If you are a music enthusiast and active on Facebook regular you may have noticed a new trend being set online - Spotify, which is a light weight downloadable plugin and software app which lets you listen to endless amounts of music free has started to appear in friend feeds around the globe. The result is half a million new users since they integrated into a Facebook application.

This week the company made several announcements regarding their success. The software seems to have taken hold with many music fans as easy search and streaming of music from many genres can accessed with little effort. The light weight piece of software runs in your computers toolbar and connects into Facebook accounts with ease.

Once users start listening to music it automatically updates friends of which songs you are currently listening to. The whole registration process is quite easy too because Spotify automatically picks out user details from your Facebook profile when you log in with your credentials.

The whole Facebook/Spotify integration has definitely given the software a serious boost. Its caused a viral storm through Facebook when friends see others listening to free music.

Although Spotify is free, there are paid options which grant users additional benefits. Subscribers can pay £9.99 per month which gives access to 15 million tracks. In addition paid users will also have removal of potentially annoying adverts and have the ability to download music to Iphone's and BlackBerry devices.

The European company which owns Spotify announced on Wednesday that they had topped 2.5 million paying subscribers.

There are still many arguments for and against streaming services like Spotify as to whether they damage the music industry or not, along with other legal issues and questions