Listen to your choice of free music, legally ! (spotify.com)

Member Name: rxpell

Product:	spotify.com
Date:	12/06/09 (49 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free, Easy to use, Easy to set up, Good range of tracks, Good sound quality

Disadvantages: Advert every 30 mins on free version, Bandwidth usage, not portable

I'm a last.fm user so when I heard about Spotify.com I initially thought what's all the hype about ? ... so I went to the spotify.com site and signed up. Signing up is easy and as other reviewers have noted you can either have a free account, buy a pass or take out a monthly subscription (£9.99). I've gone for the free one and really don't see the benefit of the others - with the free one you get an advert about every 30 minutes and then its back to your music choice. Anyone wanting to try it, try the free one first and see what its like. Once you launch it, its easy ... type in an artists name and you'll get a list of matches and albums / singles available. Just pick the tracks you want or pick the whole album or the artist's whole work and click play and that's it. Not every track from every artist is there and not every artist is there but there are a lot. Its mainly mainstream stuff so you don't get exposure to the breadth of bands that you'll see on last.fm which has the unique ability to grow organically. Lets consider last.fm for a minute here ... last.fm builds up a list of what you listen to by "scrobbling" and uses this to recommend other stuff to you and gives you a "recommended radio" stream. Spotify.com has built in last.fm scrobbling so if you have an account on both your spotify plays can help build your last.fm recommendations. Spotify.com and last.fm are therefore complementary applications in my view.

Spotify.com gets music on there quickly so, for example, when the new Manic's CD came out last month it was possible to listen to it there and then on release day and decide if its worth buying. Another great feature is that there are lots of B-sides / EP tracks and special edition CD's on there so you can hear tracks that are (were ?) "rare" without much difficulty. Sound quality is excellent and while true audiophiles will maybe beg to differ, its music via a PC, not a top notch sound system.

Drawbacks ? Well, first if you are on a limited download allowance you need to watch how much you listen to. Second, its not portable - you have to be at a PC to listen (I dont think it can be streamed through an Internet Radio yet (?) ). For some people it could meet all their music needs.

Is there a catch ? Well not for us users there's not, but like another reviewer, I don't see how the business model can work. If they are paying royalties per play and taking in money from advertising I don't think they can make enough to keep going. So I'd recommend giving it a go now and enjoying it while it lasts.

Download it now and get going, you won't regret it.

Summary: Amazing, surely too good to last