Spotify

Spotify might just be the best online music streaming site on the planet. It's free (provided you don't mind the occasional audio advert between tracks), fast, user-friendly and has a pretty decent selection of both new and back catalogue material. I'll grant you that for some users the lack of a mobile phone client at the moment is a drawback, but as I don't own a mobile phone – and wouldn't want to rack up the bandwidth charges for streaming all that music if I did – I'm perfectly happy with the desktop client.

So far, I've been using Spotify as much to hear music that I have (or once had) in analogue formats as to listen to new material that I probably wouldn't go out and buy just yet. I'll be interested to see if that pattern holds over time; there's all sorts of music I'm not going to buy all over again but am happy to be able to listen to now and again, but then there's always something new(ish) that I'd like to listen to a few times before deciding whether to buy it. I wonder which impulse will win out.

Naturally, good as Spotify is there are a few improvements that could usefully be made (IMHO):

1. Get this menu item working. In the end I'll want copies of music I really like in a format I can play when away from my desktop computer, so if they add links to the iTunes Store and Amazon's MP3 store then I foresee many, many impulse buys.
2. I hope they'll re-skin their client so that it looks more like an ordinary MacOS X program: I know some people like the matt black look in their jukebox programs, but I'd like the option of not causing myself eyestrain reading all that light text on a black background. Make it skinnable and everyone's happy.
3. I like that the Spotify client works with Growl and Last.fm, but I missed the ability to display song lyrics while I played tracks that I enjoy when I use iTunes.¹ I'm sure that Spotify will eventually incorporate most of the bells and whistles that users have built up around their current jukebox software, but it's a shame that most of us will end up with two parallel music libraries and their associated ecosystems of utilities. Not enough of a shame to make me consider dropping Spotify though.

Spotify is officially in invite-only beta mode; I'm sure that the company would be horrified if anyone were to follow this link to get straight to the signup page without an invitation.

[Via Feeling Listless]

1. In fairness, iTunes itself only holds the lyrics: it's DesktopLyrics that displays them in a translucent window over my desktop. ↩