Yesterday Spotify landed in the United States, and being impatient, I decided to subscribe to the Unlimited plan for $4.99/month to get around the queue. I downloaded the .deb package, fired up the terminal for a quick install, and then played around for a few hours to see if this was the life-changing service I had heard so much about.
The Service
Personally, I don’t see the need for Spotify. Some of the big features, especially the ones centered around the use of smartphones, don’t really relate to my needs, and others don’t exactly get me fired up. They tout the ability to instantly stream any album or song, but I could always have done this- just by firing up Grooveshark, or worse case scenario, YouTube.
The social aspect of it is sort of half-baked, too. Nearly all social interactivity is done via the use of connecting your Spotify account to Facebook, which I feel isn’t to its benefit. I’m not a Facebook fan, and not only that, but none of my Facebook friends are using it at this moment. I understand that some people want to share their music with friends and family (although I’m not one of them), but only using Facebook seems like a step in the wrong direction.
Another big feature is that music you add to a playlist or star is put right into your library, alongside your personal MP3, AAC, and OGG files. The library is where it really breaks down for me. It tries to match your songs to those in the Spotify catalog, but much of the information got put into another album with a different track listing, and I had a terrible problem with explicit songs being matched to the clean version, and vice-versa. Additionally, the album sorting can be frustrating at times, with the tracks being out of order due to artist or metadata mis-match.
On a positive note, the selection seems to be extensive, and the methods for finding artists, albums, and songs is straightforward and elegant. On the artist page Spotify gives you a short biography, and categorizes the music chronologically by album. All in all, it isn’t half bad. Being fair to Spotify, I’m sure that the service is exactly what some people are looking for, and if that’s that case, it isn’t half-bad. I still can’t justify the $4.99/month for the service, because I don’t really gain much, and my experience with the client isn’t all that great. I will be cancelling before my first month is up.
The Linux Client
I’m torn on how I feel about the Linux client. On one side, it does have some really great integration features, the main one being that it works with the Ubuntu Sound Menu, and it knows to automatically look for music in your “~/Music” directory.
Sadly, I think it has a sort of sluggish feel to it. It feels sort of like running iTunes in Wine. The theme doesn’t at all match, the menu bar doesn’t integrate, the buttons are on the right-hand side, and it has a general slowness about it that is just enough to annoy you.
Additionally, it doesn’t have an equalizer, which is a must-have for a music player, and as I mentioned before, the library management is kind of spotty (no pun intended). That being said, it works, it integrates to a fair degree, I’m glad to see they didn’t leave Linux users out in the cold, and we can’t be too mean about the client, because it is more of a beta release. So, until they make it official, I think we need to keep an open mind.
Final Thoughts
While Spotify is a competent service and does what it says to a decent degree, I’m not sure that the service is one that people really want, and coupled with a frustrating Linux client, I say pass on this unless it’s exactly the thing you need. If you’re like me, use Pandora or Grooveshark for streaming, and use a better music player like Banshee or Beatbox for downloading and listening to music locally.