Piki Geek will be creating themed posts surrounding a daily topic each weekday. Henceforth, we will regularly celebrate the Twitter staple Music Monday, with details surrounding a particular music-oriented piece of technology or software. Check back each day to discover what theme we’ll be using for the duration of known time. We’ll be figuring it out together (because even we’re not quite sure yet!). Have any suggestions? Tweet them to us at @PikiGeek. You are already following us, right?
Spotify is a music streaming service that is still foreign to most of us in the U.S. of A. Why? Because it’s simply too awesome to touch down on American soil! Not that the developers haven’t tried, with rumors and news of Spotify’s impending U.S. approval dating back to 2009. The primary issue blocking their service in the U.S. lies in the bevy of features Spotify has available to music streamers, and how those features aren’t so popular to licensing companies and record executives. Spotify allows listeners to:
· Choose a specific artist and song
· Save songs for offline playback
· Create playlists of specific songs
· Browse popular and new music lists
· Send music to your friends (Facebook, Spotify friends)
Unlike Pandora, the U.S.-only client, Spotify’s services seem pretty robust, and they offer music listeners a streaming solution that can finally rival their own music collections. There are 8 million tracks in Spotify’s library, and users have essentially unfettered access through either an ad-supported version or through a monthly payment. Honestly, we could extol the virtues of Spotify for hours, but their feature list is simply too big and too impressive to do it justice. We’re sold on Spotify…if only we could use it.
The service appeared in the news recently because of their update to iPhone iOS4, which added, the ability to finally use the streaming service in the background of other applications, among other things. Essentially, this now means that Spotify premium subscribers (use of the iPhone app requires a paid subscription) have a service that replaces the need for the iPod on their iPhones — and provides them with 8 million streaming songs for significantly less coinage than iTunes would charge to own them.
Of course, we couldn’t think of anything that sounded quite as awesome as that. So, if you live in Finland, France, Norway, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden or the United Kingdom, hop to it. Then again, something tells us our geeky counterparts across the pond are already early adopters of Spotify’s sweetness, and all we’re actually doing here is making Americans even more jealous.
When the Piki is launched for music streaming services, if features like those listed above are up your alley, Spotify will undoubtedly top the list. If you’re looking for availability in America, though, you might be stuck with Pandora for a good long while. It’s still better than nothing, right?
