Spotify's music now follows you wherever your roaming fees will allow

Spotify has just done this:



They stress that it's a work in progress, but also hint at other mobile apps in development (i.e. for phones which, unlike the Android, people actually own.)

It's something that's been threatened for quite a while, and clearly there's still quite a way to go before almost-free music on-demand from the cloud. But paying a premium for Comes With Music suddenly looks a lot less attractive, doesn't it?

[Thanks to Michael M for the link]

The Android makes music

Amongst the frilly giggling of tech-headed types as Google's first phone, the G1, gets announced, there's a an announcement from Amazon that - for punters in the US, at least - the Android phone will have Amazon's DRM-free mp3 store "preloaded" into it. (In other words, there's a shortcut on the phone desktop which will simplify the purchase process.)

The announcement is careful to stress that the store is preloaded as part of the phone, not as part of the operating system; it'd surely be in Google's interests to stitch this as a deal across all Android phones regardless of operator. The other odd aspect of the deal is that you can only download music over wi-fi - not over, you know, the telephone service. Presumably T-Mobile is worried about customers actually consuming bandwidth if they could suck music down on 3G.