We’ve only just begun!
We’ve been looking forward to posting this message for quite some time now. This morning we announced that we have signed groundbreaking licensing deals with a list of companies that include Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music Group, Merlin, The Orchard and Bonnier Amigo.
What this means to us, is that after just over two years, thousands of lines of code, and even more cups of coffee, Spotify will launch today. We plan to roll out invites to our free service gradually over the coming months, while premium access to Spotify has now been made fully available.
So what does this mean for our beta test community? Existing accounts will immediately transition to become a free Spotify account. This means that you get to keep all of your playlists. As we have refreshed our database you might find that some music needs to be replaced or is no longer available. We are in the process of uploading lots of freshly licensed music and will continue to scour the globe in our mission to bring you any song you want, so please bear with us.
For those of you who have not yet had a chance to try Spotify, we’ll gradually be releasing more invites to our free service into the wild over the coming months. If you feel you can’t wait, or would prefer to experience Spotify without advertising, it is possible to get ahead of the curve if you buy a premium account.
We really appreciate all of your brilliant support so far and look forward to starting this new stage of the journey.
54 responses to “We’ve only just begun!”
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Best of luck to everyone at Spotify! We all hope you will turn this service into a new era for the music industry. Well needed if you ask me ;)
Makes me think of this track: spotify:track:3ra3JsiiMtyeNedruUbaEB#0:16
Great job guys…
Congratulations on the launch. You have a fantastic product that is a pleasure to use. I’m sure you will have a very positive business future.
I wonder why you have “scene” mp3s in Spotify? There’s no use denying it, I can give you several examples.
Love it! But… :) I’d love a super simple “friends” list in the sidebar so you can just drag-n-drop songs to friends and they appear as ‘recommendations from friends’ or something similar. Also, automatically add invitees and add people by email address.
I’m still getting the: http://open.spotify.com/track/3zXecLRbshtXSqbTWeoQ2Y !
New idea just plopped up! :) Connected to the friends thingy above..
Basically to be able to see who has added which songs to a collaborative playlist and see deleted songs in some kind of history pane. Seriously, collaborative playlists is the feature I use the most. Awesome stuff!
Music on!
btw… any more invites to premium users coming along?
You’ve deleted my absolute favourite music! Pease, please, please give it back to me!
WTF? All the good music is gone!! :-(
Just want to say that this is the best product I´ve seen in Sweden ever!
Eh. It worx. And not only worx, this is by far… I’m speachless. But I have more Adolphsson & Falk albums than u do ;) . Awesome!!! </T>
Awesome! Keep on updating it (uploading your own songs and beatport license! :) and I’ll be more than happy to buy the full product.
Keep up the good work!
Kärlek utan reklam kostar 99:-/månad. Det är ett bra pris tycker jag.
70 tracks gone from may playlists. A bit more than “some” I would say.
Tack för ett grymt program! Om det är nån här som saknar ett gratiskonto så lottar jag ut två invites på min blogg: http://music.blogg.se
lovely looking app, congrats.
neil
Spotified is like rediscover music, Thanks!!
Me and a friend thought it misses a function though: a community where you can share your playlists, rate them and and enjoy others. So we made one: http://spotylist.com Check it out!!
Here is a freaking brilliant playlist that you may enjoy while checking it out: http://open.spotify.com/user/leonard/playlist/1tS2RXS5tKDbAwQVsPdkMY
See you on the flipside!
Peace // Adam & Philip
vindrelid
check out www.listiply.com as a place to share spotify playlists
I think listiply is a bit messy with the genre and voting system… It works but i think spotylist is easier to use:)
Thank you for making this universe of music available for the world! This is the best idea for a program I have ever seen and believe me - I have tested MANY programs. There is always room for improvement (for example favorite artists and albums, most played, browsing all artists/albums after a search, list of genres), but it is already very good. It’s the only program I feel happy that I can pay for, because the price is the most competitive price I’ve seen for the perfect quality and speed! This is the way to defeat music piracy. A cheap monthly subscription fee and you can play all the music unlimited. Now I’m just seeing forward to a mobile version of Spotify!
I signed up for one month to check it out. I’ve been saying this is the way to go for the past years, good to see someone made it a reality!
Now marry last.fm and implement loads of social networking features and a party kiosk mode and we’ll be friends for life!
Congratulations, Spotify!
It’s been a very exciting beta period so far, and it’s nice to see a library refresh.
Really nice job!! Tvivlade lite på er föreläsning, men nu när jag testat är jag helnöjd! Absolut ett bra alternativ mot nerladdning, spotify erbjuder massa musik som är svår att få tag på egenhand.
Thanks! Finally a legal alternative to piracy, that actually works! Great work!
I can only say that I’m speechless. This is a revolution…
Why are there so less Pink Floyd tracks on Spotify? Where is the famous album “The Wall” for example?
Very impressive software, I love it. Hopefully well see this application in more medias than PC, parhaps xbox live? or mobile phones? well, you’ve hocked me up anyways. Thanks again.
This is the future. Right now!
