di George H. Limongi
Speaker: Chuck Rolando (Standard American accent)
In recent years the music industry has had a lot of problems. This is because people can download music for free, often illegally. Nobody buys CDs any more, but Spotify is a good way to access music without damaging our favourite singers and bands.
Spotify is a popular commercial music streaming service. It is a programme which lets you listen to music without having to download it illegally and without the buffering delays of streaming. It is available for Windows and Mac, and the Spotify app works on most smartphones. It is quick to download and its library is extensive. It also has a very good search function so it is easy to use; you can search by artist, genre, song etc. Its loading times are minimal. It’s like having a jukebox on your phone or computer at all times!
Why is Spotify free? The answer is advertising, of course! When you create an account for the first time you have a six-month free trial period. This allows you to listen to an unlimited amount of music supported by visual and radio-style advertising. After the trial Spotify has a listening limit of 10 hours per month, divided into 2.5 hour weekly portions.
Founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon and a team at their start-up company, Spotify AB, developed the service in Sweden in 2006. They launched it in 2008. Spotify was not an immediate success. In fact it had a considerable loss in 2008. In 2009 Spotify experienced some problems. There was a defect in the security system and some private information was exposed.
In 2010 Symantec’s antivirus software marked Spotify as a kind of virus called Trojan horse and this stopped Spotify from working on millions of computers around the world. Fortunately, the situation improved and the World Economic Forum chose Spotify as a Technology pioneer for 2011. That year Spotify obtained the support of the major record companies. Spotify now has more than 20 million users and approximately 25 per cent of them pay for the unlimited and premium versions.