Free Music...Simple! (spotify.com)

Member Name: cazkins

Product:	spotify.com
Date:	08/07/09 (19 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Advertisements short & sweet, easy to download and use application, option to upgrade

Disadvantages: Not able to download on Ipod at present

I only recently came across Spotify after someone recommending it to me, and now I'm using it everyday!

Spotify is an Internet music application, allowing you to listen to music from a wide choice in its database, for free! And yes, it's even legal! I was a bit dubious at first, because anything that's 'free' is either not very good or has some hidden catches. I was pleasantly surprised to find it to be better than I expected, so I wanted to review it for those who haven't yet heard of it or tried it.

Spotify.com gives more information on this service and allows you to download the application needed. This isn't a service for downloading music to save on your computer; you must be online to access the music from the Internet, so it's not stored on your PC.

Signing up is a straightforward process and takes only a few seconds. You then need to download the application, something which I was a tad concerned about as I'd never heard of Spotify before. It was quick to download, and works well on my Vista laptop. It has a green design, and will appear as a small green circle in the icon tray at the bottom right hand corner of your screen when it's running. The application is quick to start up when you turn your PC on, and doesn't seem to take up much space or slow your computer down. So far, so good!

Spotify has a search function, allowing you to put an artists name, song title or album in and choosing from the list of results. If you spell something incorrectly there's no need to worry as it usually gives to the correctly spelt alternative.

There's a good range of music on there to choose from, more than I expected. That said, don't expect to find everything you want. There's a couple of big bands who haven't allowed their music on there and the lesser-known artists may not feature or will only have a couple of tracks on there. I shouldn't complain at that though, after all, it's free!

The free version also has radio capacity, which you can search to find something within the genre you want. Plus, you can share tracks and links to music with others, making the application more accessible and sociable.

How can Spotify operate for free? Well, technically it's not all free. You can use this for free as often as you want, and Spotify will play advertising in between tracks. I expected long adverts disrupting my music every 2 minutes; in fact, the advertising is short and sweet, hardly noticeable, and relatively infrequent. I don't find the adverts annoying or distracting, so I'm more than happy to put up with them for the free music.

If you don't want the advertising, you have the option to upgrade to a paid account to get pure music. This can be done in 2 ways: a 24 hour pass costs 99p, so if you're having a party for instance and you want to be advert-free for 24 hours it will cost you under £1. Nice and simple! Alternatively, for £9.99 a month you get a faster bit rate and no advertisement. It's down to personal choice of course, but I'm satisfied with the small advertisements if it means free music.

So far, I've had no problems with Spotify. Although it did freeze and crash on me yesterday, but I think that was because of my laptop which was getting as tired and frustrated as I was last night. It's been reliable, easy to use and navigate, and runs efficiently.

I would definitely recommend giving this a go and I can safely say it's kosher; no hidden strings and no bugs. Just fab free music :o)

Summary: A simple, hassle-free service for free music that I would definitely recommend