Due to some legal issues, we’re unfortunately not able to show publicly the video of the Spotify presentation. However, I was blogging whilst I was watching, and got down most of the details:
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We’re now listening to Jon Mitchell from Spotify, a new music (desktop) app from the people behind Skype. It’s a free, legal, on demand music streaming service that’s ad-funded (both audio and online).
They’re determinedly not a social network, but have many social features to share playlists, recommend music, etc, and have very sophisticated ad targeting. They do some similar stuff to last.fm (e.g. a radio player that recommends music) – but you can listen to full tracksindefinitely, compared to Last.fm’s 3 times. They also have the ability to purchase songs through them (via retailers at the moment), although they say this isn’t a focus at the moment, as they’re more about exploration than ownership.
They’re showing a demo of the app on Mac. It’s similar to iTunes, a good idea considering the huge number of users of iTunes familiar with the layout, and it seems pretty slick. It has a playlist feature so you can put together favourite artists and songs etc. They asked someone to shout out a band and straight away got to Devo and started playing, which is pretty impressive – it showed all of their albums and artwork and he dragged an album into a playlist.
Tags: May '08 by Joshua March
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