Free Online Music on Demand - Listen to Spotify
The goods
Free music, artists on demand? The latest tracks to listen to, and 100% legal?
Yes it does exist without violating a million copyright laws and being sued by the devil (the RIAA to other people). Its called Spotify. Are you Spotified?
Wiki says it's a “proprietary peer-to-peer[1] streaming music program that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums with almost no buffering delay" Music can be browsed by artists, albums or created play lists as well as by direct searches.” Nifty eh?
You don't download the music unless you've paid for the premium service, but if you have an internet connection you can almost get any music you want. The list is not inexhaustible but its pretty comprehensive.
Essentially the program works like internet radio, the only difference is that you select the music by searching for anything from a single track to a movie score. What is the price for this high-street-music-shop-killing-wonder- technology?
Very little, you have to download the program, but that's the same as any application you want on your computer. There's also the advert. One ever 15 minutes or so. That's really not a lot now is it?
Catches
You don't get an .mp3 file (or .acc, .wmv .ogg or whatever else you might use!) unless you pay for it but it is available so long as you have your connection. You obviously need an OK connection. I've played music seamlessly on a 2mb broadband connection, but you might be pushing it on a 56k dial up (do they even exist any more???) without long pauses halfway through your favourite song.
Not everything is available, but I've managed to find even some incredibly obscure music on here. The advert. I put singular as really they're so infrequent you don't particularly notice. It's not like some radio stations where some idiot talks over the first half of the song and plays an advert for double glazing over the second half of it.
There is always the option to pay for the premium membership, sans adverts and probably with a lot more jazz (pardon the pun) but its not anywhere near essential to using this service.
Pros
It's free!! yes free, cost = nil, zero, zip, zilch, Nada! You can devise play lists of a mix of songs from any artist, any album featured that you've searched for. You can search a song title and then browse the artist of the song, the album of the song or anything else that comes up.
There's a radio if you get bored of the endless selectable music on here. It's not just obscure little bands floating their songs for free either. The BBC top 40 UK singles has Tinchy Stryder Ft N-Dubz “number 1” (what ever that is) as the number 1 in the charts at the time of writing this. I'm listening to it (free and by my selection) and its awful! The No.2 is also available, it's fractionally better but not much.
Something I've just discovered about this program is it's transportable. Once you've loaded it up on your computer, you can put it on a flash drive or portable hard disk and take it with you! all you'll need is the .exe file and an internet connection and you're away! awesome if you have a little freedom at work but not enough to load programs.
How do we want it?
Where do you go? What do you download? What do you sign up to?(when do we want it?)
Spotify (yes I know, god awful name isn't it?) However the program is for real and gold. It's also now on 3 the phone company.
(PS no Swedish people were harmed in the writing of this blog)
