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Spotify

By Ian Urie

Another day, another streaming music service, or so it would seem.



Spotify (catchy name, or what), is a Windows only service.
It does give advice on how to run it under wine for Linux users, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.



The windows installer downloads and installs under wine quite nicely, thank you.
Fill in the required details (name, e-mail,password, etc.) and off it loads.




The interface is relatively uncluttered and bereft of all those pointless parts you didn't really need or want, to be found in others of the same ilk.
It does have one drawback, if you can think of it as a drawback.
Adverts!
This is an ad supported system.
You simply type in an artist or song or album, and it will display the search results.
From the grabs above, you can see it also has a variety of genres for their radio.
Make up a playlist, and every so often after the end of a song, it will play an ad.



Personally, I didn't find it all that intrusive.
It will also display text ads as well occasionally.
Again, music for free, I can forgive quite a lot.



If you want to dispense with the ads, you can upgrade and pay to listen.
Yeah, right!
Of course, with this type of attitude prevalent, I suspect its business model might come under strain.



The music quality is actually quite good.
Spotify reckons it plays at around 192kb/s, thanks to their nifty compression.
I thought it sounded quite good myself.



You can even scrobble the music you play to last.fm, which I like.
This little program is useful to check out music before you buy it.
Let's face it, the chances of the BBC or commercial radio playing the music I like has tended to fall off the end of a cliff for a great many years now.
This program and the likes of last.fm are doing well because of this.
I have tended to avoid buying CDs until I know I like them, again for a great many years.
The demise of programming on the radio for my type of listening has tended to drive this.



Pick this as a player to listen to new music and not have to navigate through hundreds of options.
It's a nice , easy to use, program, and is getting quite a bit of attention from music listeners.