You may have read headlines lauding a new music service called Spotify. Apparently, Spotify is quite popular in Europe (10 million users since 2008), and its arrival in the U.S. among music geeks has been as eagerly anticipated as the arrival of The Beatles back in 1964.
You may have even read some of the stories about Spotify in the mainstream media and a couple of reviews – and still have only a vague idea of what Spotify is all about.
Let me try to explain.
Apple's iTunes revolutionized how we buy and listen to music and has become the country's biggest music store. But in many ways, iTunes is old-fashioned.
iTunes and its competitors such as the Amazon MP3 Music Store essentially are simply online versions of the old-fashioned record store: you buy songs, you buy albums. You can create playlists – digital versions of your old mix tapes – from these tracks and those you've copied from CDs.
With a subscription music service such as Spotify, however, you don't buy – you rent your music.
You pay a monthly fee ($10 for the services that includes the use of the service's Android and Apple iOS mobile apps), and you get access to any of the 15 million songs in Spotify's catalog. Just like iTunes, you search the catalog and download the track and add it to your existing library.
Space saving
Spotify doesn't just give you more, cheaper music. You can now access your entire music library – the Spotify rented music combined with all the other music you've already accumulated – via an Android or iPhone music player app (there is no iPad-specific app, yet, but the iPhone app works fine) streamed over the Internet.
By being able to stream your entire music collection via the Internet, the amount of music you tote along is no longer limited by the memory in your phone.
Streaming your music through the Spotify app over the cellular network, however, could push your data usage way past whatever limit you may have in your phone's monthly data plan. But, you can listen off-line – when the phone or tablet isn't connected to the Internet – with songs physically stored on your phone just as they are now.
And, in addition to unlimited music and streaming, Spotify also supplies social media connectivity to help you find new music via suggestions from the Spotify community or from friends.
How Spotify works
Once you download and fire-up the Spotify desktop application on your Windows or Mac PC or laptop, the service scans your existing music library and automatically matches the non-copy protected tracks you own – those songs/albums you ripped from CDs and tracks you bought on iTunes after Apple did away with its copy protection in mid-2009.
If Spotify runs across copy-protected tracks it can't automatically duplicate, you can still search the service's library and download each unduplicated track yourself.
Now, instead of buying more tracks at 99 cents or more each, you can supplement your existing music library by searching the Spotify catalog and adding as many songs as you'd like. If you buy more than 10 songs a month from iTunes (and assuming you opt for Spotify's premium service), Spotify is well worth the price.
As long as you pay Spotify's rent each month, you can access all the music you got from Spotify. If you don't pay the rent, you lose the ability to take your Spotify downloaded music with you.
You don't have to make an immediate purchase decision about Spotify, though. You can use Spotify for free – sans the mobile app – just to see what it's all about. But not right away. Spotify is officially still in beta; you have to be "invited" to join. You give them you email address and they'll send you an official invite in a couple of days.
Who should consider Spotify?
If you are an iTunes user and you buy fewer than 10 tracks a month and are satisfied with the number of songs your music player or smart phone can hold, you don't need Spotify.
Plus, Apple already has introduced bits of its iCloud service, which I explored in "What Apple's iCloud Means For You" and "Get a Taste of Apple iCloud Now."
Next month, Apple may well drop the other shoe and introduce its own rumored subscription music service (it bought such a music service, Lala, in late 2009) which is bound to look more inviting and play nicer with Apple products than Spotify.
However, if you're an Android phone user and you have only little music and would like to expand your mobile listening experience but don't want to pay through the iTunes nose for it, Spotify is a great, cheap music-acquisition option.
However, Spotify isn't your only music subscription service option. For a decade, Rhapsody has been offering pretty much the same services and functions as Spotify.
Both Spotify and Rhapsody have their adherents. On the surface, Spotify is cheaper (Rhapsody's premium plan is $5 more a month) and offers fewer tracks (three million less). But Rhapsody's catalog offers music Spotify doesn't (Paul McCartney's catalog, for instance), and you can access Rhapsody on a wider variety of devices than Spotify.
Here's an excellent discussion of the differences between the two on Rhapsody's site (and the informative discussion seems objective to me).
My first take
I've just started playing with Spotify myself and likely will have a more extensive examination in a few weeks. There's a lot here.
But initially, I found Spotify's interface a bit clunky, its functionality unnecessarily confusing, and it suffers from some weird anomalies.
One tiny example: the mobile app tells me I have more than 54,000 tracks. I have no idea where the app is getting THAT number from.
I have a number of other quibbles, which I'll explore once I actually give Spotify a fair shot (and a chance for Spotify to work out its app bugs – the U.S. version, as noted, is still in beta).
But don't take my word for Spotify's viability – download the free version, or Rhapsody's free trial, and play with each yourself. You'll discover in short order if one, the other or neither is something that will boost your mobile music listening pleasure.