Spotify has teamed up with UK based 7Digital.com to enable users of the music player to download songs as 320kbps mp3s to their hard drive.
The download isn’t free, 7Digital’s usual pricing applies, but this does give Spotify another weapon in its arsenal against the side of the music industry that fear Spotify. In the future, users will be able to download complete playlists with the click of a button.
This is a great step forward for Spotify. By bridging the gap between free and paid for music, the music industry can see a valid payment model that benefits the industry and the audience. You may question why you would want to pay to download a track when you can listen to it on Spotify, but Spotify is reliant on the cloud and therefore if you are in the middle of no where with just your mp3 player, you’re going to want this service. Perhaps you want a higher quality version of the track, or simply want to support the artist, now you can do this through Spotify and not have to open up i-tunes to download the track you want.
In my previous post, “Spotify, you’ll never need to own music again“, I talked about using Spotify as your central resource for playing music, being able to play online tracks as well as music downloaded to your hard drive. Enabling users to download music through Spotify is surely the first step towards this. It also shows that Spotify wants to be your core music player, and the sooner it integrates more features like those in Last.fm, myspace, Boxee and Songbird, the better for everyone.