Spotify has apologised to it's users' after an outage on Saturday evening left the popular music streaming service unusable for thousands of music lovers. Spotify allows anyone to stream potentially millions of music tracks to their computers or mobile device without having to pay for the privilege. It is subsidised by periodic adverts between some tracks and from a subscription of £9.99 per month should users wish to remove the adverts and have access to other 'premium' features.

As a Spotify user myself, I found on Saturday evening that I could not connect to the service. It quickly become apparent after a quick search that the service was experiencing a major outage. It was down for several hours before coming back online later in the evening.

Today Spotify have issued a statement via their blog that says they experienced a power outage at their London data center where some of their content is hosted. Backup generators kicked in but for some reason the air conditioning in the center did not fire up properly.

With server rooms running at high temperatures, it's important to keep the systems cool, otherwise they will malfunction due to the heat. Spotify's Andres Sehr stated that, "Heat is a major issue in large data centres and without this cooling unit the temperature rose very quickly and our servers shut down to protect themselves from over heating."

Due to the complexity of their system, it look a while to fire everything up again and for things to return to normal. However everything is running as normal again and full service is restored according to Spotify; "Currently all systems are working properly - a few premium users may have some billing anomalies due to the outage but we will contact those users directly to resolve any issues.", said Sehr.

On behalf of Spotify Sehr said that having a stable and secure service is of the utmost importance to them and that they are sorry for the downtime. "We’re very sorry for the silence this caused and I can assure you that over the next few days and weeks we’ll be working to make sure that this does not happen again."

Spotify the ad supported service that streams music for free, seems to be experiencing a major outage as I type. When I tried to connect to the service about half an hour ago it would not connect to the servers. Suspicious I searched Google and quickly came across lots of other people who are also experiencing similar issues.

After some reading it quickly become obvious that the Spotify service has gone down, even the official spotify.com website is down. Whether it's because of some catastrophic hardware failure or worse a malicious attack of some sort is unclear at this time.  Spotify have stated from their community support system  that they are "currently having network problems and are working on it as fast as we can to resolve it and get online again" and that the outage is affecting all users.

The reality of a cloud based service such as Spotify going down has hit home with many thousands of people today. Now I'm going away to load up foobar for the first time in months.

UPDATE: As previously thought, the outage has been confirmed as a "big one" at their London site, and sadly is not easy to put right again. Which could suggest that it maybe down for a while. A post by a Spotify representative on their support system has stated "As you notice we are still down. I'ts a big outage (as you probably figured) and unfortunately not easily fixed. Hang in there!".

UPDATE 2: Looks like after several hours of downtime, the Spotify team have resolved the problem(s). Spotify.com and the desktop client are back up and running although they both remain temperamental.

Sky has announced that it plans to release a digital music service called Sky Songs that will try to compete alongside Apple's iTunes and Spotify.

Initially Sky Songs will have 4 million tracks and will include new and back catalogues from the likes of EMI, Universal, Sony, Warner and some independant labels.

Sky are offering customers the choice of two subscription models. The first one costs £6.49 per month and allows the user to download 1 album or 10 tracks per month. The second subscription costs £7.99 per month will allow the consumer to download up to 15 tracks per month. The extra 5 tracks for this subscription service will cost about 30p compared to 65p if you wanted to download more than 10 tracks with the cheaper subscription. If you don't wish to download any content both subscriptions will allow you to stream music ad-free without any limitations, any time you like.

As mentioned you will be able to download additional tracks and albums outside you're monthly allowance. However this will cost you 65p per track or £6.49 per album regardless of what subscription you are signed up to.

Sky say that purchased downloads will be available as an mp3s and will be playable on any mp3 device DRM Free! This is something Apple's iTunes does not cater for and could prove crucial for consumers who want their purchases to be available on any device they own.

Andria Vidler President of EMI Music for the UK & Ireland, welcomed the announcement by stating "Sky has proven expertise in running first class consumer services and we welcome their entry into the music market.  The widespread adoption of DRM-free downloads has helped drive new digital music services and with Sky’s launch we have another major player who will help our artists and their music reach an ever wider audience."

Since this is a new product Sky are offering all their broadband customers a free album download worth £6.49 when the service becomes available on the 19th October 2009 via http://songs.sky.com.