Spotify is an online music service which allows you, much like Last.fm, to stream music to your computer via a downloadable app.
You can play individual tracks or build, share and collaborate on playlists. The free version allows you to listen to unlimited music with the occasional ad. They come up about once every 4 or 5 tracks so it’s not too intrusive. You can also buy a day pass for 99p which gives you an ad free service for the day or sign up for a premium account and get unlimited ad free listening for £9.99 a month.
So far I’m very impressed with the service. It has almost everything I want to listen to and the best bit for me is that you can build custom playlists and share them with people or collaborate and build them together.
Because music is social, Spotify allows you to share songs and playlists with friends, and even work together on collaborative playlists, Friday afternoon in the office might never be the same again! We’re music lovers like everyone else. We want to connect millions of people with their favourite songs by creating a product that people love to use. We respect creativity and believe in fairly compensating artists for their work. We’ve cleared the rights to use the music you’ll listen to in Spotify.
From http://www.spotify.com/en/about/what/
Spotify has a very simple interface, similar in a way to iTunes:
The player allows you to search by artist, album or track, then filter the results down. You can then create a playlist (on the left of the app) and drag your tracks in. You can select the playlist and make it collaborative so other people can change it or just leave it locked. Each playlist has a URL which you can give to other people using Spotify and they can open and play the playlist too (or add tracks to it)!
Head over to their site for more information: http://www.spotify.com