New software released this week promises to let Web surfers save unauthorized copies of music tracks from Spotify, a popular European streaming service set for U.S. launch before the end of the year.
Beware.
SaveSpotify, created by a British company called Online Media Technologies, uses an old and unsophisticated stream-recording technique (simply recording the audio signal as it plays back on your computer), and bait-and-switches users to a paid $59 lifetime subscription. (The free version adds audio watermarks to its copies.)
It is also utterly irrelevant, as Spotify is so useful as a cloud-based streaming application that there is literally no reason for anyone to download and manage its massive catalog locally. How utterly 1999.
When the analysis firm IDC looked at digital music habits last December, they found that paid online music services (34.5 percent) and P2P downloading services (28.1 percent) are still consumers' most-preferred sources, but streaming from social networks (26.7 percent), online versions of terrestrial radio stations (26.6 percent) and artists' web presences (21.2 percent) are coming on strong.
"As the components of the cloud become more reliable, as more affordable services become available to support cloud-based music services, and as connected car, portable and home devices come to market," IDC consumer audio analyst Susan Kevorkian told Wired.com, "the promise of the cloud for persistently and consistently delivering music will gradually be realized."
SaveSpotify.com leads users to download a free version of the AVS Audio Editor program, which adds an audio watermark to every audio file it records from streaming services. The only way to get rid of that is to pay $39 for a year, or $59 for life. But the results -- assuming you want to waste your time recording songs from Spotify when bit torrent accomplishes the same task with orders-of-magnitude more efficiency -- can be achieved with far less expensive or even free software.
This program is a merely return to the days of recording songs from the radio. Sure, you can do it -- but why would you want to? Recording from Spotify is not only awkward and time consuming, but it's expensive in this case, and none of that money goes to artists and other copyright holders.
Programs that can record streaming audio are almost as old as streaming audio itself (see Total Recorder or Audio Hijack). We've seen this functionality countless times before; just because it's associated with Spotify this time doesn't make it a good idea.
To be fair, we asked the people behind SaveSpotify how it differs from those programs, how they expect Spotify to respond, whether there are any new features in the program (i.e. is SaveSpotify.com just a marketing gimmick for AVS Audio Editor?), and how they feel about the artists and labels their program would shortchange -- assuming enough people are gullible enough to use it. Over 24 hours later, they have yet to respond.
See Also:
- U.S. Exclusive: Hands-On with the Spotify iPhone App
- Spotify Set to Take America by Storm
- Spotify $50 Million Closer to U.S. Launch
- Ka-shing! Spotify Investors Include Chinese Billionaire
- Biggest Record Label Earns More from Spotify than iTunes in Sweden
- Spotify's Android App Should Frighten Apple
- Contribute to Our Crowdsourced Spotify Playlist
