Music streaming service Spotify has exploded in the UK media since I mentioned it in my article on the death of the download in The Guardian a few weeks back. From this month UK users can access the service without an invite. The Guardian’s Chris Salmon has called Spotify ‘life-changing’, and the excellent The Word magazine has also enthusiatically endorsed the service.

For the uninitiated, Spotify is basically iTunes without downloading. A huge catalogue of music is instantly available via high quality streaming, with buffering eliminated by innovative caching technology. And it’s free to use – assuming you can put up with the occasional radio-style ad popping up between tracks every half hour or so. (If you can’t put up with that, you can go ad-free for £9.99 per month.) It’s undeniably brilliant, and must surely represent the future of digital music.

One side-effect of using Spotify I’ve found is that I’m listening to a lot more albums, in full and in order, than I do with other streaming services such as Last.fm, which are geared more towards individual tracks. Downloading has also favoured individual tracks over albums – why risk paying for a full album’s worth of tracks you might not like rather than just plumping for the single you liked on the radio?

The beauty of Spotify is that you can listen to full albums without downloading – or buying – them. So if you want to confirm that your suspicions that Morrissey’s Years of Refusal is not in fact the return to form it is billed as, or that Springsteen’s Working on a Dream is pretty disappointing (with a title track that is remarkably similar to In My Arms by Teddy Thompson), you can do so without committment. Presumably Mozzer and The Boss are compensated in a small way, and you don’t end up buying a CD you’ll never bother listening to again, so everyone’s happy.

Meanwhile, you can check out the new Deluxe Edition of REM’s Murmur to see how it compares to the standard edition you already own. In fact, I’ve found myself listening to whole albums that I have easy access to on CD in my High Fidelity-style A to Z filing system, via Spotify simply because it’s so elegant and fun to use. So I can be listening to For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver, or Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes with my laptop jacked into my hi-fi amp, and never have to go to the awful trouble of opening the CD cases. And then, of course, there are those recommended albums that I don’t own, but probably should check out if I have any chance of staying ‘hip with the kids’ – at the time of writing, the most popular albums for UK Spotify users are by Kings of Leon, Lily Allen and MGMT, all of which I’ve heard lots about but wouldn’t normally listen to.

Spotify isn’t perfect. The radio feature, with categories based on genres and decades, can’t hold a candle to Last.fm’s recommended playlists. I don’t want to listen exclusively to 60s soul or only 90s alternative, I just want to listen to music I like, which could be from any of the genres or decades available.

Incidentally, for those who, like me, are using both Spotify and Last.fm, you can set Spotify to automatically scrobble to your Last.fm account via Spotify’s preferences menu.

Unfortunately, the future of Spotify might be uncertain. The Guardian (again) has reported that Spotify has been forced to remove thousands of track due to licensing problems. And I worry that Spotify’s ad-funded model might not be sufficent to ensure its survival, as I can’t see a huge number of users feeling the need to upgrade to ad-free membership.

But here’s hoping Spotify survives and flourishes. It’s a genuinely brilliant service, and the music industry should embrace it as the future.

UPDATE 19/02/09: This guy has Spotified his entire CD collection…

Paul Music, Technology Spotify