Music piracy has long been a big problem for record labels which blamed this activity as the main reason why its sales is fast declining. To curb this illegal activity, there are many laws which have been passed to govern music sharing and distribution, but unfortunately, piracy is still continuously rising which is aggravated by new technologies specially the Internet.
To solve the problem of Internet piracy, the music industry welcomes the arrival of Spotify which is an online music service that provides users with a wide array of song lists.
In a statement, the company said that it will provide a new alternative way for people to download music legally in an effort to curb online music piracy, adding that its goal is to offer web-centric consumers with a better service than illegal file-sharing sites.
To make music distribution legal, Spotify signed a partnership deal with major music labels including Warner Music, EMI, and Sony which can provide the torrent site with songs.
This site uses an application which resembles the one adopted by Last.fm and iTunes added with P2P technology to allow music to download faster.
According to a source, Ludvig Strigeys, who is the creator of uTorrent which is a popular P2P site, sold his company to BitTorrent Inc., allowing him to have enough investment to build Spotify. Today, he is one of the software engineers of this online music service.
How Spotify works
This P2P site provides a streaming application with 160kbps MP3s and uses a new hybrid of P2P system that allows people to download faster both popular and less known songs.
Besides from music streaming, the torrent site also allows people to create their own playlists and share these to other users.