Spotify releases video of Android app in development

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Mike Butcher is the European Editor for TechCrunch. A former grunge rock drummer, he became a long time journalist, and has since written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. Mike is also a co-founder and shareholder of TechHub, a co-working space/service/community with several locations... → Learn More

Spotify, the streaming music service which is gradually gathering a large fan-base in Europe, has been plotting a mobile version. It recently hired a head of mobile and the speculation was that it would come out with an iPhone app first after releasing a teaser video. But today it’s released video of an Android app it’s being demoing to people at Google I/O.

The Android app is still very much a work in progress and subject to minor changes, but it gives a pretty good overview of their thinking. The demo highlights a number of features including playback, playlists, offline synch and music search.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet – the service has yet to launch in North America, although I’m about to send some lucky TechCrunch writers some preview codes we’ve gotten hold of – Spotify is a lightweight iTunes-like application for Windows and Mac that lets you search, browse and stream a deep collection of music. Tracks are streamed via a encrypted P2P technology. The free service is ad-financed, hence a general comparison with Last.fm, but it’s primary service is subscription based. It works like a fully-playable iTunes store, creating playlists is easy and some bill it as an alternative to file-sharing, hence why it’s managed to sign so many music labels.

Spotify has raised a large round of funding so far, €15.3m from VCs Northzone Venture Partners and Creandum. It launched in the UK in February after building a big following in Sweden, it’s country of origin.

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