Spotify: Free Music Streaming Software.

Spotify: A mixture of 'spot' and 'identify' apparently.

I am normally quite skeptical about this sort of thing, but I saw a news story about 'Spotify' in The Times (which I don't normally read, honest) and thought I would give it a go, also I spotted saxophonist Bruce Coates gave it the thumbs up in a Facebook status update, proving they are not always inconsequential whimsy.

It turns out that it's pretty good, meaning it has a lot of music on it, including a lot of classical and contemporary classical stuff (not tried searching for anything else yet, only installed it today.)

According to the wiki page it's only available as a free beta service in Western Europe at the moment but the subscription service should be available in other territories.

For the free service you download the software and off you go (might want to check your firewall settings though, the program made a few server requests which I blocked and it didn't affect the streaming content so erm, not sure what's up with that).

I have the score for Lutoslawski's Double Concerto out from the library and the moment and was looking around for a cheap or free stream of the piece somewhere as it seems one of his less recorded works, glad to see Spotify has it, amongst lots of other peformances of pieces by him. Hopefully the free streaming service continues past the beta stage, probably something worth supporting.