What Is SpotifySpotify is the latest music application to sweep the nation. The Swedish company has met great success in Europe and is now stepping into the American market. This company has an innovative approach to meeting today’s demands for quick and easy access to a wide variety of albums. They offer three subscription levels: Free, Unlimited and Premium. Their free subscription allows users to access almost any song on the market and share playlists with other Spotify users. However, without upgrading to a paying account, users are limited to ten hours of listening per month and can only access each song five times. Members who purchase an Unlimited subscription can enjoy access to all the tracks on Spotify without limits or advertisements. If users wish to make Spotify their primary source of music entertainment, they may prefer to upgrade to a Premium account.
For the price of $9.99 per month, equivalent to buying one album each month on iTunes, members can enjoy the best features Spotify has to offer with a Premium account. This includes offline access to your personalized Spotfiy library. Unlike owning the music, once you choose to end your subscription to Spotify you lose access to these tracks. But as long as you continue your subscription, you have complete offline access to any song added to your library, as well as unlimited access to the online Spotify database. Another great feature allows Premium members to listen to music in 320kb – twice the quality of the Free or Unlimited subscriptions. Additionally, Premium members have access to exclusive content, can access their music from anywhere in the world and can play their music directly from a wireless system such as a digital television or the Sonos wireless stereo system.
What Is Spotify – DrawingThe services provided to Premium members seem to show that Spotify is effectively finding solutions to satisfy society’s wishes for cheap access to a diverse selection of music. Spotify offers users more control over the music they listen to than most other music applications. Pandora, for example, creates customized radio stations but does not allow the listener to pick which song is playing. However, Pandora does have a discovery engine that keeps track of the listener’s preferences and tailors the radio stations to match them. Spotify lacks this discovery engine feature but has instead a feature that displays related albums or artist bios for whatever music is being played.
Overall, Spotify is an excellent way to discover new music, share music with friends, and have continuous access to all your favorite tracks. Spotify Premium has several great features to make the music listening experience more enjoyable. The only downside is that you don’t actually own any of the music. Once you decide to end your subscription you will no longer have access to your playlists and library. If you prefer to purchase all your music, Amazon and iTunes may be better suited for you. However, if music ownership is not a concern for you, Spotify’s unique approach to music may take your listening experience to a whole new level.
