Shawn Blanc‘s initial impressions on Spotify, and the differences between this (new to the US) streaming music service and other competitors like Rdio. All positive, it seems.
My Thoughts
Personally, I’m giving the premium plan a go for a month ($9.99/mo for unlimited music streaming to both desktop and mobile, with offline saving of songs). So far, I’m thrilled. Think of it like the iTunes store without the purchasing option, and instead of hearing 90 second previews of songs you get the whole thing. Granted, Spotify’s streaming library isn’t quite up to snuff with iTunes’s, but I’m definitely satisfied so far.
The part I’m most excited about is the social aspect of the service — sharing new music is something that I’ve always done with friends, but it seems to be becoming harder and harder to do so as our music libraries are getting split between devices. Spotify’s features like collaborative playlists and public music profiles will (hopefully) help me both share music with friends and find out what they’re listening to. And, no need to find out their usernames — Spotify uses Facebook Connect to give you access to your ‘friends’. Sharing music with them is as simple as dragging and dropping a song onto their name, sending the music to their Inbox of tunes. I dig it.