This story from the New York Post caught my eye online today because I sometimes use Spotify. The music service intrigued me because I have struggled with finding something which lets me stream/play my favorite music on multiple devices. While I like Spotify, I’m not surprised their attempts to hook people into a paid service has mostly failed.
Right now, I have music playing on my work computer through Google Play. This is the player hooked up to their cloud service. I have 4,627 songs available with absolutely no restrictions. OK, now I have 4.626 songs available because something I had downloaded for my daughter just showed up in my shuffle play, the hazards of simply adding all the songs from your hard drive to the cloud. Regardless of how many Victoria Justice songs I have to delete when they play, I have all my music in one place, including my R.E.M. bootlegs. Before anyone screams “piracy,” the band has a pretty open policy in letting fans share live recordings.
Using Google Play does mean I might end up with spotty song information – I just listened to a version of 1,000,000 which I think came from their 2007 live rehearsals in Dublin, but I’m not sure what night – but I can deal with that. That also means I have variable audio levels, my biggest complaint about the Google interface, but hardly a dealbreaker. I first tried the Amazon Cloud Player, but hated how you had to go to the Cloud Drive to change information on a song, something I do when a file plays but doesn’t indicate the artist or song title. Google makes that function much more seamless.
With Spotify, I get all the correct song information, a stable audio level and access to some songs I may not have in my library, but that doesn’t quite cover things for me. Sure, I’m not going to listen to all 4,000 plus songs, but I like having them accessible. With Spotify, I can access “local files” from my hard drive, but I don’t have all my music on a hard drive at work and have eliminated music from my laptop hard drive since I can access it from the cloud.
I still crank up Spotify once in a while. I made some pretty fun playlists on there and don’t mind the brief ads, but I have found myself drifting more and more to the cloud where I have music I have paid for and/or curated. Some people may find Spotify something they want to pay for, but I have already put a lot of time and money into my music and don’t see why I need to pony up for their service.
I like Spotify for the music that I never got around to buying or want to try out. But I’m reluctant to spend the money for the service because that only means accessing it on my iPhone. I’m just fine with the desktop access for Spotify and podcasts and iTunes for my iPhone.
For me, Spotify is for the stuff I don’t *want* to go out and pay for, or the realms of music I’m undereducated in and just want on in the background.
For instance, when I’m pounding away at the keyboard trying to wrap up a data sheet, I’ll throw on a big impressionist classical album; something without lyrics to distract me. I don’t want to pay for that, cause I don’t know if I’d listen to many of those tracks outside the context of content generation.
I’ve got iTunes and my iPod for the times when I want a specific song. I’ve got Spotify for when I just want something in the background.