wants to have a play around with the service do let me know and I will arrange log-ins. I also have a deck with more info which I can email across.

www.spotify.com

-Sam