A program which allows you to stream over 6 million good quality songs for FREE? (spotify.com)

Member Name: Caewan

Product:	spotify.com
Date:	27/07/09 (159 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free. 6mil+ songs, easy to use playlists!

Disadvantages: Advert - But it's worth it for free music. No music if you're offline.

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What is Spotify?

Spotify is a free program which streams music using Peer-to-peer technology at rates of either 160kb/s or 320kb/s, which is about the same quality as MP3s, so it's good! There is also very little buffering. It was released to the public in 2007, but free accounts were only implemented in the United Kingdom in February this year. There are more than 6 million tracks available at the click of a button, and every genre thinkable.
To access Spotify, you must go to the website at www.spotify.com, when you enter the site you must create an account which usually takes <3 minutes, followed by downloading the program, which is only 2.62MB in size and works with Vista, OS X and anything newer.
On opening Spotify you are required to enter your user name and password.
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What does it look like?

When you open the client you are presented with a layout much similar to iTunes, in my opinion. The colour scheme is grey, and the search box is at the very top, as well as two buttons to back and fourth between previous pages. On the left side of the program is a bar going down, this contains the 'Home' button, which takes you to the page which comes up when you first open Spotify - containing information on new albums which have been added and more. As well as this there is a button to access the radio feature, which I will explain further. There is also a play queue function, and underneath this are the last 5 things you have searched for followed by playlists and the option to create more playlists. The main page shows you the results of your search, with the headings 'Track', which is obviously the track name, 'Artist' which shows the artists name - you can click on them individually if you would like to listen to more music by only that artist. As well as this, the track time is displayed, as well as the popularity of that song on Spotify and the album it is from. The bottom bar contains the fast-forward, rewind, pause and the options to skip parts of a song, repeat the song, or to shuffle the current list. At the top there are also 4 drop down menus, File, Edit, Playback and Help.
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What can you do on Spotify?

As I mentioned, all the music on Spotify is free - which means they have to make money another way - And they do it through advertisements. Lots of advertisements are on the program itself, they come up and go away quickly, but they aren't tacky advertisements to dodgy sites. They also play advertisements every few songs which are between 20 and 30 seconds long. You can't turn the volume down or off when they are playing as they stop until you turn it back up. If you can't stand the adverts there are several options - If you are having a party or something you can pay £1 for 24 hours without any advertisements, or you can pay £10 monthly.
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As well as this you can make your own playlists, simply by clicking 'add playlist' and adding all of your favourite songs - and you can do this as much as you like and you can share them! Which has been very useful for me. The radio function allows you to tick as many boxes containing genres and times - such as 70s music, and then plays through popular tracks which fit your selection. You can also re-arrange the music by clicking on any of the 5 column titles which can order the songs alphabetically, by band name, popularity, time and album.
Another great function of Spotify is that in the Edit drop down menu at the top, preferences, it allows you to put in your Last.FM details - So allows you to scrobble to last.fm! (Last.fm is a site which lists everything you listen to, and you can meet people with similar tastes and it recommends new music! It's free and great also) In the preferences pages you can also edit how big the Cache is, it can be from 0-100gb, you can connect through a proxy, and change the language.
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What is Spotify to the music industry?

Basically, the large companies such as the RIAA like Spotify because they get paid for every time someone listens to a track - much like what used to happen on Youtube until Youtube refused to pay the ever rising fees, and I think the fact that it's hard to find music now because of Youtube being not paying, a lot of people have turned to Spotify - I certainly did, it was a pain looking up new bands and random tracks, but I am aware there are other sites that you can.
It's an alternative to legal downloading also - but I am aware that it has had very little impact, no one that I know has stopped, or even slowed down their downloading and in some cases it has increased downloading as people use it to find new bands they enjoy before downloading. I am aware of several people refuse to do this because of anti-antip2p principles.
Some may think that Spotify could be the death of legal downloading, but on every track, if you right click, there is an option to buy it! And many people are doing so for use on their MP3 players and other devices. In some cases, people will buy more because of Spotify, unfortunately some will buy less but people didn't stop buying music because it was available on other places online. So there may be no change!

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My views on Spotify.

Spotify really has changed my life. You know when you get a song stuck in your head and want to listen to it? It's never been easier to listen to it! Just enter the band or track name and it's playing. It feels like having access to everything I want, and could ever want to! Unfortunately this is far from the case. Many smaller bands that I listen to are not on the site - as well as some really huge bands, for example, The Beatles and AC/DC are not on Spotify as they have opted out. This could change in the future though. Don't let this put you off though - There are still loads of bands and if you're fed up of having your hard drive full of music, or like to listen to music people suggest quickly and easily this is for you. Unfortunately, a down side to not having music on your hard drive is that when your internet is going as fast as it should, it means that Spotify will sometimes stop a song to buffer mid track, and it means that when you are not connected, you will have no music
As for paying £10 a month for no advertisements, I don't really know if it's worth it, you can pay £10 for Napster and download as many tracks as you want! Granted, Spotify is useful if you don't have the space but after that month you don't keep anything, though, to be honest, 33p a day is worth it if the advertisements really annoy you - They don't annoy me at all so I would never do it unless they increased the amount of advertisements. The £1 for one night is definitely worth it though! When having a party it would be awful to have adverts every 10 minutes, so I would recommend this.
I love being able to sign in anywhere! Because you have a Spotify account it means you can access your playlists on ANY computer which has Spotify. The only down side is the adverts - They have recently been getting people to phone in with their opinions and they sounds stupid.

FREE. SIMPLE. QUICK.

Summary: If you haven't tried this, you should try it now. You will not be disappointed.