The future of music is simple, free, and now.

Every now and then, something comes along and completely revolutionizes the music industry. In 1957, "The Quarrymen" were conceived. In 1966, "The New Yardbirds" played their first concert. 1969, and "Smile" had just been signed to Mercury Records. More recently, in 2006, a team of programmers got together with a plan to revolutionize the music industry. It took John Lennon several years for his unheard of new band, "The Beatles" to become a household name. Two years after the debut of "The New Yardbirds", they disbanded,"Led Zeppelin" rose from the ashes. In 1970, Tim Staffell left "Smile", and "Queen" were born. 2007 was the year that Spotify, an unheard of music streaming service was released to the public.

Still relatively unheard of even two years later, Spotify is a 100% legal music streaming service that offers lightning fast, reliable, and most importantly, completely free playback of a huge library of music, with the help of several major record labels, such as Sony BMG, EMI Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. The free version of the program contains small, appropriate adverts on the side of the screen, and the paid version (which as of now, only removes the adverts) costs $10 for a monthly license. This system pays for all the fees the creators need to pay to the record companies, whilst leaving the user with their freedom. The program is currently in beta, meaning there are still glitches in the software to be ironed out, although there are none obvious to the average user. The program takes up a mere 1.45 MB of hard drive space, and less than four times the processing power of Windows Media Player to play a song; a minuscule amount to sacrifice for all the world's music at your fingertips. For the time being, Spotify is only available to download to people with invitation codes, five of which are given for free to anybody who has already installed the software. The program allows for many of the features seen in the most popular music players, such as iTunes, Windows Media Player or Songbird, whilst containing a similar recommendation system to Last.FM. It also has a built-in Last.FM scrobbler, allows for playlists, song queues, and has a very similar user-interface to each of the media players listed above, and so can be easily picked up by anybody with no hassle.

Spotify has the potential to end music piracy. Why would anybody want to risk downloading a song illegally when they could listen to the song for free, in a simple, convenient way? The software also has a "Buy from" option, giving users the option to purchase the track so they can add it to their music collection or carry it around on a portable device. Through my eyes, Spotify has not only the potential to end music piracy, but to open new doors to the entire media industry. Imagine being able to watch films and TV shows on a software much like the one we are here presented with? Think 4OD or BBCi, but in one convenient package.

Spotify is music freedom in an EXE file. No longer will iTunes' DRM force us to spend £160 on the latest iPod to listen to music portably, or Last.FM's "full track" service telling us that a song can only be listened to a small number of times. As "The Quarrymen", "The New Yardbirds" and "Smile" before it, Spotify will revolutionize the music industry.

If anyone should want an invite to Spotify, send me an email at my school address.