App of the Week | Spotify Music

BY SHAWN KERR | Spotify recently went free for both mobile and tablets, something I didn’t think would ever actually happen. But the magic of Spotify has done something fantastical and brought us our on demand music – even if you can’t necessarily listen to it exactly the way that you would like.

I want to mention that I’m reviewing Spotify from a free standpoint. You can pay a small fee to be a premium member, however I’m interested in what Spotify now offers us in terms of its free services.

There are several different options for listening to music. You can listen to the radio – a service similar to that of LastFM, listen to albums, artists, and many other ways of clustering music together. However, the crux and strength of Spotify is playlists.

You can create playlists on any device and they will sync over the cloud. You can even access your Spotify playlist library within your web browser. You can listen to any playlist that you’ve made at any time and so long as you don’t mine the occasional ad you can do it all for free.

The catch on mobile is that you can only listen to playlists, artists, albums, etc. on shuffle. Free users have to listen to their music as a jumble and if you were hoping to hear that one song that you love or have stuck in your head you may have to wait a bit before it starts streaming into your ear holes.

I tried to circumvent this by creating a playlist of only one song, but doing this only got me a radio station based around that song.

The other feature I want to briefly touch on is discover.

I find Spotify’s discover feature to be the best recommendation feature I have found yet. Spotify has some sort of algorithm that really looks at what you like and recommends based on artists and songs, not genre and loose weird connections. It’s one of the reasons that I stopped using Pandora. Spotify has introduced me to a lot of music via their discover feature and it’s one of the few that I’ll take the time to look at.

Spotify free is pretty fantastic. For paying nothing you can listen to your favorite playlists, artists, and albums. So long as you don’t mind listening to it shuffled. As well, when listening to mobile I didn’t find any increase or decrease in the number of ads that I heard – which was another nice plus.

I highly recommend Spotify for anyone who wants an on demand music streaming service but doesn’t have the cash for a monthly subscription.

Score:

User Interface: 5

Presentation: 5

Performance: 4

Utility: 6

Price Point: 6

5.2

by Shawn Kerr