Eager to share, but doesn’t quite know how: hands on with Spotify

The long-anticipated US release of the music streaming service Spotify finally happened last week. With a free version that gives users access to millions of songs in a highly stable desktop app, Spotify stands to make a solid impact among American music listeners. The subscription versions, however, face stiffer competition from competing services like Rdio and Napster.

Americans gazed longingly over at the enormous music catalog Spotify provided to Europeans for nearly two years before its arrival here. Now that it’s finally reached US turf, invites to the free tier of Spotify have become highly sought after and batches of invites have been distributed through different outlets.

Using Spotify is pretty straightforward in many ways. Once you’re signed up and have downloaded the desktop app, Spotify will pull music into itself from the rest of your computer, including from your iTunes folder. If you connect your account to Facebook, Spotify creates a public profile for you that also automatically publishes all of your playlists that it can find. This will cause you immediate, if temporary, panic, because for someone who talks a big game about listening to Grizzly Bear and Toots and the Maytals, your exercise playlists have an inordinate number of Beyonce and/or Lamb of God songs.

The free version of Spotify works well as a desktop replacement for iTunes. Both streamed and local music play smoothly, and the app comes with a small set of useful preferences, like the ability to scrobble to Last.fm and to tell Spotify which files to pull music from. The service is supported by dynamic ads that alternate between horizontal and vertical banners, as well as audio ads (though this seemed to be broken as we were testing the free version out).

Access to music is not a problem for Spotify, as it boasts over 13 million tracks, but discovery is one of its weak points. A “What’s New” tab in the menu displays a few recently released popular albums with one or two quirkier choices. For reference, last we looked at the section, albums by Alan Jackson and Enrique Iglesias as well as a new Coldplay single were displayed.

A “Top Lists” section in What’s New lists the top 100 tracks and albums. There’s no way to customize what kind of music floats to the top in Spotify; as with many other services, you are entirely on your own in finding edgy stuff.

Upgrading to one of the paid versions of Spotify sweetens it up a little: with the lowest paid tier at $5 a month, you no longer get ads in the desktop app and have no playback limits (the free version is capped at 10 hours a month and 5 plays of each track after six months). For $10 a month, you get offline access to your music and up to 3,333 tracks from Spotify’s collection at a time on up to three separate devices, with optional high-quality streaming.

The mobile app works well and without hiccups, in our experience, with all the glorious access of the desktop version. You can even sync your device of choice with the desktop app to get offline music on there as well, whether you previously owned it or added streamed music to a playlist. Settings let you optimize streaming and syncing for low bandwidth use or high quality, and you can set the app to not sync if it doesn’t have a WiFi connection. 

While paid versions of Spotify stand well enough on their own, it invites comparison with other paid services like Rdio that are more robust in some ways, not least in the social dimension.

Spotify’s biggest social effort is with Facebook. You can connect with your Facebook friends over the service, see what they’ve been listening to, and share songs with them. You can also follow someone by tracking them down via their Spotify name, and then can subscribe to any playlists they make. Spotify encourages this by auto-publishing every playlist you make, unless you happened to notice (while you were frantically unpublishing your iTunes playlists) that you can uncheck that preference in their profiles.