Spotify, a music streaming service, offering digitally restricted streaming of selected music from a range of major and independent record labels, today announced the availability of its service to Android users.
In a blog post, Spotify announced their latest app, which offered free radio, the only one of its kind that allowed you to save the songs you love. “It’s never been easier to discover, save, and enjoy an unlimited amount of music on the go,” the blog claims.
Android users can use the App to create stations and select music wherever they are, from the entire Spotify catalogue. By creating stations, users can set up their listening choices – be it an artist, an album, or just a playlist.
A great feature is the facility to save a song to the desktop. If a user likes a song, he can give it a ‘thumbs up’ which will save the song to a “Liked from radio” playlist on the desktop. Once saved, the user can play it whenever he likes, and as many times.
Though free users have to bear with the occasional ads, premium subscribing users enjoy their music ad-free.
In many ways these features are similar to Pandora Media Inc (NYSE:P), which Spotify has been known to emulate. However, the two services differ in that Spotify is an on-demand service, whereas Pandora Media Inc (NYSE:P) plays music randomly. Given this difference, Spotify is the slightly more expensive operation, because it has to negotiate special rates with the music content providers. Pandora’s random service, on the other hand allows it to pay only government specified royalties.
Like Pandora Media Inc (NYSE:P), last month Spotify updated its iOS app to include free mobile radio features such as those mentioned above. Spotify brought the same features to the desktop last May.
In fact, even Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) Play now offers the Spotify service as an app that downloads for free.
