Spotify Hits the Spot for Casual and Serious Music Lovers
If you’ve found yourself settling for randomly generated music on Pandora or increasingly expensive tracks from iTunes, Spotify.com may be the answer to your woes. For most people Spotify.com may even eliminate the need for online storage solutions like Amazon Cloud Drive and the Amazon Cloud Player as well as household collections of CDs and cassette tapes.
Free Finds
Like Pandora, Spotify.com offers limited, free access to its library of 15 million tracks if you don’t mind the occasional advertisement. The key difference is that Spotify gives you instant access to any track in its library. Search for a song and instantly listen to it. The free version of Spotify currently is available by invitation only and it will expire after six months. Join the invite queue or ask a paying subscriber to send you one.
If you can not see the embedded video above please use the following link: Spotify has landed in the U.S.
Comparatively, Pandora gets around licensing and copyright issues by randomly playing tracks or artists similar to ones you enter in the search field. Free access to Pandora lasts indefinitely as long as you only listen for 40 hours per month, and Pandora music will stream outside the U.S.
Cost Comparison
Minimum subscription levels for Pandora and Spotify eliminate advertisements and lift some listening restrictions. Upgrading to Pandora One costs $36 a year and lets you skip more songs, listen to higher quality audio, and listen for unlimited amounts of time. The $4.99 per month Spotify Unlimited subscription also removes time limits and ads.
Upgrading to Spotify Premium ($9.99/month) puts the service on par with U.S.-based Rhapsody ($10/month). At the Premium level, you can listen to Spotify on your mobile phone and create playlists for offline listening. Spotify and Rhapsody appear to have similar music libraries, and neither includes the Beatles or Led Zeppelin, which are notorious online licensing holdouts.
Interface Analysis
When you download Spotify to your desktop, you’ll see that it looks strikingly similar to iTunes. In fact, if you have iTunes purchases on your desktop computer, they will automatically appear in Spotify too. iTunes loyalists have nothing to lose.
On mobile platforms, the free version of Spotify will organize albums and tracks you already own, but if you want to wirelessly sync playlists or get full streaming access to the Spotify library on your mobile phone, you’ll need to pay for the Premium subscription.
Social Compatibility
Spotify further differentiates itself by letting you share music with anybody. Share a song with a friend on Facebook; tell your Twitter followers how to access your favorite track; or send an email containing links to tracks, custom playlists or whole albums. Anyone can access the music as long as they have access to Spotify. Even the free version will work.
Historical Success
Spotify already has experienced tremendous success in Europe where it reports 1.6 million paying customers. Their hope is that the “feemium” business model carries over to the United States. Spotify attracts people with the free, invite-only service, and then they sell them on paid upgrades to the service with more features.
