Word: music
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...Spotify has its way, though, iPhone owners will no longer be slaves to iTunes, song-by-song payments or finite disk capacity. Last week the Swedish company behind Spotify's streaming music provider announced plans to release a free iPhone application that will let users listen to songs played directly off of its online service, with no need to download. That would give iPhone users instant access to any of Spotify's 6 million songs, without taking up precious memory space - way more than the maximum 7,000 tracks that a 32 GB iPhone can hold. Songs can also...
Spotify has been gaining popularity in Europe since its launch in 2006. The peer-to-peer program, which lets users share music from their own collections with other users, is considered one of the top music-streaming sites thanks to its huge library of songs, which play with almost zero buffering delay (that annoying choppiness that can make streaming songs - or video or TV shows - particularly frustrating). Add to that the fact that Spotify's basic service is free - advertising pays for artists' royalties - and it's easy to see where it gets its approximately 6 million users...
...service's lack of portability has meant that most music fans still prefer downloading songs, sometimes illegally. Now Spotify wants to make streaming mobile. The new application won't be available to everyone, only those who opt for the premium service, which costs $15 a month for unlimited streams (the same amount buys you about 15 songs from the iTunes Store), access to prereleases and better audio quality than the free service, which forces users to listen to ads after every few songs. Spotify says it can't reveal exactly how many of its members are currently using the premium...
Spotify hopes to have its new application available on the iPhone within the next few weeks. The trick is getting Apple to approve an application that some observers see as a potential challenger to Apple's own iTunes music player, which iPhone owners use to listen to their downloaded tunes. "Apple has made it clear in the past that iPhone apps should enhance the experience, not compete with its core functionality," says Mark Mulligan, a London-based analyst with Forrester Research...
...Apple, it has yet to comment. The company has allowed other music-streaming applications, such as Pandora and Last.fm, onto the iPhone. But they work more like radio stations, without the control, choice and instant gratification that Spotify users enjoy - all the things that could make Apple reluctant to give the service space up against iTunes. To try to win over Apple, Spotify will no doubt argue that its service could drive people to download more songs from the iTunes Store and even increase sales of iPhones...