Spotify iPhone App hit US Market by the end of this year
Spotify is a peer-to-peer streaming music program that allows you to instant listening of specific tracks or albums with almost no buffering delay. Music can be browsed by artists, albums or created playlists as well as by direct searches. Although it is not possible to save the streamed music for use outside the application, a link is provided to allow the listener to directly purchase the material via partner retailers.The program/service in its free version is only available in parts of western Europe during the ongoing beta programme although the subscription model should be available in almost all countries.
The good news is that Spotify is coming to America by the end of this year. With an application that seems like a magical, all-encompassing version of iTunes, giving access to over 6 million tracks on demand, Spotify is already proved the most successful music sharing platform in Europe with more than five times the usage of its closest competitor. Because of its drop-dead simplicity and freemium pricing structure, the company could soon be in position to threaten just about every other music service, from iTunes to imeem to Rhapsody.
Like the desktop application, the iPhone version of Spotify lets you create and listen to custom playlists from the music catalog for free (ads) or for a monthly fee, listen to songs and albums on demand, and play and edit other people’s playlists, so long as you have the corresponding URL.
Spotify’s success as an iPhone app hinges partially on a crucial feature: the ability to cache entire playlists for listening when you’re connected to AT&T’s slow Edge network (on which we encountered dropouts, as we have with other music streaming apps) — or for when there’s no connection at all. That means if your iPhone or iPod Touch has enough room, you can store up to 3,333 songs in Spotify playlists on the iPhone. That’s 10 days of listening, all without streaming a single song over an internet connection. Even better, playlists sync easily over Wi-Fi — no USB cable required.
Here are the few screenshots:
Keen observers will note that since Spotify allows access to millions of music tracks, why would Apple allow this app to go into the store and potentially compete with iTunes? Apple has allowed the Last.FM app into the store but this is more like a radio station – Spotify behaves like a jukebox, bringing up exactly the song and artist you want with one click.
However, it’s common tech industry knowledge that Apple makes fairly meagre profits from iTunes, as it’s largely a honeypot to get consumers to buy Apple hardware, sales from which form the bulk of their profits. So Spotify would not compete nearly as much as you might think – plus, making it a subscriber-only application on the iPhone further creates a barrier to competition with the iTunes store.
