Spotify, our favorite online music-streaming jukebox, has just added offline music to its desktop version, bringing it into line with the excellent but flawed iPhone version.
Spotify is a piece of software that lets you play pretty much any music you like. It already keeps a “secret” cache on your computer and uses that to serve music to other users. Think legal BitTorrent for music, but with an instant-on that makes iTunes look even more sluggish than usual.
The iPhone version will let premium users (people who pay €10 or £10 per month for the ad-free service) store up to 3,333 tracks on their devices for offline listening. The latest desktop iteration of Spotify has just gone offline, too, with the same track limit. This is wonderful news, and means that Spotify could replace iTunes for all but applications and podcasts for most people.
It makes a great deal of sense on the back-end, too. If you already store gigabytes of cached music to make things more responsive, why not make those gigabytes available to the user? And of course you still have access to the gazillions of tracks in the catalog when you are online.
The service is still unavailable to US users, who must be getting more and more jealous as the cool features pile on. Pretty much as jealous as I am of you guys having Google Voice already. Make sure to check out the in depth coverage of the Spotify phenomenon by the handsome Eliot Van Buskirk over on our sister blog, Epicenter.
Spotify goes offline [Spotify]
See Also:
- Apple Approves Spotify iPhone App; US Rollout Still On Hold …
- Hands-On With Spotify for iPhone: Is iTunes Dead?
- U.S. Exclusive: Hands-On with the Spotify iPhone App
- Spotify Approved: Does Apple Care More About Apps Than Music …
- Spotify Set to Take America by Storm
- Spotify Becomes Platform, Makes U.S. Music Fans Even More Jealous …
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