Spotify finally coming to America?

For those of you who don’t track online music services as obsessively as we here at Bay Area Butchers do, Spotify is an online music service that provides its subscribers with access to over thirteen million songs, and complete control over what you are listening to.  Imagine having the world’s greatest music collection available to you at all times to build your playlists from, and to show off to friends the things you are listening to. 

Internet radio has been developing and increasing steadily for as long as the ability to transmit the necessary amount of data at a high enough rate has been available to the public.  In 1994 the Rolling Stones streamed a concert, but the true start began when Real Networks offered the first streamed media in 1995 with a broadcast of a baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Seattle Mariners.  Since then, a great number of companies and individuals have jumped on the technology and offered various forms of streamed media.  This delivery has ranged from the simplest forms of low-bandwith, low-quality song by song streaming, to pre-arranged playlists consistent thematically and masquerading as radio stations, to existing AM/FM stations offering online listening to their content, to the latest incarnation: user controlled content. 

User controlled internet radio has gained ground over the last few years, with millions of users worldwide signing into personalized accounts where radio stations are built around selections made by the user in order to only provide music that fits in with the taste of the listener, rather than the traditional radio format of broadcasting commercially viable songs within a genre.  Unlike Pandora, Slacker, Last.fm, and the other internet radio sites out there, though, Spotify isn’t merely streaming music with a theme that you choose.  This is a virtual collection that you develop and grow to suit your tastes, all stored in the cloud so you never have to worry about getting more hard drive space, paying iTunes millions of dollars, or having the feds knock on your door because you chose to not pay for all of it.

Nuvo Technologies is a Kentucky based company that develops and sells equipment for distributed audio.  Their equipment lets you simultaneously  listen to multiple audio sources in multiple rooms, controlled by in-wall keypads, advanced universal remotes, and more recently, iPod, iPhone and iPad.  You can listen to things like internet radio, your cable box feed, attached DVD players (even your dusty old BetaMax if you are so inclined) or even your Pandora stations, through their Pandora integration.  The ability to connect to your Pandora account has been a popular feature as the use of the service has increased steadily since its introduction, and is representative of the cutting edge nature of advancing media technology.  Perhaps tellingly, Nuvo recently added the ability to link your Spotify account to your system in their latest firmware update. 

Spotify is currently only available to subscribers in certain European nations, but maybe this ability in the latest Nuvo firmware is a sign that it will soon become available here.  The hold-up on American access has been that the major labels in this country will not sign the licensing agreement to the creators of Spotify.  It was briefly available in this country after its initial launch, but a cease and desist order from the major labels forced the Swedish company to restrict access to a limited number of European countries.  This move has been harshly decried among American music fans and insiders since day one.  Perhaps the labels have finally decided to listen to many of the industry experts like Bob Leftsez and signed the licensing agreement.  Let’s hope for the best.