14 DAY TRIAL // A lot has been written and speculated about the Spotify launch in the United States, and those wondering why it takes so long for the service to be introduced to Americans have finally got their answer: the company wants to create a service that users will not want to pirate.
The goal is that once all the agreements are signed and the deal is officially closed, Spotify will be streaming music faster than anyone can search for the same track on torrent sites.
This way, nobody will feel the need to look for their favorite albums on other websites, much less among the much-debated copyright-infringing torrents.
Needless to say, this method is a win-win for both users and artists: the former can instantly listen to whatever they want, whereas the latter still get the corresponding revenue from their creations.
Spotify engineer Gunnar Kreitz was the one to describe the trend the company is currently following, stating that as little as 1 percent of all the steamed tracks have buffering issues.
It seems that Spotify has a median playback latency of only 265 ms, so users do not feel any delay in listening to their preferred tunes.
When accessing a track, it is initially streamed from Spotify servers, but it will move to peer-to-peer technology as soon as it gets the chance, thus reducing the strain on the company’s servers.
On the other hand, this service also relies on a proprietary protocol especially created for on-demand streaming, keeping the streams at Ogg Vorbis q5 @ 160kbps.
Ever since it was founded in 2008, Spotify became hugely popular in Europe, currently boasting 10 million users even though it can be accessed only from seven countries (Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the UK).
There have been a lot of rumors during the past year that a Spotify launch in the US was imminent, but the Swedish company has yet to sign the required agreements with the most important music labels.
Until this happens, it appears the developers spend their time constantly improving the speed and the quality of their service, so that when the time comes, Americans can enjoy Spotify at its finest.