A friend from across the pond recently brought something incredible into my life: the peer-to-peer music streaming service Spotify.
I was a little skeptical when I fist heard about Spotify. If you're like me, you enjoy hunting down new music from around the world on your own using blogs, word of mouth, and a plethora of downloading tools, to grow your tastes and personal mp3 library. As a rule I generally avoid things like LastFm and Pandora. For me they take a lot of the fun out of it.
Thankfully, Spotify is nothing like those programs. What is Spotify then? I'm so glad you asked!
Ever had one of those nights where the only thing you want to do is throw caution to the wind, go to a Chinese restaurant and completely lay waste to the buffet line? Help yourself to plate after ungodly plate of every piece of Chinese food you can think of? Start with some General Tso's chicken, gently work your way over those spring rolls, stay away from that nasty-looking pudding, and finish up with an unhealthy amount of crab wantons/rangoons/whatever you call those things? Perhaps you even want to go out on a limb, and discover something new (if such a thing exists in Chinese-American dining) along your journey? If you know what I'm talking about, and I think you do...Spotify is kind of like that. Only with music. And without the utterly pride-destroying, post-Chinese binge eating hangover.
Spotify is a service which gives you, via a small downloadable client, access to a surprisingly rich (and rapidly expanding) library of music. That library is fully and easily searchable by song title, artist, album, genre, popularity, even record label. There is also a radio function, but to be honest I really haven't checked that out. All this at your fingertips, with a simple and sleek user interface not unlike iTunes. In fact it's almost like someone put tens of millions of songs on your iTunes while you were asleep.
Then there's the playlist function. This is the part that really got me interested: with one click you can take a song from your search results and add it to a playlist. Spotify lets you create tons of playlists, and it saves them so you can access and change them any time, almost* anywhere. You can share playlists with other people, and even create collaborative playlists with others. This minuscule, perfectly unobtrusive element of social-listening really pulled me in. There are no profiles to create, no interest sections to fill out, and no annoying status updates. The idea of collaborative playlists and sharing sealed the deal for me.
Though I didn't think I would like it at first, the related artist features are actually really handy, especially if you are searching for specific types of music from around the world. For instance, Spotify has been hooking me up with suggestions of great Norwegian folk and folk-rock bands from the 1970's and 80's all night. "Femøres Fridtjolf" and "Steinaldersjel" by Nøkken are nothing less than amazing songs, if you can ever check them out.
I mean, some of this stuff is music I potentially would have had to spend many hours digging around dusty corners of the internet for, just to get artist names, let alone find more than one or two songs if I got lucky. It's not like stumbling on some indie band from Brooklyn on a blog at random and checking them out. There's really no way I would I have been exposed to this stuff if not for Spotify.
However, I will say Spotify's world-beat/African area is slightly lacking. I searched for Franco and they didn't even have a single song! They do have lots of Fela Kuti, some Tinariwen, and other bigger names in African music (but no Franco? WTF). Doesn't look like they have much from the World Village Music label just yet. I think they will start get more African and indigenous world-beat music on here as the service evolves.
I am not exaggerating when I say that I haven't stopped using Spotify since I first got it, which must have been about five days ago. I am completely, 100% addicted to Spotify. That said, here's a list of some pros and cons I have found over that period of time.
Pros:
-Excellent sound quality, the best streaming quality I have ever heard.
-No perceivable buffering, even on a bad internet connection. The worst I have experienced is a small, two or three second delay between songs. Streaming as close to flawless as it gets.
-Insane, easy-to-access library.
-Instant access to your music with limited (you can set the size of Spotify's cache) minimal usage of hard drive and space. I use Spotify on my small netbook running Windows XP with 1GB memory/160GB drive, and just as a test I opened Spotify, iTunes, Photoshop, MS Word, and Firefox all at once and found I had no problems.
-Fully legal and licensed. That means artists and labels are paid.
-Easily navigable interface
-Free. The free version does have advertisements (the premium version does not) but they are minimal. I have found them not the least bit annoying.
-Play queue! Something I have always wanted in iTunes.
-Related artist features.
Cons:
-The big four record companies, as a result of agreeing to license their music to Spotify, own a large share of the company. Not sure how this effects what gets added or left out from Spotify's library.
-Some smaller artists are not yet a part of the Spotfiy library (only one Iron and Wine song!?!?). But I feel like this is going to change as the service evolves. Eventually, it would make sense for Spotify to allow artists to willingly upload their music with the consent of their label to increase exposure. An upcoming artists feature or something. In the meantime, it would be nice if Spotify let users upload their own tracks to fill in the gaps (strictly for personal use).
-Unless you buy the premium subscription, you don't have offline access to your playlists.
-You need an invite to get the free version...for now. Or maybe a good friend to let you test out their account :)
And now for the one really big, annoying, problematic con for most of us "yanks." Remember that asterisk I placed next to the "almost" a few paragraphs back? Brace yourself.
*Spotify is not available in America...yet.
Yes, it is true. Making it possibly the best thing to come out of Europe since socialized medicine, Spotify is currently only available in 6 European countries. But that is reportedly set to change this fall. Spotify has briefly flirted with open, invite-free access to its eligible countries, and my guess would be that soon after it comes to America, it will go permanently invite-free.
So how did I get Spotify? It's actually kind of fun. First off you need an invite. This is the most difficult part. Comb the web, sign up for some invite lists, or talk to some friends. Then you just go through a proxy-server to fake your IP address so that Spotify thinks you're in one of its eligible locations, and sign up from there. Spotify has a 14 day travel restriction, so you will need to fake your IP once every two weeks to get around this.
I know this sounds like a lot of work. But it's much easier than it sounds, and it's totally worth it. If you're up for it, TechCrunch outlines exactly how to do it in three easy steps.
If you don't feel like being a covert American early-adopter, you can always wait until it hits the States. I might even consider buying the premium subscription when it does. That's how much I like this thing. It's great for me, because the size of my mp3 library is ridiculous, my 80GB iPod is full, and I don't need to keep adding to my library unless it's absolutely necessary. That's why Spotify is so great. But don't just take my word for it.
Check it out for yourself.
