On-demand streaming music service Spotify just announced the addition of more than 90,000 releases to its catalogue. The announcement came on the heels of their recent deal with CD baby, and users will be pleased. The company published two lists sorted by artists and labels early this morning.
While Spotify is not yet available to North American audiences, legal streaming music services have certainly proved their demand with competitors like Grooveshark, Lala and Tunerec seeing steady growth.
In addition to allowing users to listen to music and share files and playlists, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek continues to forge partnerships in his “commitment to developing the world’s biggest music catalogue.” Given that Lala claims that it also offers “over 6 million songs for free”, this is no easy feat.
Launched in 2006 the service is available in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Spain, France and Finland. The service is already so popular that crafty audiophiles outside of the service areas have been accessing it via proxy server. Spotify is invite-only and currently offers streaming music via Mac, Windows and Linux, and device integration on the Android, iPhone and Nokia S60 series is well on its way. The service also allows users to scrobble to Last.fm and keep track of their listening through the popular music recommendation site.
On a related note, Silicon Alley Insider and Reuters reported that Virgin Media is about to launch an MP3 music download subscription service in partnership with Universal. Virgin media broadband customers will listen to streaming music and pay for tracks from Universal’s catalogue. Virgin is looking to form new partnerships with UK-based labels and create a comprehensive catalogue upon launch. This play by a major media company may have dire effects on Spotify and its competitors. At this time, Spotify also offers links to downloadable tracks and a huge selection of tracks, but it will be interesting to see who consumers choose to deliver their tunes.
