Spotify: The Future of Music Listening?

Do you ever find yourself wanting to listen to a song but you are unsure whether to buy it or not? Do you waste your time trawling through dozens of websites just to find the song in decent quality? If the answer to these questions is yes, you definitely want to download Spotify; this is a free application which allows you to stream thousands of songs to your Mac or PC.

Once you have signed up for a Spotify account and downloaded the application, you will soon be amazed by its brilliance. Upon opening Spotify, you will be greeted by a wonderfully simplistic user interface. It will show you ‘Top Tracks’ as well as ‘Top Albums’. When you click a track you will be shocked by how quickly it begins to play. Thanks to a well thought-out peer-to-peer streaming system, songs will begin to play almost as quickly as they would if they were stored on your computer. You can also search for the song or artist that you are looking for, which makes navigation of the application even simpler. Users will also benefit from the ability to make playlists. This stops you from having to search for a song every time you want to listen to it. An interesting feature within a playlist is the ability to retrieve the link of that playlist. You could send this link to a friend, and he or she can then modify the playlist themselves.

One of the drawbacks of Spotify is that in order to make money, it includes advertisements. Although these are infrequent, they may annoy some. However, there is a solution to this; users may purchase a ‘premium’ version of Spotify. This currently costs £9.99 per month (US Dollar equivalent is $15) or £99 (approximately $150) for a whole year. Despite this price being steep, those who mainly listen to music on their computer may never have to purchase a song or view cheesy advertisements again.

Overall, I am a huge fan of Spotify. It has an amazing user interface, contains millions of songs, and best of all, it’s completely free. It is also a glimpse into the future. ‘Cloud’ technology is currently growing strongly, and Spotify is a great example of this. It makes it possible to have your whole music library completely online.  I believe it may eventually revolotuionize the way we listen to music. I recommend Spotify to anyone who ever listens to music on their computer; it is definitely a worthy download.