Spotify is an online music streaming service which allows users to instantly stream millions of songs. Free users have to put up with ads and limited song plays however a subscription service is available which allows users to access songs an unlimited amount of times without ads. There are also many other premium features included in this subscription, which costs £9.99 a month. I use the premium service myself and it easily allows me to make playlists of all of my favourite songs, and even make them available on my phone using the spotify app. There is also a version for half of the cost which just removes the advertisements and allows unlimited plays on all songs. There has been a lot of controversy about the rights that Spotify have to allow them to play songs from different record labels however they now have the rights for Sony, EMI, Universal and Warner Music Group, amongst many other independent labels.
Napster first launched in 1999 as an independent peer to peer file sharing service, heavily based on audio files. They had their most successful period in February 2001.This company eventually ran into a lot of legal problems over copyright infringement and had to close down, before being bought by Roxio. It then went through a phase of being an online music store, similar to iTunes or Amazon MP3 store. Recently in December 2011 Napster merged with Rhapsody, which is a browser based music streaming website similar to Spotify.
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