Spotify offering downloads soon?
Spotify has recently announced that you can now store over 3,000 tracks on your hard drive offline for just £9.99 a month. That may seem like a good deal but ,in reality, is it a false economy? Under £10 a month may sound like a fantastic deal for the ability to listen to millions of tracks to your hear's content without adverts and the ability to save 3000 of them temporarily offline and a similar ability on the iPhone/iPod Touch. All for under £10 or £99 for a full year!
The reality is that essentially all this music is heavily DRMed because you cannot transfer it to any player and you can't even copy the files. With the ZunePass service available at an equivalent price of $15 per month, you also have unlimited streaming but in addition you get 10 free downloads that are DRM free and that you can keep - forever.
With Spotify you are essentially renting music - if they do go out of business all the previously paid months of music will essentially have been for the ability to rent that music as you own none of it. With the launch of the ZunePass, Spotify must be seriously considering making this an option as £9.99 a month could buy me 10-20 songs DRM free at up to 300kbps instead of Spotify's 192kbps bitrate.
Whether or not Spotify will be implementing this remains to be seen.
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