If you're living outside of Europe you may not have heard of Spotify yet... but it's coming to you soon. One reason its not in USA yet is because of the tapestry of rightholders and gatekeepers that have to be approached rather than, say, a single collection agency as it is in the UK.
Simply put, it's music service that can be "free" (ad supported) or subscription-based. Once you have an account, songs can be listened to on any platform - desktop, mobile, console etc.
Here's the advert :)
Here's the bullet points I took...
The numbers
- 7 million users. Of which…
- 320,000 paying subscribers
- 100 million playlists of which 30 million are albumns.
- 15-18% of Swedish population uses Spotify and sales of music CDs and downloads have increased. Same trend is seen in other countries. Spotify’s conclusion: we increase music sales, not decrease it.
Recommendations
Uses collaborative filtering to serve adverts. It discovered that two people with the same demographic who listen to similar music are likely to have the same brand preference.
Spotify will ultimate use “social discovery” for recommending songs (e.g. make recommendations based on your network of friends), not just an algorithm that guesses what you like.
Playlists can be shared and collaborative (think mix tapes). Music journalists in UK are publishing their playlists for others to download and start listening immediately.
Technology
Uses P2P and that’s fast and why it’s a downloaded application. Also, Spotify users consume more bandwidth than the total bandwidth available in Sweden. Spotify is based in UK and if songs had to be streamed from London to Sweden it would block the whole UK-Sweden network link.
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