Spotify - The Next Best Thing

If you haven't heard of Spotify, you are seriously missing out. It's the best music library type program after iTunes. Seriously. You can listen to your favorite songs or discover some new ones without buying them. This program has saved me some cash and is very friendly to my wallet. You can get this lovely program for five easy payments of $0. It's great.

This program has a huge library of music to choose from. It even has music iTunes doesn't sell. The creators of Spotify also provide a Top 100 chart that doesn't consist of only every overplayed song on KDWB but also other awesome songs that don't play not the radio. You can even see the Top 100 charts of other countries and listen to the songs on them. That's something that iTunes doesn't offer. In iTunes, you can't buy songs from a different country unless you have a mailing address in that country. I assume that it's because of copyright issues, but it's still lame.

It is also extremely easy to create a playlist of all of your favorite songs. There's a "Starred" playlist that can have songs easily added to by clicking the star icon next to the song you're listening to. Unfortunately for other playlists, you have to click and drag. But doesn't that sound so much more appealing than click-and-dragging-and-maybe-some-scrolling for adding songs to a playlist in iTunes?

Spotify also makes it very easy to keep up with (creep on) your friends' latest fav songs by connecting to your Facebook account. It syncs with your friends list and allows you to look at playlists made by friends who have their Facebook accounts connected also. So, instead of having your friends burn you CDs, which is technically illegal, they can just go listen to your playlist on Spotify. You don't have to spend time to burn a CD (who uses CDs anymore?), and you won't arrested. Your friend also doesn't have to buy the songs. It's a win-win situation.

There are only a few negatives about Spotify, but they're tolerable. The first is the occasional commercials that play in-between songs, but the good news is that they're only 15-30 seconds long. It's the same as Pandora, except you can actually hand pick the songs you wish to listen to and there's also a radio for those who just want to listen to a certain genre/mixture of genres of music. The second negative is that you can't put the songs that you listen to from Spotify onto your iPod or other MP3 player you own. You can only listen to music from Spotify on a computer with internet connection. This is not a major dilemma though in modern times because in this era most people use their laptops more than their iPod or MP3 player and internet is easy to find.

The program is overall very easy to use. All you need to do to get started is make an account on the site spotify.com then download the program, which all takes a total of about 10 minutes. And then you're free to play all the music you want, with the exception of occasional commercials.

Now don't worry, I'm not getting paid by Spotify to gush about it. If I was, I'd probably have a lot of obnoxious emoticons and too many exclamation points. But sadly I am not. I just love it that much.