Spotify: Does It Live Up To The Hype?

What would you do if you could own every song in the world? It sounds a bit extreme, but it’s not that far from reality.

Enter Spotify, the free music service that’s already a hit in Europe (over 16 million users!), and is now making its debut on this side of the pond. The site boasts that it can provide “any track, any time, anywhere,” but does it live up to the hype?

The first step is signing up. After getting on Spotify’s website (Spotify.com), users must enter their email address to be invited to use the service. Whether this is for some legit technical reason or to create the air of selectivity is unclear. But after signing up, it took about 3 days for me to get my email invitation. A quick click and download and Spofify was ready to use.

The main page prominently features a list of albums that were recently released. Just select the album of your choice, and you can listen to it in its entirety. Users can also access the database of 15 million songs by simply typing the name of the artist or song they want to hear in the ‘search’ box. Plus, the program imports your iTunes library…so all of your music is in one place.

Spotify has also gone social. With one click, it links straight to your Facebook account bringing up all of your friends who use Spotify. This allows you to see their top artists and the playlists they’ve created. It’s a great way to find new music!

The glaring setback to Spotify is that you can’t keep the music. It’s more like Pandora on steroids, where you can listen freely, but you can’t download actual songs. There are also very annoying commercials that play sporadically and always seem to catch you off guard. However, there is a solution to the ad issue. Spotify features two other tiers that users can opt for if they don’t mind shelling out a few bucks. For $4.99 a month, the unlimited version removes the presence of ads. A monthly fee of $9.99 will get you commercial free music along with the ability to listen offline and on your cell phone.

For me, I found the free version to be pretty enjoyable. I could access every song I searched for, I found some great new music and well…it was free!

- Brittany Jones-Cooper
www.bjonescooper.com
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August 3rd, 2011 | Mara | Comments Off |