For the past couple of months, my friend Todd Vernon has had Spotify installed on his computer at work. You can always tell when he is about to get serious about putting together a powerpoint deck, because the sounds of Rush begin to…well….rush out of his office.

Whats that? I would ask.

Spotify. It has every band/song you could ever want.

Do you have an invite?

Not for you sucka!

Thats pretty much how the conversation would go. It was like Todd was dangling the fact that he had something cool, and questioning my ability to get an invite.

I figured since I have more than 33,000 songs at home, and could access them from anywhere, that there was no technology that I would miss.

That was until I sent out this tweet:

To which I got this response:

Damn, I thought. This wasnt going to be easy.

Later, when I checked my email, I saw I had two emails. One from a friend in Copenhagen, who forwarded me an invite that was non-US specific (so it didnt work), and one email from the founder of Spotify, Daniel Ek.

Daniel’s invite worked, and I began to use Spotify.

Holy crap! That is one bad ass application.

It literally changes the way I listen to music. The library is solid (unless you listen to really obscure or random music) and the recommendation engine is sweet. It is really an amazing application.

But, being a single user isnt whats cool. I asked Daniel for a couple more invites, which I quickly distributed (it seems the demand is high – hint, hint!), and that is where the really power of the application revealed itself.

I can now IM links to songs or albums or artists, and with a single click, my friends (which is anyone using Spotify) can listen to the tracks. Even more interesting is the ability to create a collaborative playlist that, when shared, become truly, well, collaborative. Anyone with access to the playlist can add or subtract songs. Now, four or five of us will add songs that we think the rest will like, and suddenly we have a crowdsourced music recommendation engine.

Often, after test driving songs, I go and buy them at Amazon (with their mp3′s, I now refuse to buy music on iTunes). I wish there was a direct link in Spotify.

Spotify has quickly become an application that I use daily (for hours). I cant wait for it to become widely available in the US. I truly hope that its model is successful and not shut down by the RIAA.

(Unfortunately, I have given out all my invites. Im guessing, that if you ask nicely enough, that one just might show up in your email box…)

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