For those of you looking for a distraction from the debt ceiling, here’s a review of Spotify after the break.
Spotify Lives Up to the HypePost + Comments (45)
I got an invite to Spotify via this link the other day, and so far I’m very impressed. Free or cheap unlimited streaming has been around before, but Spotify’s implementation is by far the best I’ve seen.
Spotify has a desktop player that seamlessly integrates your iTunes library (or other music libraries) with their seemingly infinite music collection. When you search Spotify for an artist or track, it returns everything it can find in its collection and yours. Both search and playback are virtually instantaneous. In practice, it’s impossible to tell whether you’re streaming a song or playing it from your own music collection.
You can also do things like share playlists over social media, or create a playlist and email a link to it to your Spotify-using friends. The artist bios and related artist components are decent quality and work well with search.
The key fact about Spotify is that it “just works” — the player isn’t overfeatured and the streaming is glitch-free. There are three editions: free, with an invite, which plays an (annoying) ad every few minutes and displays ads in the player; unlimited ($5/month), which does away with ads, and premium ($10/month), which also lets you stream on your mobile device or on other network devices. I’m still mooching on the free service but I’ll probably throw down for the unlimited, since it’s less than the price of one album.
This review sounds like a goddam commercial, but I was predisposed not to like this service, and I’m surprised at having the opposite reaction.