Vladimir Rakhmanin
Deputy Online Editor
Spotify, the Swedish streaming service, is now officially available in Ireland. Since launching in its home country in October 2008, Spotify has been increasing in popularity, with features such as a large back catalogue (18 million songs) and an ability to stream to a variety of gadgets, such as smartphones and tablets. This success has allowed the company to expand into 17 different countries, despite some controversy relating to unfair compensation for artists whose songs are available on the service. The service has previously been accessible in our country through some system exploitation. For example, some Spotify users were able to register through a foreign postcode. Furthermore, a lot of people realised that you can use a VPN with Spotify so were able to access it by using a VPN. However, this is the first time the company officially brought its product to Ireland.
The basic version is free, and features unskippable ads that users have to listen to in between songs. The slightly more expensive Spotify Unlimited allows users to remove those ads. The most expensive option, Spotify Premium, also allows for playback on various multimedia devices.
Before Spotify, there have been several music streaming services available in Ireland, such as Deezer, Eircom Music Hub and We7. It will be interesting to see if an established brand such as Spotify will be able to make a splash in the current market, where other companies have already had a head start.
With traditional albums slowly dying out (for better or for worse, depending which side you’re taking), Spotify’s emergence in Ireland will no doubt contribute to this trend. Whether or not it will become the default method for listening to music in the next few years remains to be seen.
