Spotify has now been made available in offline mode. You have to be a Premium subscriber. A computer can have up to 3,333 songs stored at most.

They have also made it possible to pay for premium with Paypal. Only in the UK to start with though.

http://www.spotify.com/blog/archives/2009/10/01/spotify-goes-offline/

Here is also a list of new releases Oct 2nd: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tLvfG00kE3zSJr0F4802Jug&output=html

Next week we are going to be making some changes to our music catalogue that we feel are important to communicate clearly. Unfortunately we are going to be removing a number of songs from our catalogue and adding country restrictions to some tracks, which may make them unplayable for you. Read more ->

Spotify announced that they are now going to put restrictions on their music library. What a drawback. I’m only going to repeat what I’ve said before. They are still stuck in the 20th century. Time to move on, people..

I went on Amazon today looking for some new music and I found the All-American Rejects new album was out. So I listened to the preview and decided, well, I haven’t tried Amazon’s MP3 Download store yet so why not.. I’m not sure I want to buy a physical copy of this album because I have their last one and I’m not listening to it a whole lot.

I see that I will have to download Amazon MP3 Downloader to purchase the album. Well, I guess it can’t hurt..  The album is just $2.99 this way so whatever. I click to buy, log in, and I see this:

(Amazon MP3 Purchases are limited to U.S. customers.)

There we go. Great. Always these US-only and other regional rights boundaries. And it doesn’t end there. Even if I would have been a US citizen and able to buy the album, I would only be able to download it ONCE! Lose it, in a hard drive crash or forgetting to migrate it when switching computers, and you’re screwed. Even though you paid for it.

So basically I’m thinking… What the **** is my incentive here not to just go on a torrent website and download it? It takes out 99 % of the hassle of legally buying it and I can get it again should I happen to lose it.

Oh yea, and I wanted to get my Canadian friend an invite to try Spotify beta. A great piece of music software in my book. But that didn’t work out either because of the issues, again, with rights.

Spotify – the story from Spotify on Vimeo.

Spotify has made great progress and yesterday announced that they have signed deals with several companies including Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music Group, Merlin, The Orchard and Bonnier Amigo.

You can now get Spotify Premium or a Day-pass. At the same time they are starting to give out invites to the free service that is supported by ads.

I’ve had the benefit of using Spotify while it was in beta-testing and it’s really a great service. The premium service is priced at 99 SEK per month and the day-pass (24 hrs) is 9 SEK. Totally worth it!