Spotify for real
June 6, 2007I got an invite a couple of days ago and I wanted to write something about it. It’s mostly positive. Almost only positive things, but lets take the bad first. Not all my music was available (no surprise) which is a bit annoying when it’s more like a music player than a radio (like Pandora or last.fm). You can’t really use Spotify as your only music player when you can’t listen to missing songs, free songs found on the internet or any other general sounds that you might find/have. You’re limited to what they have to offer. This was mostly annoying in the beginning when I wanted to listen to specific songs in my old playlist. After a while I more or less stopped listening to them, because it was too much work to switch between Spotify and my other music player.
Now the good stuff. What really impressed me at first was how fast the songs started and how jumping in the song really is as fast as your ordinary music player. No delays whatsoever. The interface is nice, iTunes-looking. There are of course some things that could be smoother, but I won’t go into them here. Even though it’s negative that not all my music was available on Spotify, they had a lot of stuff that I didn’t expect to find. I wonder if they agreements cover the same amount (or more) for a released product, or if the content is just for the beta.
The radio is so-so, but does its job I guess. You select zero or many genres and they try to play music from those genres. Sometimes you don’t really agree with the genre set for a song, and sometimes it’s plain wrong, but most of the time it makes reasonable choices. You can also select from which decade it should play music, which was something that I liked playing with.
Time to go back to listening to Dilated Peoples again (though some of their albums are missing in Spotify).
Oh, I had no idea Spotify was changing – weren’t they the guys doing ‘Voice Spots’ in iTunes, where people could talk about music between the songs… I thought that was a very strange idea.
Seems even stranger that they are stepping into online radio. That space to me is completely owned by Pandora and last.fm. Then there are excellent fringe services like Hype M and Streampad.
This leaves space free in the market for a good solution to help deal with the existing catalogue of music on our hard drives and for that there is The Filter which is Peter Gabriel’s new company.
Well, I’m looking forward to seeing what Spotify are up to!
I don’t know if it’s the same. I haven’t heard of ‘Voice Spots’ myself, so I don’t know anything about that. The Spotify I’m talking about writes that they were founded 2006 and I don’t think that they have done anything previously.
This is a pretty good (short) comparison to other popular music players, of different kinds.
[...] Henrik Torstensson – Spotify – En Första titt Kribba: The Blog – Spotify Is The Sh*t Beta Alfa – Spotify — kärlek vid första öronkastet Månhus – Revansch på Pricken efter 15 år Eric Wahlforss – OMG Spotify! Sriram Kroshnan – Spotify: The revolution has started blog@osd.se – Spotify Alarm:Clock Euro – Former Tradedoublers Create Spotify Anek.com – Spotify, nästan lika bra som Freestyle lk9 – Joining the buzz Dyngan – Bolånsrock vs. bloggpop Lillbra – Spotify mäkta populär Emerge – Spotify: Sveriges nya musikexport Friendly Bit – Spotify is a lot like… Björn Fant – Spotify Top 5 features Mymarkup.net – Et in Spotify ego Viktors Mobile Blog – Spotify is the Next Big Thing Henriks Blog – I got Spotified! Ahlund.se – Spotified Des – I am Spotified blog@osd.se – Spotify for real [...]