Tuesday Tunes: Spotify
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Spotify – Now available in the US!
I still owe you a post on Amazon Cloud Drive, but it can wait. Spotify is in the US now, previously only in the UK and Europe. What is Spotify? Yeah, it’s another music streaming service. But this one is a bit different than the others. I told you about Google Music. That’s a music locker that uses your own music to upload to the cloud. Spotify is a combo streaming service. It syncs your music to mobile devices AND allows you to play music you don’t own over the internet. For free, or you can expand your options and pay a monthly subscription. Interested yet? Let me show you how this works.
Playing an album
First off, once you are signed up, you need to download the app for your Windows or Mac computer. Once you have that, install it and login. Above is what the main app window looks like when you are playing an album. The left bar is all sorts of different options like syncing your iTunes library, checking what’s new and to see what devices are connected to your Spotify account.
The free version is ad supported, like banner ads. And also when you are listening, ads will play in between every few songs. Like listening to a radio station. To get rid of the ads, you can sign up for a monthly service for as low as $4.99/mo.
Palm Pre mobile syncing with desktop app
Have a mobile device? There’s apps for webOS (Palm Pre), Android and iPhone. I installed the iPhone and the webOS apps. For my Palm Pre, I can sync all local songs that I have on my iTunes, but any streaming from music that is on Spotify, I need to sign up for a paid account. Same with the iPhone. Sync local, but streaming live needs a subscription.
And speaking of syncing local, by signing up for a Premium account for $9.99/mo. you can have any of the songs you would stream on the free Spotify synced local to your computer or mobile device. All playable, so long as you keep that subscription going. Think of it as paying a licensing fee to play music.
My Thoughts
So far, I like it. I’ve been able to listen to a good 20 or so albums… some I’ve been wanting to hear like Bon Iver and others that I might not ever listened to before like Britney Spears and Katy Perry. I could see continued use shoving something like iTunes aside and giving it some serious competition. There are Spotify users already planning to make the switch. For now, it’s an additional place for me to play music [I still have a sizable investment in iTunes], but it’s a solid product and one that I see having a use for integrating one’s music across multiple platforms.
Need an invite? Want to see what is the buzz with Spotify? Click the photo above or this link to sign up. It should be good for a while.
Give Spotify a shot. It’s free and you might find some cool music you’ve enjoy.
Who already has Spotify? Tell me how you are liking it (or not).
My friend D.A. Wallach from Chester French is the “artist in residence” at Spotify so I definitely wanted to give it a try. And I LOOOOVE it! So much I bought a premium subscription. There are so many albums I want so now I have them all at my fingertips. My favorite is having my playlists available on my iPhone so I can play them on my car stero with an iPhone connector. The only downside is not actually owning the music, but that would defeat the purpose and would obviously cost much more.
That’s cool you know the “artist in residence” at Spotify. I really like this service. Haven’t decided to jump in with a paid subscription yet.
The Premium sub puts local versions of songs on mobile devices, which is a nice feature when you don’t have constant access to a web connection.
I love the idea of it, until Dave2 brought up that there’s KARAOKE versions of songs you have to scroll through to get to what you want to listen to.
Possibly the worst sentence I’ve ever written.
Anyway, that part would KILL me.
I’ve had to get drunk while listening to the karaoke songs on Spotify… 😉
A friend of mine sent me an invite about a week ago and I’ve been giving it a whirl. I really like it. There were a couple of albums I wanted to listen to that Spotify didn’t have but they were a little obscure so can’t really fault them for that. The Spotify app is well designed and kinda slick. I thought that this could be the answer to all my $64,000 “what if Apple don’t bump up the storage on the iPod classic?” question.
Oddly though, I found myself missing iTunes somewhat. And after a week of using Spotify, I’ve gone back. I think it boils down to a couple of things. Playcounts and smart playlists. And how those two things both interrelate. Firstly I love my playcounts. I love knowing the last time I played something, how many times I’ve listened to it. (I think that’s also why I’m a last.fm junkie). In sort, I’m a bit anal about it.
Listening to things in Spotify, while being able to still scrobble to last.fm, won’t ever update my playcounts in iTunes. And I have a bunch of smart playlists in iTunes related to playcounts. I have a “most listened to” playlist of my top 300. A “under 10 plays” playlist, a “never played” playlist, a “haven’t listened to this year” playlist etc. I found that so much of my listening habits were tied to these smart playlists that I kinda missed them.
For me, smart playlists are the reason why iTunes is my “go to” music player of choice. The ability to have a “genre is goth, but ignore that cure album i don’t like, and i only want those songs that were released between 1980 and 1985” playlist is the reason god made iTunes.
Wow, this could be a blog post of its own couldn’t it? Sorry mate.
The Smart Playlists in iTunes are used a lot here, too. Nice way to sort music differently and have easy access to often heard tunes.
And you make a good point about the lack of Spotify not updating playcounts in iTunes. With all of my iDevices, it’s nice that the play counts add every track played into the same list.
And a fine blog post you created from a comment here. 😉