A Day with Spotify

Yesterday I signed up for Spotify, the music service that has been around for a while but is just now available in the US. I signed up for the Premium Service because, well, that’s what I do. I wanted the whole enchilada. The features with Premium are:

  • You get to use Spotify on your mobile phone.  They have a really nice iPhone app.  The tracks are synched to your phone from your playlists so that you can listen to them at any time on your phone
  • You can play all tracks in your playlists offline
  • Unlimited streaming of music
  • Integrates terrifically with iTunes.  You can drag tracks from Spotify right to your iTunes playlists, etc. and see all of your iTunes music right in the Spotify app.
  • No advertisements!

After signing up, I downloaded the Mac version of the desktop app, downloaded the iPhone app and was off and running.

User experience

The user experience was pretty intuitive.  You can search the massive Spotify music library for tracks, playlists, etc.  It feels a good bit like iTunes here.  One thing that really bothers me is that I don’t have the option to add columns to the songlist grid.  For instance, I like to see the track # when looking at an album.  I couldn’t add Track List as a column.  As a matter of fact, I don’t see a way to add any columns.

Adding a new playlist and is really simple, and again it’s a lot like iTunes.  You add the playlist, then just drag tracks from the catalog to the playlist.  There is a ‘Share’ button at the top of the screen that allows you to quickly share your new playlist on Facebook, Twitter and (strangely) MSN Messenger.  The Share button did not have a way to just copy the Playlist URL so you can paste it yourself.  You can also indicate whether or not the playlist is available offline.  Really simple.

One feature I really wish they had was the ability to play to any Apple Airport destination.  I have an Airport Express in my house, but can’t direct music to it without something like Airfoil.

Synching to my iPhone

To synch with my iPhone, I simply launched the iPhone app on my phone.  It connected with the desktop app and synched all of my playlists, etc.  That’s a little odd as a user experience, but it works.  If you have an iPod, you can just connect the USB cable and it will synch that way.

Sharing music

To share music, you can share the url via Facebook, Twitter, and MSN Messenger via URL.  You can also send music to another Spotify user, which will show up in their inbox.  This will be handy for recommending music to friends, etc.  There is also an integration to Facebook for finding out what your friends are listening to.  I couldn’t test this because I don’t know anyone else using it yet.

Overall, I am so far really impressed with Spotify.  The catalog is immense.  There was not any music that I searched for that was not found.  In some cases it found a bit too much.  I got a lot of karaoke versions of songs / artists when searching that was a bit annoying.

I am going to spend some time this weekend building up some playlists and testing out the Facebook integration a bit more.

If you signed up for Spotify, let me know.  I would like to test the more interactive parts of the app with others.

What are your thoughts on Spotify?  Is it better than other online music sites for you?