Spotify is a (relatively) new music streaming service that aims to outdo all the other various efforts in this field. It has, up to now, been purely by invite only, with each user given five invites. But Spotify is now open to all… in the UK.

I’ve been using Spotify since the beginning of January, and reviewed it on Jan. 5, 2009. Despite having only used it for a few days, at the time I described it as “a music streaming service to end all others.”

Since then, there has been a cull of tracks. Basically, as soon as something becomes mainstream enough to grab the music industry’s attention, certain labels and artists feel the need to remove their tracks from the service. The cull hasn’t affected me too badly, but some people are reporting losing up to a half of their playlists.

Despite this unfortunate turn of events, Spotify is still a brilliant service. Free, ad-supported, and completely user-friendly, it is one of the most addictive Web applications I have ever used. Over a month after downloading it, I’m still using it on a daily basis. And now you can too, at least if you’re resident in the UK, or alternatively proficient at using proxy servers.

Spotify today announced that the service was open to all in the UK, with an easy sign up system on the Web site. The company did reserve the right to return to the invite-only system if the service was inundated with new users in a short space of time, but personally I think Spotify is still not widely known enough for this to be a problem.

Why the UK? Sweden is Spotify’s home country and where most of its users come from. But the UK is second, accounting for 16 percent of visitors. It’s thought that opening Spotify up to anyone in Sweden would have had a negative impact on the reliability and speed of the service for all, and that’s clearly a situation to be avoided.

I’d recommend Spotify to everyone. I have yet to use a service that streams in such high quality or with such a lack of issues. It is literally like having a jukebox on your computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. What’s more, it’s also completely free and legal.

Hopefully, the UK is just the first country to go ‘free-for-all’, with other European countries to follow in quick succession. Eventually, the U.S. should get access to the service, and then we’ll really see how impressive the service is at handling millions of song requests.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 5:41 pm under Internet, Music, Opinion, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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