Spotify, a music service currently only available outside of the US, is a social streaming site that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums.

Users can easily share their library with friends and collaborate on playlists.

Although ownership of music is important to users in general a more pressing issue is accessibility. Sites like Hype Machine and Imeem allow us to share songs with friends, but we can only share the content that those sites have available to us.

By employing the peer-to-peer model like Spotify does, I can upload those special gems and curated playlists I spend weeks agonizing over. My friends can then stream the music and click-through to purchase for legitimate ownership of the song.

Spotify takes advantage of the “cloud“- data living over the internet as opposed to locally on your computer. We can peruse music quickly this way without downloading it first. Then, if a user wants ownership of the song, it can be purchased – supporting the artist rather than jacking it from a blog.

Makes sense to me.

What is Spotify?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify

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