Most of you are probably already familiar with Spotify. For those of you who aren’t, Spotify is an online music streaming service – with a twist.
Spotify, while still in beta, is currently offering three ‘products’, i.e. subscription types. First of them is Free. Indeed, it costs nothing. Zip, nada, diddly squat. There’s gotta be a catch, right? Well, there is, I suppose. Free accounts are funded by advertisements. Or so it says on Spotify’s website; I’m using the Free account right now (thanks Sebastian!) and I’ve yet to hear a single advertisement. I guess they’re not running ads while in beta, or something.
The second subscription type is Day Pass. It costs 0,99 Euros for 24 hours of access, and there are no ads. The catch is that you need a Spotify account to buy a Day Pass. At the moment it looks to me like the only way to create an account is by getting an invite code from Spotify or a Premium access member.
Yup, you guessed it: the third account type is called Premium. It costs either 9,99 Euros per month or 99 Euros for a full year. There are no advertisements and by buying a monthly subscription you get invite codes you can send to your friends.
Once you’ve got an account, you need to download Spotify’s proprietary client software. The installer is only 1,45 MB. The client itself is very light: on my Windows XP PC (2 GB of RAM, AMD Athlon 64X2 4200+) it’s currently using less than 20 MB of memory. Task Manager reports the client’s CPU usage hovers between zero and 02, so it’s not hogging CPU either.
The client does not look or feel like a beta product. It’s slick and quick, with a definite iTunes vibe to it. If you know the name of the artist you’re looking for, you simply type the name in the Search field and press Enter. Results are usually displayed pretty much instantaneously. This is what I got by entering “Depeche”:
Spotify are obviously hard at work adding new tracks to their database, because yesterday that same search found 30 tracks less. I was very surprised to find a number of bootleg mash-ups and some rare remixes listed under Depeche Mode, while at the same time the database has some curious gaps as well. Clicking “Depeche Mode” next to “Artists:” brought up the following view:
There’s a short artist description as well as a list of similar artists. I’ve already discovered a few previously unknown (to me) artists that warrant closer inspection thanks to the “Similar artists” listings. Next up is “Top hits”, which feels a bit unnecessary if you’re already well versed in the artist’s output. However, it comes in handy if you need to get a quick feel of a previously unknown artist.
Next follows a list of the artist’s albums and singles currently in Spotify’s database, followed by a category “Appears on” which is another nice feature. I had no idea Depeche Mode’s tracks were featured on Resident Evil’s soundtrack, for example – or on the “Teen Spirit 2″ compilation along with artists like Marilyn Manson, Incubus and Weezer.
Biography tab gives you a longer artist description:
Then there’s a feature called “Artist radio” which I haven’t fooled around with at all yet:
It’s basically a list of recommended artists and has a pretty good hit ratio, at least based on the Depeche Mode page. OMD, Soft Cell, Talk Talk, Propaganda, The Human League, Ultravox, Gary Numan, Duran Duran, PSB… yup, all good stuff. It also lists The Cure which I absolutely loathe, but I guess most DM fans are into The Cure as well, so its existence on the list is understandable.
Listening to a track couldn’t be simpler: just double-click on a track name and playback begins immediately. I’ve yet to experience a delay longer than one second from clicking to playback, so it’s fair to say Spotify is very responsive. Once the song ends, the next one begins automatically based on the view you have on screen at the moment. If you’ve selected a promo single with only one track on it, there’s nothing to play next and playback simply stops. Click a track on artist overview page and in DM’s case the client will happily play Depeche Mode for the next 3000 minutes or so. The client also offers Shuffle and Repeat functions. You can also create playlists and send them to your friends by e-mail.
Audio quality, then. This is pretty hard to estimate, as my PC is currently hooked up to a rather modest set of Creative Labs’ multimedia speakers. There’s nothing obviously wrong with the quality; it sounds a lot better than clips on MySpace, for example. 44kHz definitely, but as to what bitrate and codec Spotify is using, I don’t have a clue. High frequencies don’t sound muffled and there’s plenty of bass as well. I’d say the audio quality is comparable to 128-160kbps mp3.
Spotify’s library has managed to surprise me several times with its size and depth. For example, Spotify lets you listen to Emmon‘s forthcoming album “Closet wanderings” which has not yet been released officially. Whereas competing services like iTunes and Pandora don’t cater enough to my rather limited & narrow taste, Spotify has oodles of electronic pop in its archives. Very obscure artists, too! But as I mentioned earlier, there are odd gaps as well. For example, “Alan Wilder” drew a complete blank. “Propaganda” gets the artist correct, but has neither “A Secret Wish” or the remix album “Wishful Thinking”, i.e. their most famous releases.
Then there’s the inevitable artist mix-up. I searched for “The Beloved” and Spotify seems to think that this English club/electropop duo is the same artist as “Beloved”, three middle-aged women from who knows where. The Beloved’s seminal album “The Sun Rising” is listed right next to Beloved’s two albums which have absolutely nothing to do with The Beloved. Some of the details are a bit sketchy, too: “The Sun Rising” was not released in 2006 like Spotify claims. I guess these niggles are part of what makes Spotify a beta release for the time being.
And as we’ve now moved from listing pros to cons, here’s the biggest one: you can’t purchase any of the songs directly from Spotify. There’s a “Buy From…” link in a pull-down menu for most (not all) tracks, but it forwards you to iTunes. Why would I want to access iTunes when I already have Spotify’s client on screen? That’s way too cumbersome and slow. Besides, Spotify has a larger selection of tracks I might want to purchase, and iTunes still hasn’t removed DRM completely from its library.
You might wonder why I wish to buy music when I’ve got a free access to the entire Spotify archives at the other end of their client app. Well, Spotify requires a PC (Mac client is also available) to run its client, but my main music playback device happens to be Squeezebox Duet. I store all my music files on a large RAID-5 NAS and there’s currently no way to combine Squeezebox with Spotify. In the past couple of days I’ve already found ~50 tracks I’d like to buy and download as lossless DRM-free files to my NAS. Once Spotify rectifies this glaring omission, they’re welcome to my hard-earned dosh.