Modern music phenomenons are happening almost every day in the new world that has been rendered, downloaded and reproduced for us, the hungrily waiting listening public.
iTunes of course being the biggest player in the music game, blasted previous king-pin Windows Media player off the court. Wired.com reported that there are 200,000,000 iTunes users.
This staggering number I believe could be cut down enormously due to a new musical revolution called Spotify.
Spotify, is a name that may repulse you to the core, as it does with me; But the service it provides is unprecedented. It’s AWESOME.
Spotify ends the music ownership era. What I mean is, why would you buy music? Spotify presents you with almost every album available on iTunes and more.
You don’t need to buy music because it’s all provided for you, for FREE. If you want to pay for it, because you have some moral feeling of giving something to the bands forget about it! This is perfectly legal, and the bands get money from the adverts. If you don’t want adverts, or just have loads of money, you can buy the Premium edition of Spotify, for £9.99 per month, which isn’t even expensive.
SO, how can it be free? Well Spotify is riddled with adverts, like a prostitute’s riddled with STI’s.
But they don’t make it less usable, most people I think will put up with it, considering the incredible service their receiving. Your music is interrupted every hour, with a quick audio ad, and on the main Spotify screen a long, thin banner pops up on the right hand side. It doesn’t obstruct your listening of viewing pleasure.
What’s wrong with it? To be honest, there’s not a lot to complain about. It hosts a very user friendly, and good looking user interface, it’s a fantastic idea, and it’s backed by most of the major record labels. It doesn’t have some big named bands such as the Beatles, Metallica, ACDC and several others, but Spotify say they’re working hard at getting them.
The biggest downer for me is I can’t get this music on my iPod. I can only listen to it if: I have a computer on, and an internet connection. Hopefully someone will soon end this problem, otherwise we’re not writing our farewells for iTunes just yet.
To summarise, Spotify is a really fantastic program, it’s free, good looking, has a huge catalogue of music and is better than Last.fm, which I hate because it doesn’t have playlists, it lags horribly for me and you can listen to one song from most bands, the rest are 30 second previews. Download it, and let me know what you think of Spotify and this article below in the comments.
Haha, excellent post.
I’ve long been an avid user of both Spotify and Last.fm. They both fill different needs for me - Spotify’s great for finding specific songs, but absolutely useless at collating and generating playlists.
Last.fm is great for a playlist, since it looks at what you listen to and develops a playlist for you. It’s pretty weak at first, but provided you use the Love/Ban button correctly, after a week or two, it gets it bang-on every time.
People have a lot of trouble getting used to Last.fm for the simple reason that it’s hard to get used to the fact that other people are telling you what to listen to - once you’ve got your head round it, it’s great.
Music can be social, too:
http://www.last.fm/user/lawrencejob
I totally disagree, Spotify is very easy to make playlists with, whereas Last.fm just provides music in a way that I don’t truly appreciate it. Music becomes better when your familiar with it, can sing along. Last.fm removes this, it gives you new songs each time which are unfimiliar and if they are the genre you like it doesn’t mean you like the song.