My experience with early access to Spotify in the US has been nothing short of game-changing in terms of what I expect from my music, and after my having said so for about two years, I know a good number of folks got fatigued of the promise, and just wanted the company to ship already. Today, as was much-anticipated and well reported, Spotify did open its doors in the US, bringing the massive on-demand music library for desktop and mobile devices to the world's biggest music market. The service was open via invitation only, as many found themselves refreshing their email boxes, waiting for the invites to arrive. Luckily, thanks to my ongoing relationship with the company, especially their Head of Special Projects Shak Khan, I snagged a dedicated URL with invites and passed them around on Google+, Twitter and Facebook before I had to zip off to something resembling a real job this morning. The link is here: http://www.spotify.com/us/louisgray/


After much waiting and an equal amount of hyperbole, the arrival of the music app took on a life of its own, overshadowing the actual delivery of a new challenger that could change the way many of us consume and share music - as much as Napster and iTunes did in their own times.

Quickly stated, Spotify is a streaming music application that offers the deepest legal library of music available for multiple platforms. Unlike the lock-in faced from the iTunes/iOS side of the world, I can get to my Spotify library from any Mac, Windows or Linux computer, and any Android or iOS device. In addition to having incredible instant access to music with almost zero buffering, even if I have never listened to a track before, I can link Spotify to my Facebook social graph, share tracks and playlists with friends, and browse their own listening preferences to discover new music.


In the last two years, when I heard of a new band or a new album, invariably I checked Spotify to see if the music was available there first, and in almost every case it has been - often weeks or months ahead of iTunes, Amazon and others. I often put Spotify to the "name an artist or song" challenge to friends who tried to find some lesser-known band to stump the service unsuccessfully, and then would skip to a later part in the song without any hiccups.


Through the wait for Spotify's arrival, much attention was placed on the service's plan to continue with a free option for listeners, which scared the heck out of music labels. After much finagling, they landed a way to offer a free, entry price and premium price for the service. Considering premium is only $9.99 a month, it's a steal, period, and I'd expect serious conversions to the higher models. Spotify has also reportedly provided upwards of $60 million in music royalties to artists just in Europe alone in the previous year, putting them second highest behind iTunes. Add the USA to the mix and obvious virality thanks to social networking, and that number is bound to jump.


As many skeptics have stated, Spotify does not enter greenfield territory, being flanked by Rdio, MOG and other streaming services, including the grandfather of the bunch, Rhapsody. The company's app is serviceable, but not beautiful, and music discovery could see some improvement. But that hasn't stopped practically everybody I know (myself included) from getting addicted to the service and using it with practical exception of all else. The flexible combination of downloads, streaming, playlists, sharing, and pure high quality sound sets Spotify apart from the rest, and you could see A-list artists as excited about the debut as we have been.


As my invite URL link bounced around the social networks, emails started getting delivered late in the evening, and everybody who has been graced with a Spotify invite almost immediately sees the value and knows this changes their game. I am glad I haven't lost my purchased music converted from iTunes to Google Music, and love that GMusic is in the cloud, for Chromebooks' sake, but Spotify's got me in every other place. Sometimes, even after all the hype, things are better than expected or stated. With Spotify, this is one of those times. You owe it to yourself to try, if you've been locked out before. I am so glad I no longer look elitist with my early access. Go get it.

http://www.spotify.com/us/louisgray/

Retail software prices are often eyebrow-raisingly high, and for the most part, inflexible. Every couple years, it's not uncommon for our family to shell out $150 to $500 for the latest Microsoft Office Suite. The full Adobe Creative Suite will set you back almost $2,000, and upgrades are $600. The home edition of Mathematica is about $300. Apple Final Cut Studio will cost you $1,000 and Logic Studio another $500. These prices are no doubt in line with professionals who require the software to live, but for more casual users, who might interact with the software infrequently, paying full retail price seems exorbitant. This sets up a market imbalance, similar to that of the world of music pre-Napster, where the consumer at times can seem justified for obtaining the software freely using another method.

I've previously stated that the vast majority of consumers are solid law-abiding citizens who are happy to pay for quality, assuming price is in line with the assumed value of the goods. When inequality enters the system, be it for full music albums, individual movie theater tickets, software, or even pay per view TV events, technology often comes into play to circumvent the traditional restraints.


The disruption of the music industry by Napster's steal what you can model, followed by iTunes' efforts to reign things back again at an affordable price point, has recently evolved further with the subscription-based all you can eat method, one not pioneered by Spotify, but popularized by it, despite years of Rhapsody and Napster (part two), and newer competitors like Rdio offering similar structures. Software, running in parallel, can similarly be downloaded for free on peer to peer networks, and can even be downloaded directly with options like the Mac App Store and Google's Chrome Web Store, but missing is the solution for the casual buyer who just wants to rent the software, occasionally accessing it, without needing to shell out for the boxed retail option, dedicating gigabytes of hard drive space for the privilege, being sure to keep one's serial numbers stored under lock and key.

