A Revolution in Music: Spotify

We have all heard of web streaming music services such as last.fm and Pandora, but I recently had the opportunity to use a desktop streaming music software called Spotify and was amazed.

Spotify, the company, was founded by entrepreneurs Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon and has its headquarters in Luxembourg. Spotify, the software, has been in beta for a little over a year, and gone through a number of revisions in the process. Currently, it offers an iTunes like interface for both playing music and searching through their extensive collection of songs. Songs are organized into playlists simply by dragging them from the Spotify music library. Playing a song is as simple as double clicking on it. Finding a song involves typing the title, artist, etc. into the search bar and then browsing through the search results.

Several areas of the product I especially enjoyed were:

Buffer Time

While using Spotify there was none. None while playing songs that had been streamed previously. None while playing obscure Seattle bands. It was incredible. Even my local music library takes longer to start playing songs when the hard drive has to spin up. I continued to test this with as many songs as I could and was not able to make it pause before a song started playing.

Overall Speed

Spotify offers clients for Windows and Mac OS X (could not find information about Linux). Everything in the interface was responsive. Search results were returned incredibly fast. Spotify felt solid and lightweight while being feature rich.

Library Size

The Spotify library had all of the popular music that I expected it to have, but it also included artists which many main stream stores have difficulty supplying content from.

Although I had the experience of playing with the Spotify beta, there were no ads in the version I was using. In the future, and for the final release ads will be added to the product, but they will be done in a non-instrusive manner outline here.

Although I am not a part of the beta, I was able to get a glimpse at software that I believe could change the streaming music market and possibly change the way I listen to music. While online, being able to play any song you want to, anytime, at no cost is extremely hard to resist.

Special thanks to Erik Hammar for showing me this software.

July 19, 2008 | Filed Under Audio, Review, Tech

 

Comments

5 Responses to “A Revolution in Music: Spotify”

  1. charles on July 25th, 2008 22:10

    hit me up with a beta invite yo

  2. nate on August 28th, 2008 21:28

    I completely agree. I’ve been using Spotify the past few days and I have no reason to own my own mp3s anymore. The only thing it’s missing is a Quicksilver plugin to control it.

    Love it.

  3. Matt on September 15th, 2008 5:47

    I don’t really know what we have to wait from Spotify, since websites like http://www.deezer.com/en already offer free and legal music-on-demand, on a veeeery vast catalogue! What else?

  4. Ewan Marshall on October 31st, 2008 16:59

    The windows version runs in wine quite nicely.

    @Matt: trust me, you just need to try it.

  5. SPOTIFY (first impressions on this product: HUGE potential) — Sustainable Online Media on November 7th, 2008 12:29

    [...] quality and a quicker response. My opinion is similar to some others I have found like the one of Erik Turnquist. I have to say that deezer is also a great music solution. These are some of the reasons that made [...]

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