On the Spotify blog there’s a video demo of Spotify running on Android (the Google mobile OS). This is a demo of work-in-progress, but already it shows that just as Spotify is pushing the bounds on the desktop, they are going to push the bounds on mobile devices. The demo shows that you get the full Spotify experience on your device. You can listen to just about any song by any artist. No waiting for music to load, it just starts playing right away. All your Spotify playlists are available on your device. You don’t have to do that music shuffle game that you play with the iPod – where you have to decide on Sunday what songs you will want to listen to on Tuesday.
I think the killer feature in the demo is offline syncing. You can make any playlist available for listening even when you are offline. When you mark a playlist for offline sync, the tracks in the playlist are downloaded to your device allowing you to listen to them in those places that have no Internet connection (such as a plane, the subway or Vermont). The demo also shows how Spotify keeps all your playlists magically in sync. Add a song to one of your Spotify playlists while sitting at your computer and the corresponding playlist on your device is instantly updated. Totally cool. I do worry that the record labels may balk at the offline sync feature. Spotify may be pushing the bounds further than the labels want to go, by letting us listen to any music at any time, whether at home, in the office or mobile.
Much of my daily music listening is now through the Spotify desktop client. The folks at Spotify continue to add music at a phenomenal rate (100K new tracks in the last week). The only reason I ever fire up iTunes now is to synchronize music to my iPhone. It is no secret that Spotify is also working on an iPhone version of their mobile app. I can’t wait to get a hold of it. When that happens, I may never use iTunes again.
Check out the demo:
Music Machinery 
#1 by Ciboulette on May 28, 2009 - 9:46 am
What would be great is the ability to “star” (bookmark) albums and songs, like in all google products, and to have a genre/artist/album library à la iTunes of those starred songs. And those songs would be synced on the phone in a certain limit. Because play list are a mess, they don’t auto organise like a library of artists/albums/songs you want to remember or explore more.
#2 by Afront on May 28, 2009 - 11:40 am
I never used iTunes in the first place, but I guess I’m quite in the minority there ;)
#3 by zazi on May 28, 2009 - 12:27 pm
Well, it sounds iteresting. I think for the offline-syncing we need a mechanism like “digital loaning” (I know some little efforts into that direction but no real applicable solution), so that one just loan the pieces of music and do not really own them.
To be honest, we don’t really need all the tons of music we’ve collected during the digital decade and hoard, because we potentially will need it in the somewhere in the future.
Unfortunatelly, I haven’t test Spotify right now, because it costs money in our country (, which is the same with Pandora). I’m just evaluating Last.FM ;) (,which is fortunally for free until now in our country).
Cheers zazi