The blogosphere has recently fallen in praise at the feet of a new application currently released in its beta stage, called Spotify. I too am excited about this application, it has some very nice perks.

• Firstly, Spotify is Swedish. And I am half Swedish. And I am in the habit of stressing this fact in a futile attempt to pretend I am more exotic and diverse than I really am.
• Streaming does appear to happen almost instantly.
• The music is apparently streamed at about 160 kbps. Whilst this obviously gives lower quality sound than those FLACs you downloaded from your music tracker of choice, I can not tell the difference when listening on my home speakers, so I’m happy.
• Spotify scrobbles to last.fm, and I love last.fm. In fact, last.fm is now probably mainstream enough that any streaming application that ignored it would probably be sunk. People enjoy showing off their tastes.
• There are very few ads, even in the free version – if you can get an invite to the free version.

But, enough of that. Let’s put this thing to the test.

Because there is no way for me to scientifically test this application in any reasonable amount of time I am simply going to pit Spotify against my 20 most listened to artists in the past 3 months according to my last.fm. This is an interesting test for me because I download most of my music from illegitimate (but brilliant) sources. (In fact I download all of it, but I also buy cds and visit concerts if I enjoy the music.) Perhaps if a service such as Spotify allowed me to properly ‘test’ music, I would be less inclined to download it. I want to see if Spotify would have been a reasonable substitute for illegal downloading by seeing what percentage of the music I have enjoyed most recently could have been streamed on their service. Continue reading →