Free music online?

Yes, it’s possible! Spotify is a lean, downloadable application that lets users stream music instantly from its library–a library built with the blessing of EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and some smaller record labels. That, of course, begs the question: how does it make money? Spotify offers two ways to use its service, a free service sponsored by ads, and a paid subscription service.

Once downloaded, the service allows users to search its music catalog by artist, genre, or title, and stream the tracks on-demand any number of times.

One of the cooler features is the ability to create and share playlists and have it always with you when logging on at an other computer. The service also added the ability to scrobble the songs you listen to through Spotify on Last.fm.

That’s the good news. Now for the bad news: It isn’t officially available in NL yet. Right now it can be accessed in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. But it will be rolled out to new markets in 2009, according to its Web site.

I have had a chance to try it out and it’s a very cool application and I think this looks very promising. Judging from comments on TorrentFreak, Digg, and TechCrunch, the service seems to have impressed people who have tried it with its speed, usability, and depth of songs. The free version will give you ads so now and then, but the paid version (approx €9,99) will not give you ads and will give you more features.

Spotify desktop client (from spotify.com)

check: www.spotify.com