Spotify Review: If You Like Music, You Will LOVE Spotify

As an Apple fan – and stockholder – I love iTunes. But now there is a program that makes iTunes look like an old PC: Spotify.

The hit music-listening service came from Europe recently and those of us lucky enough to be among the first to use it have been blown away.

Even its free version is wonderful, never mind that its limited to 10 hours a month after an introductory period and has ads. But for $4.99 a month you can have unlimited use on all your computers and for $9.99 a month you can also have it on your cell phone, has improved sound quality, and you can even use it when its NOT connected to the Internet.

So let me tell you what it is and how it works. You install Spotify on your computers, easy, nothing to it. It automatically collects all your music, including what is on iTunes, so you have one place to see and play all your music.

You then connect to Facebook and all your friends who also have Spotify are loaded as well as the music they want to share. If that isn’t enough, you can search for any artist or any title and place a star next to it and its yours to play. Your Spotify account syncs up each computer. This music you won’t own, you will be renting.

While not every piece of music is available, 15 million tunes are.

Here is what Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg had to say about it:

“Spotify is so good”

Now, you have to get an invite to join Spotify, but here is one way I learned to get around it: sign up for Klout, a program that rates your social influence, and you will get an invite to Spotify. That is how I got my account. I have been playing with it for a couple of weeks and even though the stock market is killing me, I am going to purchase the $9.99 monthly program today. Life is too short.

“The biggest complaint I heard from people who’d tried it was that the music discovery features were seriously lacking. It was great for listening to exactly what you want, but if you wanted a music service to recommend new bands or stream a customized radio station for you, Spotify wasn’t it. They’ve now added an “Artist Radio” tab that includes a streaming radio station of similar artists for every artist in their library. This feature makes Spotify even more useful to someone like me, who doesn’t always know what they want to hear,” writes Get Rich Slowly.

“With the arrival of Swedish-born, London-based cloud service Spotify on American shores July 14, along with the progress of Google Music, and the impending launch of Apple’s iCloud music service, this year will be remembered as the year in which keeping our own copies of music, be it physically on CDs and LPs, or digitally as MP3s on our hard drives, became a decision, not a necessity, for both casual fans and music obsessives.

Instead of buying each individual track or album, you can pay for access to a vast collection and then organize and share it as you choose. Or, if you’re a casual music listener like me, you don’t even need to pay for the service. The free version still allows you to make and share your own playlists, and to listen to playlists from your friends.

J.D. says that not owning the music is actually an advantage for him, since he’s in “owning less” mode. If owning your music collection is what matters to you, this isn’t the service for you. One friend I talked to, a former disc jockey, said he was concerned about what would happen if he lost access to the music collection he built up through Spotify.

 “Say you used the service for four years, built all your playlists and favorites in it, and then something happened and it was unavailable. That’d be a major loss. He’d rather keep buying his music and retain control. Spotify does let you export and share playlists, though, which seems to address that concern. If they went out of business or changed their service in