14 DAY TRIAL // Spotify has made a couple of announcements that may not seem like such a big deal but which are a major step forward for the company. Spotify is opening a download store, enabling users to buy their music directly from the app, adding support for iPod sync and it's also launching free mobile apps for both Android and iPhone users.
"You’ve been telling us how much you love discovering, sharing and talking about music in Spotify - and you’ve created well over 200 million playlists to prove it," Spotify writes.
"But you’ve also said you’re listening to a huge amount of music on your iPods, and that getting your Spotify playlists onto them as MP3s has been a serious hassle," it added.
"As of today, Spotify is making it possible for everyone to take their playlists with them in one lean, green music machine," it announced.
iPod sync
Spotify is launching several new features today. The first thing it's touting is iPod sync, which enables users of iPod Classic, iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle to sync their Spotify library to their device.
This is great for the tracks you store on your computer and manage with Spotify, but the service is focused on streaming and you obviously won't be able to sync the songs in your playlists that you don't own.
Download store
This is where the new download store comes in handy. Users have been able to buy songs in Spotify until now, through its partners program, but few people actually used the feature.
Now though, Spotify is debuting its own download store and it's positioning it quite interestingly, as something for the most avid listeners since it is offering discounts for bulk purchases.
10 tracks will set you back eight pounds, 80p per track, and 100 tracks will go for 50 pounds, 50p per track. The idea is to offer a simple way of purchasing an entire playlist and then syncing it to your mobile device for example.
While it certainly is convenient to be able to buy all of the tracks in a playlist you already created, with a few clicks, there's not much of a value proposition, many individual tracks on Amazon.co.uk, for example, can be bought for 69p or 79p.
Free mobile apps
Until now, if you wanted to get Spotify on your mobile, you had to pay up, mobile streaming was only available to premium users. But the company is now debuting mobile apps for free users as well, both on the iPhone and for Android users.
These apps won't enable you to stream music from Spotify, but they can sync your existing tracks and playlists to your phone and you can then use the Spotify app to listen to them.
Recently, Spotify severely limited its free service, but the new features indicate the new direction it's going with it, as more of a discovery tool to help you find out which tracks to buy rather than a replacement for owning songs.