Spotify: Good for music lovers, bad for musicians?
(Read article summary)Spotify music streaming is hugely popular in Europe, and now it’s live in the US. But what does Spotify offer the musicians that create that music?
The popular European music service Spotify is live in the US, launching this week to popular fanfare and a huge amount of blog buzz. But of course, music lovers in the US already have quite a few options when it comes to music-streaming services. Recommendation services such as Pandora and Last.fm occupy slightly different niches, as do nascent cloud offerings from Apple, Google, and Amazon. But Spotify more resembles streaming services such as Rhapsody and Rdio. How does Spotify stack up?
Spotify has two major advantages over similar services. The first is its gargantuan library of more than 15 million songs, which includes the catalogues of all four major record labels and lots of indies, too. (By way of comparison, Rdio offers about 7 million songs, and Rhapsody 10 million.)
