Marginalia
A miscellany of musings on the tech that crosses my path
Wednesday 17 June 2009, 2:26 PM
Spotify: let the music begin
If you’ve not tried Spotify yet, then please, please do. Give yourself at least half an hour and at best an hour for your first visit.
Spotify is a streaming music service. There are oodles of artist and oodles of songs available. OK, at the current count the number is a shade over 90,000 tracks. If your musical tastes are as eclectic as mine, if you love discovering new artists, then you’ll love Spotify.
Classical music fans will enjoy the fact that Spotify cut a deal with Naxos earlier this year to put more than 100,000 of its tracks onto the service. Other labels on the service include Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music Group, Merlin, The Orchard and CD Baby.
I like to listen track by track, mooching about as my taste dictates. Alternatively you can make playlists. And you can drag a track or playlist into an email message where it becomes a live link. Send it to someone else with Spotify and they can share what you’ve found.
There are two versions of the service. I use the free one, and every now and again a few spoken word ads interrupt my listening pleasure. I can live with them, but if you can’t there’s a £9.99 a month subscription that wipes the ads.
That’s all I need to say, really. Try it for yourself.
PreviousComments on this post
It's a fantastic service and soon will be available in the U.S. Until Spotify came along, I used and in fact still do use playlist.com.
I think spotify has the edge here. When it came out I was suspicious of the fact that it left the client running in the background after shutting it down. Enough so to write a warning blog.
On hind sight I don't mind sharing a little bandwidth if it makes the expierience better for everybody. It's easy to shut of if need be.
Spotify is superb - for sure.
The ads are not too intrusive and it's great fun to try some eclectic searches and see where their files do or don't match up to your own personal tastes.
The Spotify Radio option is not so great though. They pick tracks by genre and move from one to another. It's not so good.
The band info write ups are very good though.
