Music website Spotify eyes Canadian launch

The founders of one of the Internet's most-hyped websites say it could soon be available in Canada, offering music fans an unlimited buffet of streamable tunes, free and legally.

Currently available in the U.K., France, Spain, Sweden, Norway and Finland, Spotify is planning to make its service available to Canadians within months, spokesman Andres Sehr told The Canadian Press.

"Basically, the situation with Canada is that we hope to launch it in tandem with a U.S. launch," he said in an email exchange.

"Music licensing is handled on a North American basis, and we're currently working on that and plan to launch at the end of this year or early 2010."

Music streaming isn't a new concept, but Canadian users have typically been shut of the largest sites online, including We7 and Pandora, which operates as an Internet radio and music recommendation service.

Streaming popular worldwide

Streaming has become increasingly popular around the world as an alternative to illegal downloading, which has recently resulted in astronomical legal penalties.

The British government warned this week that it may cut people off the Internet for repeated illegal downloading of films and music.

Spotify is being raved about by its users as the best of the streaming bunch, and recently got some high-placed praise from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who posted on his profile, "Spotify is so good."

The site offers what sounds like a music fan's high-tech fantasy: the ability to type the name of a song virtually any song into a search field and have the tune almost instantly retrieved and ready to play, completely free and legally.

Spotify gives users three choices: free, unlimited streaming access to the site's millions of songs, although the music is interspersed with ads; the ability to buy an ad-free day pass for a nominal fee; or a monthly subscription for full access to the music archive, without any ad annoyances and with some additional bonuses, like better sound quality.

Canadian competitor

For those who can't wait for Spotify to open up in Canada, there's already one competitor open for business, which has largely remained under the radar, even though it's attracted an estimated 200,000 Canadian users.

Grooveshark.com boasts that it lets you "play any song in the world, free," which isn't entirely true, but doesn't seem far off the mark.

You can find everything from Aaliyah to ZZ Top, and just about every mainstream Canadian artist and band from pop to indie rock is ready to play. New music is also being added by users all the time.

In addition to pulling up a new song or album your friends are raving about, you can string together a personalized setlist of tracks, browse through what's currently popular on the site right now it's topped the likes of the Black Eyed Peas, Kings of Leon and Taylor Swift, pretty much mirroring the U.S. CD sales charts or have Grooveshark compile a radio-like experience of random songs, tailored to your likes and dislikes.

It's an almost-too-good-to-be-true experience and some recent legal objections from at least one record label may threaten Grooveshark's existence.

EMI has filed notice to take the site to court, although Grooveshark spokesman Ben Westermann-Clark claims the label is just using a "traditional intimidation tactic of filing a lawsuit as a negotiating tool" in the midst of licensing-agreement talks.

Westermann-Clark insists the website is gaining support with music industry insiders and aims to be fully legal.

"In a world where literally any song can be illegally downloaded within a few minutes, what Grooveshark's really doing is competing with piracy and the huge amount of potential revenue lost every year because of it," he said.

Grooveshark functions very much like Google-owned YouTube, he added, which relies on user uploads and complies with takedown requests from copyright holders, if and when they arise.

Westermann-Clark claims Grooveshark has deals with over 1,000 labels and artists, including big names like V2 and Vancouver-based Nettwerk, and copyright owners "from stadium rockstars on down to coffee shop quartets" get paid per stream and get a slice of advertising revenue.

"If any content owners with whom we don't have agreements notice that their content made its way onto Grooveshark, they let us know and we always oblige," he said.

Blessing of record labels

Spotify, on the other hand, is billed as a completely legitimate option with the full blessing of record labels. If a song is on Spotify, it's because it was fully cleared to be made available.

One current limitation of music streaming sites is that songs can only be listened to on a computer and can't be taken to go on MP3 players.But maybe not for long.

Both Spotify and Grooveshark are promising to release mobile versions of their services, and it appears paid Spotify subscribers could soon get untethered access on iPhones if Apple approves the app.

A teaser video on Spotify's website advertises the future function, which will allow the site to be accessed through wireless Internet and will apparently even allow caching of tunes, so they can be played in subways, on planes, or in other situations where there's no Internet access.

Grooveshark is also working on apps for the iPhone, Blackberry, phones running on Google's Android platform, and a few other devices, said Westermann-Clark.

"Unfortunately we don't have exact launch dates as of right now, but it's definitely a big priority for us," he said.

"If you have a phone with full Internet access, and something like Grooveshark exists, who needs an MP3 player?"