Quick Intro: Woo Hoo “ a Guest Review! The Spotify streaming music service, and its recently launched iPhone app (neither of which are available in the US just yet) has been much talked about, heavily praised, and has generated a lot of excitement. I ‘m delighted that today we are able to post a ‘guest review ‘ of Spotify from a friend of the site “ Milo McLaughlin.
I did a post a few weeks back featuring and linking to Milo ‘s hilarious video guide to the iPhone. Since then I ‘ve been following “ and thoroughly enjoying Milo ‘s blog. So I was very happy when Milo offered up a guest review of the exciting new Spotify app. And here it is
Spotify for the iPhone became available in the UK on Monday and as a big fan of the free desktop application, I couldn’t resist signing up to a premium account at the cost of £10 per month (around $16) just so I could check it out. The company’s founders say Spotify should be available in the US by the end of the year so hopefully this preview will whet your appetite for what’s to come.
I’ve not been disappointed by it – I now have access to an easily searchable, vast library of music (6 million tracks and growing) from a wide variety of genres. I can type in an artist, and providing Spotify have them in their catalogue and I have access to a wi-fi or 3G connection, within seconds I can stream the track or album of my choice and so far, for 99% of the time there has been no latency whatsoever. I can also save either an individual track or entire album to an existing playlist, and all of this is possible on the iPhone. However to create new playlists I currently need to use the desktop app – but any changes made there are updated almost instantly to the iPhone. I fully expect this function to be enabled on the iPhone app in future versions. The other thing that isn’t possible yet is the ability to share playlists with other users, which is part of what makes the desktop app so much fun.
The best thing about the new mobile app, especially for iPod Touch users and frequent travellers, is the ability to store over 3000 tracks offline via the offline playlist function which can be accessed anywhere that an internet connection isn’t possible. The premium account also means none of the increasingly irritating ads that pop up in the free desktop app, and a higher streaming rate of 320 kb/s instead of 160 kb/s for the free version.
So what are the drawbacks? Well like all iPhone apps apart from the built in iPod, the Spotify app doesn’t run in the background, so you can’t listen to music and also surf mobile Safari, take photos or play games. This is likely to prove to be increasingly frustrating and it’s clear that this is one of the main reasons it won’t be an ‘iTunes killer’ as has been hyped – (and possibly why Apple let it pass through the app store). Another downside is that the sound quality on the app isn’t as rich as some audiophiles would like, but I’d say it’s sufficient for the majority of casual music listeners.
But the fact remains, it is a major step forward in terms of the way people will listen to music in the future. I have already found myself playing albums I already own on Spotify just because it’s easier to find them than go hunting around on my external hard drive or on my CD shelves. And as for all the cheesy, uncool music I used to like but was too ashamed to buy again, well now I can listen to it to my heart’s content!
I have noticed the app being a bit buggy once or twice but I would say this happens on all apps from time to time and for the vast majority of the time it’s worked perfectly. For the price of one album per month I can now listen to hundreds of albums, and if there are any I really want to own them I can always buy them elsewhere (the desktop app currently links to the mp3 store 7digital.com but reportedly will also link to iTunes). It’s the best alternative yet to illegal downloading, and may also further undermine Myspace’s user base, especially if unsigned bands are given the option to add their music in the future. The only people who may not be happy are the smaller scale musicians who apparently earn very little royalties through the service – but then that might increase as Spotify is rolled out across the world. Hopefully you will get a chance to try it sooner rather than later.
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TAGS: iphone apps, iPhone music apps