Why do you remove so much music? Just one week ago ‘’double nature'’ with ‘’mustasch'’ was available, but no it’s not :/
Hope you bring back more music instead of deleting…
Go spotify! :)
Spotify is keeping me company every second in front of my computer (basically 9-5 every day). I love it! Would be great though if you integrated a function that suggests similar songs like Pandora or Last.fm. Another thing I’m missing is audiobooks. I’d be happy to pay every month if I could listen to audiobooks in the office while working.
What’s the difference between Spotify and for example Napster? I really can’t see a difference at the moment: both are music streaming services, price for Premium access is the same in both worlds, Napster has much more music at the moment (more than 6 million tracks), sound quality is better in Napster, and so on, and so on.
So, what makes the difference?
Ja!!! Jag älskar seriöst detta program. Detta kommer spara mig flera flera gigabyte från min hårdisk OCH jag har chans att testa på massa olika musik stilar!
Nån som är intreserad att dela lite musik ;) ? http://open.spotify.com/user/zpiky/playlist/1jyMSHug4yCT1NHSZoAAaq
Great work on this! My musiclife right now = Spotify+Podcasts+Garageband.
Living the dream!
But one thing thou! Where’s Weezers first album?!
zpiky - added some stuff! do check out: http://spotylist.com/ :) (it’s a bit basic at the moment, we are working on xspf support and optimizng some ranking algoritms..)
Jag skulle också älska att ha vän lista..Och se vilka vänner/användare som lagt in vilka låtar!
Comment by akrde What’s the difference between Spotify and for example Napster? I really can’t see a difference at the moment: both are music streaming services, price for Premium access is the same in both worlds, Napster has much more music at the moment (more than 6 million tracks), sound quality is better in Napster, and so on, and so on.
So, what makes the difference?
well. i think the difference is that its mutch faster. Most webbrowser is super slow. And since its running from webbrowser its rly slow. And loading time is kinda slow, and the look its nicer :P
@zpiky: Thank you for your reply, but Napster is not running from a web browser, Napster has it’s own client too! Ok, you are right, the Spotify client is very fast, but Napster has an acceptable speed too. But i really don’t want to change the Spotify speed for fewer music in worse sound quality compared to Napster…
@akrde :P… Oh. did not know all that :p. But most ppl with spotify is swedish, and i dont think napster has that many swedish song :p. But i can admit that napster can be better the spotify .. .RIGHT NOW. but in a close future i think it’l might be better then napster ^^.
det vore perfekt om mina spelningar i spotify scrobblades på min last.fm sida.
the sound quality needs to be upped!!
some EQ would also be usefull=)
spotify:user:hawken1:playlist:6e8LTAiXefJLmWCo9FwCOx
search by LABEL would be nice.
I want to find everything released by F Communications and ECM for example.
I agree.
@hawken1: They use Ogg Vorbis with quality 5 for the music stream, but it sounds as they cut off all the bass from the tracks! And the Spotify music is not very loud, because i have to raise the loudness much more when using the Spotify client than with other music players on my pc. Perhaps they are doing a loudness normalization of all the tracks??? By the way: We discuss the bad sound here: http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/sound_is_very_flat_and_empty
Good going!
This is the most innovative (legal) music distribution I’ve seen so far. You are on to something very big. Even if you are ahead with music company agreements for now, for your sake you have your world patent in place so you don’t ripped off by MS or Google or any of the other big players.
I’ve dedicate a laptop to boot into spotify in my leaving room :-)
(running on Debian using wine). A native Linux client would be nice though … even a cmdln one.
At the writing moment the level off commercials on the public service are to live with. I don’t hope you will increase that to heavily in the future.
All in all
Good luck, best wishes and a great congratulation to a very nice service!
/flaxfrax
akrde:
Well, Napster is only available in the US, so there’s definately room for Spotify!
Spotify could just be the future of online music.
Read my post about this at http://www.andrewgrill.com/blog?p=1201 along with some suggestions to improve your ad revenue.
Andrew Grill
London
Idea:
Add a UPnP or DLNA server to the PC client. Result? Access your spotify music from your SoundBridge or Squeezebox and play anywhere in your home!
wormskin:
You can stream music from spotify via uPnP, many steps though..
http://dempah.com/innehall/18-teknik/340-spotify-till-xbox-360.html
Fredrik you rock! Thanks for making a this ground braking software real! I remember when you brought home something called “mp3″ to Älvsbyn and some wicked weird al tunes on your “Jolt” computer :) /Johan from Förargatan 33
Visit SpotiShare to share spotify playlists!
http://www.spotishare.ws
It’s free and fun!
För att vara en BETA-version så är det en mycket bra bit på vägen! Saknar en EQ samt en siffra som visar hur många låtar som ligger i varje playlist.
Vore även mer överskådligt om man fick en antalssiffra bredvid “Sent inivitations” samt “Users you have invited” (inget som den genomsnittlige lyssnaren kommer att sakna).
Vet inte om det är genomförbart, men det vore kul att kunna droppa förslag på låtar man vill få indexerade, för att få med “all musik i världen” är ju bara en utopi…
Besök gärna vår nystartade Spotify-grupp på facebook: “360 - SPOTIFY”:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47086068231