Spotify Premium: Totally Worth the Hype (and the Price)

A couple of weeks ago, one of Europe's leading music streaming services landed in the United States. Spotify has hit the ground running, taking American broadband Internet connections by storm, and I couldn't be any happier.

I should make it clear that in no way did Spotify compensate me. I paid for Spotify Premium out of my own pocket. Wanting to stay is impartial as possible, I figured shelling out the ten dollars myself would keep my honest as to what my experience really was. So here's my honest assessment of Spotify Premium: It's totally awesome.

PC, Smartphone, Whatever

A huge selling point to Spotify is the fact that you can get to their vast library of tracks via any web-browser in the world. Of course, you have to pay for the premium service to be able to get access like that, but for my money ten dollars is the perfect price point for this feature alone.

If you take into account the fact that you'll also be able to sync up your iTunes library, you are basically giving yourself access to vast wealth of tracks anywhere in the world for ten dollars a month. Whether you have an iPod, iPhone, laptop, netbook or some other web-ready device, with Spotify Premium you will indeed have just about every song ever recorded at your disposal.

Super Easy Navigation

With any new application or service, there's a learning curve. After getting my invite, signing up and installing the local client on my desktop, it did take some time to familiarize myself with the layout, and the specific terms that Spotify uses. I'd say that within an hour or two, I was very comfortable getting in and out of the menus.

One extremely nice thing about Spotify's layout is the ability to search an artist and have a lot of the pertinent returned data be active links. For instance, I searched for Nirvana. That search brought up tons of tracks, and so I clicked on the "Unplugged in New York" album title for one of the tracks and it instantly brought me to that full album, which I listened to, thank you very much.

Availability of Material

Since signing up for Spotify Premium, I've been exhaustively searching for artists and tracks and have been absolutely shocked at how vast a library I have access to. So far, the only two artists I have not been able to find in Spotify's catalogs are The Beatles and Metallica. Considering that these two bands are notorious for not being available digitally (The Beatles just last year were added to iTunes), I consider that a non-issue.

The fact is that since I have both The Beatles and Metallica in my personal library, and Spotify lets me sync my local iTunes library into the tracks for use, I essentially do have The Beatles and Metallica right along the millions of other tracks Spotify gets me access to.

Socialize and Share Your Playlists!

You can be DJ with Spotify. All of the tracks available to you can be compiled into countless playlists that you can then share and make public with the world. Spotify's bult-in connection to Facebook allows you to add your friends and see their playlists, provided they use Spotify and want to share their 90's Boy Band Mixes with you.

Not Everything is Great

As with any product or service, there are definitely some issues that need addressing within the auspices of Spotify. For starters, DRM, or digital rights management will prevent any songs you purchase on iTunes that have DRM attached to them from playing on Spotify. This may be more a negative on purchasing songs from iTunes, but hopefully the folks at Spotify work something out with either iTunes or the record labels that will allow them to give their customers access to DRM-controlled content.

Next, if you're like me and have an MP3 catalog ranging back now almost 15 years, it's quite time consuming to have Spotify search and index all your songs. I wish that by default it would just the user if they'd wish to sync and just how much to sync. It made creating custom playlists a little more difficult than it needed to be. However, discovering the drag and drop feature certainly made syncing my library manually very easy once I turned off the auto-sync feature.