海角大神

A Stockholm company has developed a music application that 鈥� if you believe the hype 鈥� may wipe out music piracy, make Apple鈥檚 iTunes largely irrelevant, and even supplant ABBA as Sweden鈥檚 most significant pop culture export. It鈥檚 called Spotify.

The downloadable gizmo is a virtual jukebox that allows users to listen to almost any song in the world without paying a dime. Legally, too.

With its gray interface, Spotify almost resembles iTunes. But all the music is streamed instead of downloaded 鈥� so, the songs are computer-bound and will not transfer to an iPod. As long as listeners are within speaker鈥檚-reach of their PC, the only speed bump is a 20-second ad every 30 minutes. (Alternatively, users can also purchase a premium, commercial-free service.)

Sound too good to be true? Well, for US residents, it is.

Spotify is currently only available in Europe. Negotiations are under way with music labels for a US release. But if Spotify does colonize North America 鈥� CEO Daniel Ek tells the Monitor that 鈥渋t鈥檚 coming鈥� 鈥� the service may further encourage listeners to view music as an essentially free commodity.

鈥淭hat鈥檚 the culture we live in: Everybody has instant access to so much media, and they expect it to be free,鈥� says Glenn Peoples, senior editorial analyst at Billboard magazine. 鈥淚t鈥檚 important that services innovate and challenge themselves to come up with new and better ways to offer music and pay content holders. If [Spotify] succeeds, then they prove that you can have free music and you can serve all stakeholders.鈥�

The inspiration for Spotify came from another Swedish outfit: The Pirate Bay, whose online buccaneers were recently found guilty of copyright infringement in a Stockholm court. Mr. Ek wanted to somehow legally harness the massive demand for free, immediately accessible material.

His solution: An application that partly streams music from a central server and partly utilizes peer-to-peer (P2P) technology. Essentially, Spotify uses a small portion of user鈥檚 computer bandwidth, turning each machine into a part-time server. Spotify also added its own tweak to P2P technology. Whereas traditional P2P only assembles a song after it has downloaded all the constituent bits in random order, Spotify streams each part of a track in sequence to facilitate hiccup-free listening.

Devising the technology was the easy part. After founding Spotify in 2006, Ek spent two years visiting record companies across the world, meeting everyone from janitors to CEOs鈥� in an effort to convince them that the only way to beat piracy is to offer a better product.

These days, record-company executives face the same predicament as a slide-rule manufacturer in the pocket-calculator age. Until recently, the record-label business model relied on the sale of physical products. But even the industry鈥檚 late entry into the digital-music market hasn鈥檛 compensated for online piracy and the decline of CD sales.

Album sales 鈥� whether CD, vinyl, or digital 鈥� dropped 14 percent in 2008 and have almost fallen by half since 2000, according to Nielsen retail figures.

鈥淩ight now, 95 percent of all downloads are illegal,鈥� says Ek in an e-mail interview, citing a January report from the music trade group, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. 鈥淲e鈥檙e looking to take this 95 percent of music fans and bring them into a user-friendly, legal environment where they can get exactly what they want while also contributing money to the artists by either listening to ads, subscribing to the service, purchasing downloads, or, in the near future, buying gig tickets and merchandising on Spotify.鈥�

Desperate, the record companies have signed on. Spotify鈥檚 catalog currently spans from ABBA to ZZ Top and is so extensive that even Engelbert Humperdinck fans won鈥檛 be disappointed.

Even so, there are a few glaring omissions, such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Metallica, and The Beatles 鈥� bands that have been historically slow to adapt to digital media. (The Beatles aren鈥檛 even on iTunes.)

In the short term, Spotify may boost music sales because its search engine encourages users to sample new music, which they might want to buy to support the band or bring with them when there鈥檚 no Internet connection in sight. In some territories, the player links to the 7Digital download store.

One can also share Spotify playlists by assigning each one a URL and then sending those links to friends via e-mail or Twitter.

鈥淪omeone sent me an e-mail saying, 鈥業鈥檝e never heard of the band Riverside,鈥� who are a Polish band,鈥� says Andrew Wood, a special-effects artist from Aylesbury, England, and premium Spotify member.

鈥淪ubsequently, they鈥檝e listened to all their albums and on the back of that, they鈥檝e gone and bought some CDs.鈥�

Nowadays, Mr. Wood mostly buys MP3s because his 鈥渟tacks and stacks and stacks鈥� of compact discs felt like clutter. Since Wood streams Spotify from his laptop to his stereo, he only requires MP3s for the two hours of his day when he has no Internet access: his daily train commute. But in the future, when wireless broadband becomes omnipresent, Wood may no longer need his iPod.

鈥淲e鈥檙e not quite to the point where we can all rely on Spotify for all [our] music needs,鈥� says Eliot Van Buskirk, a technology journalist at Wired magazine. 鈥淗owever, I鈥檝e referred to Spotify on the iPhone as kind of an end game. I think it becomes fairly obvious that once you can create playlists of all the music in the world and access them from your mobile, then at that point, buying music really starts to look like a waste.鈥�

Spotify already has a demo version of an iPhone app on YouTube. The irony that an iPhone app may threaten iTunes surely isn鈥檛 lost on Apple. The company might refuse to sell the application.

Such a move wouldn鈥檛 be a dead end for the Swedish company. It raised up to $50 million in an August venture-capital drive and the firm hopes to be profitable within a year.

Spotify has also positioned itself to play on other mobile devices and video-game consoles.

If Spotify is to succeed in the US, it will have to ward off several competitors. The popular site LaLa.com, for instance, allows users to listen to any song once free of charge, but then charges for repeat streams of each track. An imminent service, the ad-supported QTRAX, promises free downloads from the world鈥檚 biggest labels, though they鈥檒l only be playable on Windows Media Player and not the iPod.

But Spotify鈥檚 immediate worry is negotiating music licensing deals with major US record labels.

Ultimately, if Spotify does conquer America, millions of new users may soon echo a famous ABBA chorus: 鈥淭hank you for the music.鈥