Reviews: Music Streaming with Spotify

Spotify is a music streaming service that has gained a lot of popularity recently. It's similar to last.fm in that you can stream music from a particular artist or genre but unlike last.fm, Spotify gives you complete control over which tracks you listen to and when. It does all this using the free Spotify application which bears a very familiar iTunes-like interface.

The most important feature for the success of any music streaming service has to be the size of its music library. Spotify has a great music library thanks to deals with the major labels (Universal, Sony BMG, EMI, Warner, etc.) as well as a number of smaller labels. The Spotify library is currently being updated and claims to be one of the fastest growing catalogues of licensed music in the world. Some artists have however opted not to be part of the Spotify library: Metallica, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, ACDC and Led Zeppelin.

The Spotify application offers four ways of listening to music:

Streaming by genre(s) and decade

Within the radio function, Spotify lets you select one more genres as well as the decades. The ability to select the decades is a nice touch that most other music stream services don't provide. Finally, you won't have to worry about a track by the Spice Girls showing up in your music stream, unless of course you are into this sort of thing, in which case you can set the decades slider to "90s to 00s".

Search by Album, Artist or Track

If you're after a specific artist, album or track, simply use the search field and if it's in the Spotify library, you can stream it instantly or even make a playlist which brings me on to the third way of accessing music on Spotify.

A tribute to the mixtape: Shared and Collaborative Playlists

No application is truly complete in this day and age without a social networking feature. Spotify lets you drag and drop any track, album, artist or playlist to your email or instant messenger. This creates a link that you can send to your loved ones. If that's not enough to satisfy your social media envy, you can also mark a playlist as 'Collaborative'. This allows anyone with the link to the playlist to make changes which makes it an excellent way to plan the music for your next party.

Artist Radio

Simply search for a particular artist and Spotify picks a stream of tracks from similar artists. If you've used Pandora in the past, this feature is just very similar. However, unlike Pandora, it's missing the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons that lets you fine tune upcoming tracks to your specific taste. What Spotify does let you do instead is skip through as many tracks as you wish in the stream, excellent in comparison to the 6 skips per hour limit for Pandora.

The Spotify App

The Spotify application is very easy to use, specially if you're familiar with the iTunes interface. It consists of a left sidebar which provides easy access to any playlists that you've created, your current play queue and even recent search results. And just below, you'll find details of the currently playing song along with its album art.

Search for an artist and Spotify gives not only gives you a full listing of available albums/tracks but there's also a tab for a Biography page and another for listening to Artist Radio.

The Spotify application runs on Mac OS, Windows and Linux (under WINE) and also has a built in last.fm scrobbling feature.

How much does it all cost?

There are three plans, the cheapest of which is free (if you have an invite) but has the occasional audio advert that lasts for about 20 to 30 seconds. If you're not the one for ads, you can either get a day pass (£0.99) or go for a monthly subscription (£9.99).

With this amazing feature set, it's no wonder Spotify has been gaining a lot of popularity lately. According to Google Trends, it's one of the most popular music streaming services at the moment, even surpassing Last.fm and Napster. Some have even dubbed Spotify as an iTunes Killer. Before Spotify can even think of taking on iTunes though, it will at least need to come up with a way to use the service from portable devices, something which could be quite a challenge considering Apple's share of the mp3 player market as well as its tight rein on the App Store.

If you like the sound of Spotify and would like to give it a try for free, sound out in the comments as I still have a few invites left.

Any invites left ?
Hate to beg, but I signed up and they're yet to contact me, so thought I'd just ask. Enjoyed Last.fm through mobbler on my E71, but I usually do prefer to have more control over my music. Amazon's been useful for that, as I dislike most DRM out there. With services like this (and Amazon and now iTunes getting rid of DRM), and sites like GOG.com springing up(DRM-less downloadable games), what are the chances of DRM disappearing altogether within 2-3 years ?
Ok... we can dream.

Liking the writeup a lot, particularly the Google Trends graph. I genuinely think it's the most exciting thing to happen to digital music in a long time.

umm.. no metallica songs... that's just. guess metallica only cares about $.