The Atheist Blogger

As I write this, I’m listening to random tracks in Spotify. The quality is great, the music choice is vast, and the program is lightning fast (literally). So what is Spotify?

Spotify is an online music player that you can download and install on your computer. I’m prohibited to post any screenshots by the TOS of the beta, but I can tell you what it does. Once installed (yes, it runs through wine as well), Spotify allows you to search for music. I type “The Killers” hit Enter, and 0.5 seconds later, my search results are returned. To put this is perspective, I’m on a relatively slow network (3MBit), my laptop is using wireless (that slows down the connection a bit already), and my search has to go through 9 hops to get to the server in question. When my search reaches the server, it has to process it and get the list of results and then send them back to me to be processed in the program. Considering the amount of music Spotify has, this is amazingly fast.

So now I have a list of results, and I click on a song, “Mr Brightside”. The most astounding part of Spotify is now presented to me. I thought the search was fast, but the song starts playing immediately after I click on it. The delay is so minute I could swear that I am playing the song from a local file on my computer, but I’m not. The song is streaming across the internet and playing on my computer, without any delay or lag. What is even more astounding is that the program doesn’t seem to buffer the songs at all, because I can click to the last 10 seconds of the song in question and it will play that part immediately, with no delay.

When my friends and I started using it, everyone in the room was astonished, and considering we are all Computer Scientists and know how networks work, that is saying something. We were absolutely convinced the program relies on magic to operate, because networks simply do not allow that kind of speed and efficiency. Florian, the guy who invited me into the beta, swears blind that he ran the program without any problems on a 56k modem in a crappy hotel, where the internet was so bad Google was taking it’s time to load.

We were so impressed by this technology that I phoned up the company to say so. They revealed nothing about how it worked though, so I have to go get a job with them now.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, this program is entirely legal. They pay the licenses for all the music by putting in 30 second ads every 30 minutes of music you listen to. If you pay a fee though, you can remove the adverts completely. This program has everything it needs to head the new era of digital music; unlimited songs, speed, usability, and freedom.

At the moment it’s invite only, so if I get some invites I’ll let you know! Until then, you’ll have to sign up to the mailing list which will tell you when Spotify becomes public.