A new business model, following the Music as a Subscription service, emerges with Software as a Subscription, more commonly referred to as SAAS (Software as a Service). SAAS applications can be enterprise-focused like Salesforce.com, or consumer focused, like Google Docs and Gmail, most of whom see all the activity taking place on the Web via a Web service. But what about the more traditional software titles from Adobe, Microsoft and others? What about an iTunes-like, Spotify-like service where the consumer could pay about $25 to $50 a month and tap into all the popular software titles in the world, reading and writing remotely, but saving locally?

One assumes the major reason this generic software subscription model has not emerged is because the traditional retail software giants can still get buyers at the hundreds of dollars apiece, and they would be less interested in spreading a customer's $500 to $600 across 12 months with other providers. So long as they are raking in the revenue, disrupting their own business isn't appealing.

For consumers with high-speed Web access and relatively powerful CPUs and GPUs, the infrastructure for creating such a software subscription service is there. Toss a few thousand titles on Amazon or iTunes and you can see that with smart cataloging, the ability to use any title in the world would be at your fingertips. Then too would come the next stage of the rollout - including video games and premium offerings with tiered pricings and tiered privileges.

Despite the music industry and other's concerns, Spotify's success is not in the ability for some folks to gain free access with ads, but in the popular and accelerating option for paid accounts, eager to shell out real cash for access to an immense music library. I may scoff at the idea of upgrading my Adobe Creative Suite again for a few hundred bucks, only using it sporadically, but I'd pay a good amount per month, like I do for cable TV, electricity and other plumbing, to gain access to the world's software library. Web-based SAAS for single instance applications is not enough. It's early days. A company that can get all the copyright holders to work together and find a solution to customers would be extremely compelling.

For the most part, I believe people are good and try to honor the law. Most people, regardless of religion or upbringing, believe it is wrong to lie, to steal or to cheat. But sometimes, there comes a perceived imbalance that drives a mob of people to collectively break the law and flaunt the rules, until the teeming anarchy threatens to break down the system, save it for a clear thinking authority figure who steps in and offers an acceptable alternative. We saw this with the boom of Napster and again with the rise of peer to peer networks for video trading. We saw it two years ago when users gloriously jailbroke their iPhones to install much-desired apps, and we are possibly seeing it again now that it looks like many existing iPhone 3G owners, shackled to AT&T for their service, are going to be unable to perform tasks possible from other carriers.

Going back to the root of the first two examples, with Peer to Peer networks and Napster, why were people sharing files and downloading like mad? For many people, it wasn't a matter of wanting to steal from the record companies, or to defraud artists. From the many stories I read and the people I talked to in that era, the most active Napster users were also among the ones with the largest legitimate music collections, the ones who made visiting a record store or concert a regular occurrence. But there came an imbalance between the ease of acquisition and the price of acquisition of the media, as prices for individual CDs rose from the $9.99 range to $13, $15, $18 and beyond.

Napster, Kazaa and other peer to peer networks, offered an alternative that delivered music of all types quickly, depending on download speeds, and for extremely low cost (free). And instead of downloading full albums, users could find individual tracks and get those alone.

It took a realistic alternative, like iTunes, that offered low per-track pricing and easy, trusted, downloads to push people to move away from illegal options, and for the most part, they have. Similarly, options like Netflix, Amazon Unbox and iTunes again provided users with trusted inexpensive video downloads that were less costly than the rapidly-rising theater experience, with its $10+ tickets (not to mention inability to pause the film).

In each case, consumers, with common sense, grew tired of the restrictions placed on them from an uncaring monopolistic industry. And while the traditional entertainment and media moguls are still reeling from having to adjust to the new rules placed on them by consumers, other old world giants think they can play the game and be a gatekeeper. AT&T's woes were painfully shown by Apple yesterday, who quietly called out the carrier for being behind in practically every important way - not enabling tethering for the iPhone, being incapable of supporting MMS, and giving all of us early adopters a dramatic case of sticker shock when we considered upgrading.

The world of common sense again says that if customers want to pay for cutting edge technology and are willing to pay for your services, they will. But they don't like being forced into a less than ideal situation that makes them feel like they are paying top dollar and getting lowest rung support.

I haven't slammed AT&T much and haven't championed them either. Phone services, like electricity and water, are a utility - something that should just work in the background. The fact that we are even talking about them now means something has failed. It's a relatively quiet group of folks, so far, who feel wronged by the phone monolith's position, but if the failures continue, they will start to break the rules, because common sense says they should, and eventually, the wrong will be right.