December 1, 2008 at 8:40 pm · Filed under Software

I’ve been using Spotify for a while now, and it looks like they are getting ready for prime-time as they have been giving out invites all over the place (I’ve given out 5, and I have another 5 queued up waiting to be given out, so if you’ve come here looking for an invite, leave a comment!), which is classic Gmail-type behavior for testing load.

I enjoy using it, and everyone I’ve shown it to has been immediately impressed and overwhelmed by the library available to them, and end up spending time browsing through skipping through songs going ‘oh this is a good one!’ or ‘oh I haven’t heard this before!’. Read the rest of this entry »

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October 16, 2008 at 4:09 pm · Filed under Software

Spotify sounds like a music listeners dream come true. It’s a way of listening to a huge library of music for free, and completely legally. If you don’t like the adverts the free version comes with you can pay just £10 a month for the privilege of unlimited music all the time, or just 99p for 24 hours of ad-free music (ideal for a party or something like that). To be honest though, the adverts are less intrusive than a commercial radio station, so it’s no big deal. Also, as I’m in the UK, Spotify feeds me UK adverts – which I appreciate (you never know, something interesting might come up). It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux under Wine, and is a very small (just a couple of megabytes) download.

The interface is very clean. I’d like a proper way of browsing by genre without having to use a search function (genre:”folk” for example), but other than that it does it’s job well. It’s a small request – but I’d quite like it to scrobble to last.fm what I’m listening to.

There’s clearly a lot of music here, and it’s not obscure stuff by any means. Sure, there’s some gaps in the collection, but overall it looks pretty good.

As I just have a free account, I have no invites I can give out. However you can go to the Spotify website, and request an invite there. I only requested one a few weeks ago, so it’s definitely worth requesting if you’re interested in checking this great application out. I think Spotify definitely has the potential to become very popular, and could push companies like Apple to do more than just 30 second samples for songs. However I’m not sure their £10 subscription model will catch on, as similar services such as Napster offer the same functionality for similar prices, but also offer additional features like downloading the tracks to your portable music players. I definitely think the ‘99p for 24 hours of ad-free music’ model is a great idea though; it’s a sign that the people at Spotify really understand what people want from their music.

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