Listen to any track for free right now. Surely this is either highly illegal or too good to be true. I couldn’t believe it either until I was sent an invite to participate in the private beta of Spotify, the online music service. With it’s iTunes like interface searching and playing music is only a simple search away.

Is there really such a thing as a free lunch?

Like a radio station Spotify pays royalties to the artist for each song that is playing through the service. At the moment the revenue model to pay for this (and hopefully make a profit!) is based on adverts. Every 20 minutes of playing tracks you are met with an audio advert from Spotify’s partners. In the early days these have been quite annoying with only a couple of partners on board. As more partners are added the adverts seem to get more bearable and is a very painless way of getting free music.

The other option is for users to subscribe to Spotify Premium for £9.99 per month. This will allow them to listen to unlimited music advert free.

Shaky beginnings

During the beta programme there has been a couple of wobbles in the service due to record label and international restrictions which have lead to a large tranche of music being removed from the service.

The other high profile event was the reports that the Swedish based company had had a massive security breach before Christmas and users login details have been lost.

What next?

Spotify is starting to get some high profile publicity including some interest by the BBC [LINK] so it is only a matter of time before it takes off. I believe that Spotify is really going to revolutionise the way we listen to music and will be the biggest step forward since the mp3.

Can’t wait to get involved?  Spotify is still in beta but you can sign up at their site. The music catalogue is growing rapidly and hopefully the full release will be soon, so watch this space!