Has anyone else in the U.S. experimented with Spotify yet?
Spotify has finally come to America. I never thought it would, since we are constantly over at war about what sort of art is definable as commerce, and what should be free (in this case, music), and I have envied the U.K. their Spotify for a year now. But it is here, and it is outstanding.
For those who haven’t heard, it’s a music service that has a free plan (which is good enough for me, I don’t mind a few ads here and there) and also two other low-cost plans, one of which has a phone app. You can choose anything in their immense catalog to listen to and make playlists of. I have tried several more obscure artists, and it has not disappointed me yet.
Is anyone else stateside enjoying this service?
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6 Answers
I’ve been using it. Seems like it’s been a little too hyped to me. It’s great that I can listen to basically anything I want, but the commercials on the free version suck and in that sense it’s no better than last.fm or Pandora. I do like that I can share playlists and songs like I can send an email and they show up in my friends “inbox.” That’s pretty cool. I also like that it’s easy to share things on various sites – though I do wish I could change the text on the Twitter post it sends. I like it, but I’m not in love with it.
Edit: And I don’t have to pay for my Pandora app. So, there’s that….
Pandora frustrated me…i couldn’t choose what I wanted to hear, and it seemed like it was always groveling for my approval before making any decisions (smacks of codependence)...plus, whenever I would suggest a song for it to find similar tunes to, I found that I really usually wanted to listen to the song I suggested, not something like it. Which it refused to let me do!
Yeah. Used it pretty heavily, actually.
I like the free-formness of it. If I want radio or recommendations, I’ll go listen to last.fm or Pandora, but if I just want to listen to one song that I might not have on my hard drive (say, some obscure electronic or the entire Lil Jon discography) I like being able to go to Spotify. I haven’t messed around much with the social feature much (not using facebook seems to cripple it some), but it does have excellent iPod syncing features and local library management, something I’ve been messing around with.
It’s not bad for finding what I can’t find on Grooveshark, but I can record from Grooveshark, so I still like it better.
I’ve only tried the free version of Spotify so far but I like it. I am trying to decide on whether to go to premium or not. If I’m going to to pay for it I want all the features and I haven’t yet decided whether it’s worth $9.99 a month or not.
Hmmm…Grooveshark, eh? I will have to test that one.
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