Spotify

Have you heard of Spotify? You have had to of by now if you listen to music at all and aren’t an oldster.  Spotify is the bomb! Have you ever wanted to listen to a song by an artist you never heard? how about listening to an entire album? How about listening to over 6 million songs in there entirety? Spotify rocks!

That is what you can do. You can listen to any artist in their entirety. For example… If you did a search on Radiohead, which I am listening to right now, there are 515 tracks available for me to listen to in their entirety. There are 35 albums of Radiohead or albums they have appeared on. The service really rocks.

The program is similar to iTunes. You have a column on the left that lists your searches and playlists. So lets say I wanted to create a Belly playlist. I search for bands similar to Belly like, Lush, Ride, Silver Sun Pickups, Teenage Fanclub, etc. I then drag and drop them to the playlist. I could also drag and drop anything to the desktop or an email to provide a link.

So, you ask, whats the catch? First, it is not available in the USA (unless you are hacker/tech savvy), which mostly has to do with the fat cats at the labels. The other catch is ads. Yes there are ads, but what did you expect for free? An add comes on about as much as on Pandora. If you purchased a subscription, assuming it was available here, there would be no ads and you could use the service offline, which is where it would shine. You would also have access to the mobile version.

There is also a “Radio” feature, however, I have found it sucks compared to Pandora, which I absolutely love for that purpose. When I chose the Radiohead station it played some pretty lame bands. Lets face it… online radio like Pandora is for discovery. You don’t want to have to listen to sucky music. There is way to much of that already. From my experience, Pandora picks the best selection of artists that fit each other than any other service I have ever used (LastFM, Slacker, etc). But with Spotify, I can make my own radio station.

One last thing… you can purchase tracks just like any other service, however, they are yours to keep. No limitation on what you can play them on or how many times you burn them. Due to the fat cats, you can only download the purchase 5 times. Might be an issue to some, but I don’t see it as one.

Don’t forget to reTweet to get the word out so that it will be legal here soon. In case you missed it, there is a link showing how to get the service here, but who knows how long the hack will work.

Update: There is even Karaoke versions of tunes… trippy.