By now, given the media coverage, you should know what Spotify is but if you don't I can give you the explanation I was giving people last week.
Spotify is a free service that lets you listen to more than 15 million songs on your computer. The free service is ad supported but they offer an ad free $10 a month plan that allows you to put 3,333 songs on your smartphone. They have everything, which means you can listen to anything you want anytime you want on any device you want.
Well, they have everything except The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and that one album. You know that one album you always wanted? They don't have that. Spotify also brings over all the music on iTunes and other services into the Spotify program. Which means, of course, that if you already put The Beatles or Led Zeppelin on your computer then you will have them on Spotify.
I've been using the $10 a month plan for a couple of weeks and it's well worth it. I do most of my music listening in the car so I need to be able to put songs on my phone and play them on the road. Well, need is a strong word but I certainly want to be able to do that.
I found that finding and playing songs or albums or whatnot works pretty well. They have a way for you to save songs on the phone so if you can't get a signal you can still hear a tune. The app for the phone is kind of buggy and freezes frequently and generally doesn't like it when you do anything other than find songs and play songs.
For instance, every time I try to create a playlist on the phone it crashes. However, creating playlists on the computer is easy and they show up immediately on the phone. Also, you can stream music from the Spotify iPhone app to an Apple TV or other wireless playback devices like Sonos speakers. It worked pretty well with my Apple TV.
For music lovers this is the service that wins, I think. In the same way that Netflix won for movie and television lovers.
