Spotify. Love music more.

I’ve been trying out and enjoying this new service called Spotify lately. “What?” you say. “New service. . . Spotify? Hasn’t that been around for. . . ?” Yeah, it has been around for a while. But I haven’t been. Travel outside the US and you’ll find that many internet services and websites are blocked. Something about copyright infringement and rampant piracy. Can’t see why that would matter. . . But anyway, it’s been blocked and now that I’m back in the States this is the first time I’ve getting my hands (I mean ears) on it. And let me just say, Spotify rocks!

I’m using the free plan and from what I can tell this is all I’ll ever really need. Spotify’s free service lets you listen to ANY song, artist or album for free. And when I say any, that’s just about true. The other day I tried searching for ‘Miles Davis’ and the list of albums and songs that came up was nearly endless. It took me ten minutes of scrolling just to get to the bottom of stuff I could listen to . That’s a lot of Miles!

Not only do they have virtually anything you want to listen to, but you can bookmark and listen entire albums at a time. This is where Spotify stands above the rest. I’ve tried other music services like Pandora, Jango, and iTunes radio and they all do about the same thing- namely, they generate playlists from music you like. That’s nice if you want to listen to a bunch of random artists you may or may not like. But with Spotify you can listen to ENTIRE albums of your favorite artists. No guessing around. No random tracks. Because the thing is I already KNOW who I like. I don’t need some service to spit a bunch of random bands at me. What I haven’t had is access to the complete collection. Spotify gives you the whole thing, not just bits and pieces.

It kind of makes me think how all this can be free? They do have a paid service which lets you download music to your computer/phone but I haven’t had a need for that. In fact I kind of like the online streaming aspect of it. Keep it in the cloud. No need to download or manage digital music files anymore. Clear up space on your hard drive while listening to great music.

I’ll probably still buy albums I like. But with Spotify I can preview anything before I make the jump. Now I just have to find the time to listen to everything I find. Unlimited free access to bands and albums. That’s music to my ears.