By Vesper Arnett
If you’re a music fan, take note of this. Spotify is a streaming music service that allows you to listen to almost any artist and album that you want at any time. It’s legal. It’s free. It also can hook up to your Facebook account, but more on that later.
The service originated back in 2008 as a better alternative to illegal music piracy and was initially restricted to seven European countries including theUnited Kingdom. It has finally made its way to theUnited Statesthis summer and is currently in Beta invite-only mode, much like Google Plus.
Spotify’s catalogue of music has a lot for users to choose from. Just by glancing at the ‘Top Lists’ tab page, the user can see the top 100 albums for Spotify’s users. Artists in the catalogue include Adele, SBTKRT, Michael Jackson, Robyn, The Decemberists, Nicki Minaj, Beastie Boys, Pixies, Talking Heads, Queen, Björk… you get the picture, there are a lot.
OK, what’s the catch?
Advertisements. Yes, there are ads, just like Pandora, YouTube and Facebook. They don’t interrupt your listening experience that much, unless you’re really in the heart of an album and are excited for the next song to start. In that case the ads kind of stink, but this service makes an excellent bridge between Pandora and Last.FM, which recommend similar artists based on what you listen to already, but those services don’t let you listen to albums of your choosing in their entirety. If you hear an artist you like on a recommendation service, then you can easily check out their entire discography with Spotify.
Another downside is that you need to download their application from their site, and it also depends on an Internet connection to stream the music. These are minor downsides, but if your laptop’s battery is running low or if you mainly listen to music at work it could pose a problem.
Pandora has a listening cap on its streaming music service, but I haven’t run into that so far on Spotify. I expect to at some point, though finding out what the cap is will probably take a while.
If you don’t like ads or don’t want to wait for an invite, you can always buy their premium service. The premium service allows its users to stream music from your mobile devices with an app.
With Facebook integration, a user can drag and drop songs and playlists into their friends’ inboxes. Spotify also connects with iTunes to import playlists and share them with friends.
Overall I like the service a lot, and I expect that it will get stiff competition from Apple’s iCloud service this fall.
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