I have been using Spotify for about one year now. Before that I used Last.fm and Grooveshark for online streaming, but mostly a rather large collection of music on my PC itself. After buying all kinds of MP3 and music players (ipod nano, ipod touch, an MP3 discman, a Minidisc player and of course a Walkman, look those last two up on Wikipedia kids) it turns out I’m not really a big fan of listening to music on the go.
Then my harddrive crashed and I bought a new laptop. So I didn’t really feel like gathering that music collection again, it needed to be updated and cleaned badly anyway. It was a great occasion to start using a streaming service full-time. Just before that Last.fm had announced you could not stream music any more for free. I wrote an article (only Dutch, sorry) on when I would pay for a service like Last.fm. My main objection was and is to Last.fm that you can not choose any music yourself but can just listen to a tag or keyword and have it stream a radio channel around that word.
Enter Spotify. It’s a great service with quite a large collection. You can search for an artist, album, genre or more specific things like labels or era and play that music. I just find the interface a little confusing here and there. There are quite some features I found out after a couple of weeks of usage such as how share stuff with your friends and how to save albums. You can only save playlists, not albums artists or anything else. So the closest thing you can get to an actual music collection in Spotify is saving some albums as a playlist. It would be nice to be able to add an album to your favorites or something and then have a nice overview of those albums a la iTunes.
All the features that made Last.fm great are a little bit lacking in Spotify. The ability to find music, share what you have listened to and just open a radio channel of a certain music genre or style are more or less there but really well executed. My profile shows what I have listened to for instance, but it seems to only list songs from the last week or month of play. You can still scrobble plays to Last.fm however (one of those things I only found out after a Google search). View my Last.fm profile here where my Spotify plays are listed.
After a couple of weeks of using Spotify I also discovered that you can select the “radio” of a certain artist. This shows you some related artists nicely but within 10 songs you’re listening to a whole other genre. One other thing is those playlists that everyone makes. They are real nice, but can not be found within Spotify. You need to go to a special website like Sharemyplaylists.com or Spotylist.com.
On the left you see my saved playlist, mainly for albums.
The deal used to be that you can use Spotify for free, for 20 hours per month. You receive some quite frequent and annoying audio commercial in between songs and ads in the player but I can just live with that. The 20 hour limit does not apply for Free subscription, but an invite is needed for that. Then for €5,- /m you get Spotify Unlimted which removes the time limit and commercials. For €10,- /m you get Spotify Premium which gives you unlimited songs in better audio quality, the use of a mobile app and the ability to download songs for offline use (can only be played with Spotify, so actually some kind of DRM play).
Now Spotify has announced that it will change the Open/Free plan. For the first 6 months it stays the same. After this you can listen for 10 hours/m and only listen to any song for 5 times /m. So in theory this seems like a lot less than what’s currently allowed.Especially for users with a Free account which have no time limit.
Will this nudge the large group of freeriding user into the paying category? It will cost only €5 /m to lift the time limit and get rid of the ads. While that’s not a lot there are many good alternatives available for free. On Twitter and in the comments below Spotify’s announcement there have been many reactions like “It’s been nice knowing you Spotify”. Spotify offers users a month of Premium subscription for free so that might be a good way to try that out. I know I will and then I will see what to do. No reason for to drop the service yet. How about you?
