Spotify

I’ve been getting a lot of mileage from a new music service called Spotify. It’s been several years in the making, including input from Ludvig Strigeus, the creator of uTorrent.

The first thing I thought was ‘why so expensive?’, the free model is great if you are in the UK, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Spain and France. But all other European countries require the premium model which is a fair whack at 9.99 a month.

After using it for a while you realise it is just about worth it, however with the top 4 labels responsible for the majority of the music on there, you’ll be out of luck if you only like stuff on obscure independents. And of course never mind the logistical problems of making any and every album available digitally. I’d imagine this will improve over time given its success so far and was pleasantly surprised by the sheer quantity of the content available already.

The client is light and fast, with searching and playback near instantaneous. I’ve had a couple of experiences with artefacts on tracks but the majority have been encoded flawlessly and stream or are locally cached for streaming to others in the Ogg vorbis format. There is some black box P2P going on to improve availability and efficiency, but I haven’t noticed any detrimental side effects yet.

Other features of note include, collaborative playlists, a time and genre controllable radio, and easy linking to playlists which in turn has spawned a dearth of playlist sites overnight.