Spotify (spotify.com) is a cutting- edge interface—based music streaming service that launched in October 2008 in Sweden and has since grown to be used by over 10 million people in Western Europe.

While not the most obvious choice to be featured as a social media tool, the service does already make extensive use of integration into established social tools. In fact, many industry insiders see in Spotify the ability to change the world of music and harness modern technology to access music ... as unlikely as it sounds, this is likely exactly the reason we can't have it yet.

Spotify was created and launched specifically to be the answer to the problem of the digital music age, a form of compromise between consumers and the record labels that wish for more control over their musical property. However, as we've witnessed over the last 15 years, record labels can be stubborn when it comes to change or giving up any such control.

Though it's had a few instances of trouble in the years since its creation - for example, the program was flagged briefly as a trojan virus by anti-virus software about a year ago, thus disabling it - Spotify has been a stable and growing service since its launch.

How it works
Spotify allows its listeners to stream music from its library on demand, choosing from artists and albums made available through partnerships with record labels like Sony, EMI, Universal and more. Though it's already established internationally, Spotify is largely unknown in North America.

Unlike many of its contemporaries, Spotify is an application based service; like iTunes, Spotify is an interface you run from your computer as opposed to a website you would regularly visit. Further, it has applications developed that allow you to take your service anywhere you go — Spotify has integrated applications on every major mobile platform except BlackBerry.

Further still, there are different tiers to Spotify; while there is a subscription-level service (with some 750,000 paying users by September 2010), there is also a free version run by visual and radio-style audio advertisements, with millions of users.

Why it's useful (or not)
The benefits of such a service would be innumerable for students; effectively harnessing the 'cloud' concept of storage and streaming, you wouldn't have to worry about moving or maintaining your music library from home to school or anywhere in between, not to mention, the music you enjoy would be of excellent quality and immaculately catalogued and tagged.

To be clear, Spotify is not a way of cheating into good music - like other interface—based music applications, Spotify has links and paths that will deliver you to your favourite means of purchasing music. And what's more, it has already been programmed to work with Shazam, Last.fm, Facebook, Twitter and all the social heavyweights.

Essentially speaking, you can listen to your favourite music (within the Spotify library, more on that soon) at home, then take the service with you via your smartphone, all without actually owning physical or digital copies of your music. Beyond that, you can share your music and playlists with other users, post to social sites about your new favourites and discover even more music by use of radio-style players. Unreal, right?

In short, yes — though it would be great to have access to such a service, North American labels have been reluctant to license their music to the service for play on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. But then, perhaps that is a sign that the service really could change the world of music — after all, isn't the North American music industry always resistant to change, however inevitable?