shakeelnaim

Spotify is a new subscription based music service, legally offering access to a vast music library.
There are 3 levels of subscription:

• Free – totally free but with occasional ad
• Day Pass- £0.99 for 24 hours, ad-free
• Premium – £9.99 per month, unlimited ad-free

Once subscribed with Spotify, a desktop client can be downloaded, which is extremely easy to use and looks very nice. It is very similar in functionality to iTunes, relying heavily on playlists to keep your music organised. Music can be searched by artist, title, album, genre or year. Once a list of search results are returned, simply drag the desired song(s) to one of your playlists.
Music is generally of an acceptable quality with an average bit rate of 160kbps, and the range of music is quite extensive, bar a few notable exceptions, such as the Beatles, Led Zeppelin.
I think one of my favourite feature is the ability to right-click on a playlist, copy the URL and then send it to a friend. When your friend clicks on the link, your playlist is automatically added to your friend’s Spotify client. What’s even more cool is that when you make any changes to your playlist, the changes are automatically reflected in your friend’s client – brilliant!
If that wasn’t enough, you can even make your shared playlist collaborative. This allows your friend to make changes to your playlist too. If you share this playlist with a bunch of friends, they can all make changes to it. How cool is that?
The radio feature is also very nice and easy to use. Simply select the decade(s) and genre and Spotify will offer you a selection of music based on your criteria.

There are some improvements I’d like to see in future updates. Perhaps some smart playlists – I think as I add more and more music, my current playlists might get difficult to manage. I’d also like to see a similar feature to the iTunes genius which would be great for discovering music you might have missed otherwise. And it goes without saying that an iPhone client would be a must-have application for any owner.
In it’s current state, I think Spotify is an excellent service and it has exposed the potential of a subscription based music service to me, whereas before I was always a bit skeptical and preferred to own all my music.
I’m not sure if I feel comfortable paying £9.99 per month for the premium service as I don’t think it offers any real advantage over the free service. The ads on the free service aren’t really that intrusive and aren’t presented that frequently, which is nice. If the premium service offered higher bit rate music and was say £7.99, then yes, I think I’d be quite happy to pay for that.
To use the free service, you must register your interest on the website and hope that you receive an invite soon. The other way is to get an invite code from an existing user. I have a handful of Spotify invitation codes available if anyone would like one. Just leave a comment (with your email) or drop me a line using the contact form.