Hi everyone Gazmaz from the UK here, do you remember a few weeks ago I spoke about Pulsar which is a Radio streaming App which could at this point only be used in the US. I was pointed in the direction of an App that can be mainly used over here in Europe, and could be an indication of things to come.
Spotify is a Music streaming service from a Developer in Sweden with the headquarters based in Luxembourg that allows you to stream music from the web. Now I know that they are striking up deals with Indie companies in the US and I’m sure they’ll get the bigger boys onboard, so hopefully they’ll be appearing over the pond, in the US soon.
There are three basic models that you can subscribe to. First, a free option which currently I think is only available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain, and some of those countries you will need an invite, so you’ll need to take a look locally to see if that’s the case.
The free model allows you to listen to music but you have to accept the input of ads into the stream to pay for that free content that your receiving. I found that the ads weren’t too intrusive actually, but if you don’t want ads then the second option is a subscription paid service where you become a Premium user. In the UK the monthly subscription costs £9.99 per month, for that you get no ads and one or two other advantages over the free package.
The final option is basically as a Premium User but you pay for a 24 hour pass and at the moment this costs £0.99 per day. Now both the pay options I think are fairly reasonable, but I like the option to occasionally go and grab a 24 hour pass rather than committing myself to the on going monthly charge, but that’s just because I never know how much I’d use it.
So far I have been a cheap skate and only used the Free option and listened to music that I don’t own (a great way to find out if you want to get the music by the way) of course for research purposes I thought I should give the one pass a go to find out just how it compares to the free option. As I said earlier I didn’t find the ad’s too intrusive, but they are there, so of course All Day music with no interruptions is always nice, it’s up to you.
At the moment none of the options have any restrictions on the what you can listen to, as long as they have it, or how long or when you listen. So getting into the app, which can also be used on Windows, you’ll see a neat interface, and in the top left some options, a Home Button a Radio button and a Play Queue below these one more option which is a NEW PLAYLIST button.
Clicking on the Home button takes you to a “What’s New Page” and “Top Lists Page”. Click on the Radio option, you then have various options by year and music genre, you have to let the choices come to you a little here, but you can mix the years and genre’s so the music you get is varied. I Chose Disco and 80’s to the 00’s and got Boney M No Women No Cry, X Offender from Blondie and Can’t Stay Away from Bootsy Collins! I altered the option to include 70’s and Punk and the next track changed to Bloody Sunday from Stiff Little Fingers and then Sioxsie and the Banshees, So you could hear some music which you might not quite realized was out there or perhaps not quite your taste, but hey, I get that on the radio anyway but unlike the radio you can skip to the next recording.
So being a bit of an ELO officianardo I decided to see what info I could find, so I typed “Face the Music” into the Search box, and the results came up with a raft of possibilities. I added Electric Light to the search and voila! There were all the ELO songs. These searches are automatically stored in a panel on the left but can be easily removed. So back to the home page, if you click on an artist, it will bring up their Albums and the top hits for that group, if a biography is available you’ll get that to look at too. Here’s a cool little diversion, an option called “Artist Radio”, if you say choose 10CC, you’ll get 10CC hits but also other featured artists that are related to that group and genre.
As for quality, go do a search for Fire on High from ELO’s Face the Music album it’s an instrumental, the acoustics sounded great and when the drums kicked in, well, all I’m really doing here is showing my fanaticism for ELO so I’ll shut up
You can easily search for Music by Artist, Title, Genre or even year of publication, your also able to setup and share with other users a play list. Even collaborate on playlists if you want to! The app also has an option to link into your scrobbling option in LastFM.
As normal for these services, not all artists are available through the service and at this point the likes of Pink Floyd and The Beatles are not available. But the Beatles aren’t in iTunes, so nothing different there then. Officially the App is in Beta but I have to say, it’s a pretty good beta that I found to be extremely polished and stable, so if you fancy a look, go over to www.spotify.com
