Spotify - Or how I stopped listening to Tool and started to buy CDs again
I'm a bit behind the curve on this one, but just got round to trying out Spotify earlier this evening. For those as out the loop as me, it's basically an app where you can stream music to your PC at no cost, a pretty large library of music is available and you pay for it by listening to the odd advert much like comercial radio. For £0.99 you can buy a day free from adverts and for £9.99 a month you can access all the content advert free.
The app itself is a black iTunes clone which is pretty straightforward to use. Search for music, add it to a queue and play the music. You can also set up playlists and it has the ability to link in to your last.fm account to track all your new found music. The only thing which appears to be missing is some way of rating tracks/albums you have listened to, in order to go back and find a band you though were pretty good later when you're buying CDs
I was a bit sceptical at first, maybe only 40% of bands I searched for are available. I thought this was a bit poor, and was thinking maybe it's aimed more at mainstream tastes rather than my strange musical listening habits. But after a bit of perseverance, I've found more music I want to listen to than I have time to listen to, and that's without searching for anything I am already familiar with, so it's not all bad.
The adverts are surprisingly well spaced, you can listen to a lot more music before being interupted than I thought would be the case. So far, the adverts have been about 20 seconds of adverts per 15-20 minutes of music. They're also not as intrusive as I thought they might be, although it would be nice if they tried to sell me some albums I might actually buy rather than the Pop albums they seem to be pushing. (Not sure if this will change based on my listening habits).
90% of music I listen to tends to be at work on my iPod and without the ability to stream from the internet there, I'm not going to be able to listen to Spotify. So it's back to either downloading music illegally (something I have pretty much stopped doing) or buying CDs (something I wish I did more). [Although it has to be said the UK's current archaic copyright laws mean that buying the CD and ripping it to my iPod is technically illegal as well]. The one strength Spotify does offer though is being able to preview an entire album completely legally before purchase.
It's a bit surreal though, if I was to find a torrent for an album I was interested in, download the album and listen to it before deciding to buy the CD, I'd open myself up to the possibility of a $1.9 million fine (at least if I lived in the US). But load up Spotify, listen to the same album with perhaps an advert for some album I'm never going to buy and that's completely legal.
Anyway, I don't see me ever paying £9.99 a month for the service, the adverts are too unintrusive to make it worthwhile and I'm unlikely to listen to more than a couple of hours a week. For that £9.99 I could buy a CD and listen to it to death for 37 hours a week (Interesting fact: for the past month or so I've basically been listening to the last 3 Tool albums non-stop while at work, but now I want something new, hence the Spotify experiemtn). Being able to sample music free of charge before purchasing the CD definitely helps, it saves me loading up the MySpace page of the band in question and dealing with the Flash hell to listen to maybe 2 tracks off an album. It also frees me from the poor quality 15 second samples Amazon allow you to listen to on their website.
Since signing up for Spotify this evening, I've added 6 albums to my Amazon wish list which I will probably buy in the next week (maybe ... ;) and 5 of them were from bands I haven't ever heard before.
Overall, Spotify is a pretty good service, could it be better? Yeh, it could have every album available on Amazon available to listen to, but that's no mean feat and the range that is there is still pretty good. It's more appealing that last.fm radio since I can choose all the bands up front and listen to a whole album if I want. To sum it up:
Amazon recommendations + Spotify == Expanded Horizons.
The app itself is a black iTunes clone which is pretty straightforward to use. Search for music, add it to a queue and play the music. You can also set up playlists and it has the ability to link in to your last.fm account to track all your new found music. The only thing which appears to be missing is some way of rating tracks/albums you have listened to, in order to go back and find a band you though were pretty good later when you're buying CDs
I was a bit sceptical at first, maybe only 40% of bands I searched for are available. I thought this was a bit poor, and was thinking maybe it's aimed more at mainstream tastes rather than my strange musical listening habits. But after a bit of perseverance, I've found more music I want to listen to than I have time to listen to, and that's without searching for anything I am already familiar with, so it's not all bad.
The adverts are surprisingly well spaced, you can listen to a lot more music before being interupted than I thought would be the case. So far, the adverts have been about 20 seconds of adverts per 15-20 minutes of music. They're also not as intrusive as I thought they might be, although it would be nice if they tried to sell me some albums I might actually buy rather than the Pop albums they seem to be pushing. (Not sure if this will change based on my listening habits).
90% of music I listen to tends to be at work on my iPod and without the ability to stream from the internet there, I'm not going to be able to listen to Spotify. So it's back to either downloading music illegally (something I have pretty much stopped doing) or buying CDs (something I wish I did more). [Although it has to be said the UK's current archaic copyright laws mean that buying the CD and ripping it to my iPod is technically illegal as well]. The one strength Spotify does offer though is being able to preview an entire album completely legally before purchase.
It's a bit surreal though, if I was to find a torrent for an album I was interested in, download the album and listen to it before deciding to buy the CD, I'd open myself up to the possibility of a $1.9 million fine (at least if I lived in the US). But load up Spotify, listen to the same album with perhaps an advert for some album I'm never going to buy and that's completely legal.
Anyway, I don't see me ever paying £9.99 a month for the service, the adverts are too unintrusive to make it worthwhile and I'm unlikely to listen to more than a couple of hours a week. For that £9.99 I could buy a CD and listen to it to death for 37 hours a week (Interesting fact: for the past month or so I've basically been listening to the last 3 Tool albums non-stop while at work, but now I want something new, hence the Spotify experiemtn). Being able to sample music free of charge before purchasing the CD definitely helps, it saves me loading up the MySpace page of the band in question and dealing with the Flash hell to listen to maybe 2 tracks off an album. It also frees me from the poor quality 15 second samples Amazon allow you to listen to on their website.
Since signing up for Spotify this evening, I've added 6 albums to my Amazon wish list which I will probably buy in the next week (maybe ... ;) and 5 of them were from bands I haven't ever heard before.
Overall, Spotify is a pretty good service, could it be better? Yeh, it could have every album available on Amazon available to listen to, but that's no mean feat and the range that is there is still pretty good. It's more appealing that last.fm radio since I can choose all the bands up front and listen to a whole album if I want. To sum it up:
Amazon recommendations + Spotify == Expanded Horizons.
posted by Unknown at 11:44 PM
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