I wrangled myself an invite to the buzz-heavy streaming music service Spotify and have been playing around with the free version for the past hour. It’s fairly intuitive to use: type in an artist, song, or album and Spotify will produce a list of matching results available for streaming. And with 15 million tracks available in its catalog, Spotify doesn’t lack for selection (although a few big artists like the Beatles are missing). It’s a great way to listen to complete tracks and albums without actually purchasing them. And it offers all kinds of possibilities for creating playlists for parties.
But Spotify seems to work best if you know what you’re looking for or you want to explore the playlists of friends. It doesn’t offer a simple way to browse and discover new music. And perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but I’m still a little reluctant to stream all my music from the cloud. Streaming is fine for video, but sometimes I want to listen to Gorillaz on a lonely stretch of road that is completely off the data grid. I’ll probably continue to use Spotify to sample music that interests, but I’ll continue to purchase tracks through Amazon and iTunes.
I’ve like Turntable.fm better. Spotify is fine, but some of my favorite albums are completely missing. Turntable has the same problem, but it is fun to DJ to a crowd and listen to others DJ.