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Thoughts on Spotify, Part 2

posted July 20th, 2011 in Music

Now that Spotify has finally launched in the US, and now that I’ve gotten an invitation and have had an opportunity to try out the free version…

One of the benefits of Spotify is supposed to be social discovery, easy sharing of playlists and whatnot. Of course, with this limited rollout, I only know two or three other people with accounts, and I don’t think anybody has shared playlists. Then again, neither have I. I did see one person sharing a track on Facebook, using the Spotify FB app, but for now I’m not installing that connectivity — it asks for way too many permissions without giving any good reason for why.

Barring social discovery, I wish it had a better exploration mechanism for discovery. On the one hand, the ability to browse by artist works really well, and it includes all of the albums they have available by that artist as well as all of the collections they’ve appeared on. Or, on the first day I’d logged in and messed around with it much, I found a dozen or so Vitamin String Quartet albums (the guys who do the “String Tribute To…” series) to add to a list to listen to later. But about the best it does for other discovery is a handful of random albums on the front page, or 5 or 6 “similar artists” listed when you go to an artist page. I kind of wish there were a good genre browser, with more specific genres instead of just lumping virtually everything under “rock & pop,” although for that matter it wouldn’t even hurt to be able to browse all rock & pop, all jazz, all bluegrass, etc. I’m sure that, theoretically, curated genre playlists are a part of the social discovery.

The collection is also sort of weird. I think I’ve read that it has the largest catalog of any comparable service, with Wikipedia quoting “15 million, growing by 10,000 per day.” But the actual contents are uneven. I started off searching for Loreena McKinnett’s “Mummer’s Dance,” which failed (not least of which because it doesn’t have a very good “did you mean x?” feature for misspelled names). I did find a slightly different version that had appeared on some kind of compilation CD, but they didn’t have her full CD that had the original track. But then it has apparently every VSQ album, tracks from a variety of indie labels, and a smattering of albums that really surprised (and pleased) me (like Jeff Kollman’s Shedding Skin (spotify link)). When I searched for Porcupine Tree’s Voyage 34, instead it came up with a track from an audiobook. They don’t seem to have anything by 3, and they’re missing a variety of older CDs that I checked ranging from bands like Tribal Tech to Coheed & Cambria.

The ad-supported nature can be frustrating, just because your playlists will be interrupted with a loud ad that usually has nothing to do with what you were listening to. And spoken ads I don’t really mind, but when it comes on in the middle of a jazz fusion playlist with this (terrible) R&B song they’re pushing pretty hard, it’s jarring. Maybe they’ll eventually be able to extend their ad base and that problem will go away.

The interface is quirky but acceptable. The biggest problem is that double-clicking on a song in a results page enqueues that song and then every other song on the page after it, which makes building playlists on the fly kind of…weird. Enqueueing a song later will insert songs in the order you would expect, but then once you’re done queueing things up it goes back to whatever was on the page when you originally played the first song.

So I’ll keep using the free service for now and put up with the annoying ads, but I don’t know if I’m excited enough by it yet to pay for a subscription, even when it switches to only having 10 hours per month and a max 5 plays per track. The benefit of the $10/month subscription would be being able to listen to the full library from a smartphone, but I usually have my Zune or the CDs handy for most music I would come up with to listen to on the road. (Plus, you know, the whole not having a smart phone thing.)

One response to “Thoughts on Spotify, Part 2”

1. Anonymous says:

   October 24, 2011 at 2:09 am

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