Spotify: Free, Unlimited, Streaming Music.

Post Published on June 2, 2012.
Last Updated on December 28, 2017 by davemackey.

I’ve been using Spotify for a number of months now and I really like it. I’ve used a number of services over the years to listen to music –
Pandora, Napster (once it became legitimate), and Grooveshark…now I mainly use Spotify.

Spotify has a tremendously large library of music available – somewhere in the ballpark of 15 million tracks I believe. It includes most popular artists as well as many small, independent artists. You can’t always find the latest releases – but overall, I find 95% of the music I’m looking for on Spotify.

I love how Spotify integrates into Facebook so that others can know what I’m listening to (if you want to share that info.), allows third party developers to create unique apps to extend Spotify’s built-in functionality, the quick and easy sharing of songs with others, and the relatively sporadic ads in the free version.

Go get it now, its free. What do you have to lose?

That said, I do have a few “ideas” for how Spotify could enhance its service. Namely:

1. I’m unaware of any way in which one can “favorite” an artist. This is easy to do with individual tracks, but oftentimes I don’t want to say, “hey, I love every track on this album” – I really want to say, “hey, I love this artist…so I’ll like pretty much by ’em.”
2. I’d love the ability to tag songs rather than just assigning them to categories. This would create a flexible base around which I could query Spotify to find songs for the specific topic I’m thinking of. In my case, I use songs to facilitate discussions – in church, in youth ministry, etc. Sometimes I’m looking for that song I can’t remember about death, love, God, anxiety, or whatever – being able to tag songs specifically would be awesome.
3. I’d like a counter on each song. How many times have I listened to this song? Sometimes I favorite songs and I love them – but I don’t want to listen to them again right now…its likely that if I haven’t listened to it more than a few times, I’d like to hear it again. By giving a counter I could easily decide which of my favorite songs to listen to…hmmm, that also makes me think it might be nice to have a “last played” column.
4. The last feature is an important one. I love music discovery – but I also have my stream integrated with Facebook and I want whatever songs appear in my list to be “safe” songs. I don’t use most discovery services at this juncture (other than Pandora) b/c too often one ends up with an “unsafe” song with explicit language. This is an unpleasant surprise in a work environment and for those who might be following your stream on Facebook. I know for many this may not be a concern, but it is for me, and I think it would be fairly easy to exclude explicit songs from being included in music discovery (this could be an option, rather than forcing it on everyone).