WiMP is a Norwegian proprietary music streaming service, similar to Spotify

Spotify

Spotify is a Swedish-founded, UK-headquartered DRM-based music streaming service offering streaming of selected music from a range of major and independent record labels, including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal. Launched in October 2008 by Swedish startup Spotify AB, the service had...

, that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums, with virtually no buffering delay. Music can be browsed by artist, by album or by created playlists as well as by direct searches. The service is made by the Norwegian company Aspiro in co-operation with Platekompaniet and Telenor

Telenor

Telenor Group is the incumbent telecommunications company in Norway, with headquarters located at Fornebu, close to Oslo. Today, Telenor Group is mostly an international wireless carrier with operations in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Asia, working predominantly under the Telenor brand...

. Music in WiMP is streamed using the HE-AAC

HE-AAC

High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding is a lossy data compression scheme for digital audio defined as a MPEG-4 Audio profile in ISO/IEC 14496-3. It is an extension of Low Complexity AAC optimized for low-bitrate applications such as streaming audio...

 file format in a bitrate of 64 kbit/s or the AAC

Advanced Audio Coding

Advanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates....

 file format in a bitrate of 256 kbit/s if the high quality streaming option is selected.

Cost and availability

Wimp is funded by paid subscriptions. The price is 99 NOK per month, but a 30-day free trial is available. WiMP is currently only available in Norway, Denmark and Sweden.. Canal Digital cable TV and satellite customers in Norway may sign up for a limited edition of Wimp for free and the full version at a reduced cost.

Last.fm integration

The application features Last.fm

Last.fm

Last.fm is a music website, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It has claimed 30 million active users in March 2009. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for UK£140m ....

 integration which allows the current track to be "scrobble

Scrobble

Scrobble may refer to:* Scrobble: to kidnap or capture. In particular to throw a bag or cloth over the head and bundle the victim away.* Scrobble: to send data about the musical history of a user to Last.fm....

d" without making use of the Last.fm software.

Buy links

Users can also buy tracks from within WiMP, as 256 kbit/s drm-free MP3-downloads through the Platekompaniet online music store

Online music store

An online music store is an online business which sells audio files, usually music, on a per-song and/or subscription basis. It may be differentiated from music streaming services in that the music store offers the actual music file, while streaming services offer partial or full listening without...

.

Catalogue

WiMP gives full access to play music from a library of about six million tracks. The selection is growing rapidly and the focus is to have the most complete selection possible. At the moment WiMP has a special focus on the selection of Norwegian music.

Mobile devices

WiMP has developed an Android client of the application, and released a version for the iOS on June 7, 2010.