Spotify Arrives: FAQ About The New Service

I thought someone told me this was free? What are these paid tiers you are talking about?

Spotify offers three tiers of service. The basic level is absolutely free but there are limitations. You will have an occasional ad, you will not be able to sync for offline use and you will not be able to sync to your mobile device. Additionally, after six months of account creation, your account is limited to a maximum of ten hours per month of music streaming. Individual tracks are also limited to five plays each.

Are there any additional benefits to the premium tier? Do I need it?

While the free and unlimited plans may satisfy many users, the Premium tier offers additional benefits. The stream quality is increased to a high-fidelity 320 kbps from the standard of 192 kbps. You will also be able to use Spotify with music services like Sonos and Squeezebox. Apparently there’s additional exclusive content and new releases available quicker than the other plans as well. And to reiterate, if you want to be able to sync songs to your computer so they are available offline, and to sync to your mobile, you will need the Premium Plan.

There’s the catch. I have to pay, it must be expensive.

The Premium Plan is $9.99/month and the Unlimited Plan is $4.99/month. We will let you decide if the cost of buying eight tracks from iTunes or one album is worth having millions of tracks available at your fingertips.

I’m just figuring out how to use Google+, and this sounds great but I really don’t have time to set this up and learn how to use it. Am I out of luck?

This may be one of Spotify’s major strengths. The setup download is literally a couple of KB and takes a second or two to download and installation takes an additional five seconds. You will be hard pressed to find a simpler program to download and install.

Sounds great, but won’t it be a hassle switching back and forth between iTunes to listen to my music and Spotify to listen to that music?

Another major strength of Spotify and what separates it from other on-demand streaming options is that it integrates your existing music with Spotify’s so that there is no need to use two different players (except for lossless files, more on that later). Click on the graphic below to view player and the integration of Spotify Library tracks and your own locally owned music. The yellow arrow points to the small music note icon differentiating the two.

Spotify Player Interface

I’ve tried on-demand music listening before but I can’t stand the buffering, skipping and lag.

Spotify uses a mix of server side music storage, P2P technology and utilizes your computer’s cache to create a streaming experience that is literally indistinguishable from playing a track from your existing music player. Select a song and in less than 10-milliseconds (literally) it starts playing. After using Spotify pretty heavily for four days and listening to 250+ tracks (according to Scrobble statistics from Last.FM) the author has had zero instances of lag, buffer, skip or any other digital anomaly.

So, what’s all this with being able to sync and save locally with the Premium account?

Really one of the game changers here as compared to rdio, Grooveshark, Pandora and other streaming services. Again, Spotify is an application on your computer or mobile, and not a web interface. So for those times that an internet connection is not available, you can load up as many tracks as you want on either your computer or mobile device. The process, like the initial setup simply could not be easier. Select the playlist or track that you want to listen to when off the grid, and simply ensure “Available Offline” is selected.

Context Menu to Allow for Offline Use

Do I need to use Spotify from the same computer?

Another major benefit. You can install Spotify on as many machines as you want: Apple, PC, Linux, etc. Once you log into any machine, your entire library, playlists and friends list is completely synced. So you can add tracks to a playlist on your laptop during the day, and listen at home from your desktop.

I heard you can easily share music from Spotify as well?

Another absolutely fantastic feature of Spotify. Once you create a playlist or find a track that others would enjoy, there are several ways to share them. First, you can highlight the track or playlist and get a URL link to email, tweet, blog, share or post anywhere. For example, we created a playlist with a couple of tunes from  each of the albums off of Hidden Track’s Best of 2010 Albums list. While in the past, it would be difficult to share these legally, sharing to another Spotify user is a snap! Once another user opens the share link, all the tracks are instantly available. And again, with a Premium account, you would be able to take this playlist, save to your laptop or mobile and listen to them as if you owned them – even without an internet connection.

Facebook integration is also built into the Spotify player. While linking your Facebook account gives you an easy way to post to your wall and share a track, it is certainly not required. However, currently the only way to change your profile image, is linking it to your Facebook account.

Finally, you can share directly to Spotify “friends” by dragging the track or playlist to the user name in the “People” column. Finding friends is not very intuitive right now. Without knowing another user’s name, it is difficult to find people. You can use the search box using a syntax of “spotify:user:username” (for example: spotify:user:tmwsiy) ensuring that user name is all in lower case. Once you find the user, you can “add to friends.” Or, you can see who else is subscribed to public playlists and add users that way.

So how much music is available?

As with most services, there are a few notable omissions. Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin are a few of the bigger ones. However, the catalog is impressive. Twitter user @ericwyman endeavored to duplicate Phish’s online radio station, The Bunny, from their recent SuperBall IX Festival. The Bunny DJ’s played an impressive, expansive and eclectic mix of music crossing many genres. So how did Spotify’s catalog stack up? From the first two days of the playlist, Eric has already added about 80% of the playlist encompassing over 300 tracks and 20 hours of music. Check it out here: Phish’s Bunny Radio. Likewise, from Hidden Track’s Best Albums of 2010, we were able to find 21 of our 25 featured albums. Supposedly there are about 15 million tracks available today with 15,000 being added daily.

So you said I can use Spotify on my mobile device?

Absolutely. There are mobile clients for virtually every phone including Android, iPhone, Symbian, Windows Phone 7, and Palm. While you will need a Premium Account to stream over WiFi or 3G or to listen to your music offline, everyone can sync your already owned music. The sync feature, again, like most of Spotify’s interface, is dead simple. One click, as long as you are on the same WiFi network, syncs your selected playlists wirelessly. Nothing to figure out, nothing to setup and nothing to have to read and learn: Sync that simply works!

These playlists are great – where can I find more?

A few ways. Find some people whose music taste you like and simply see what lists they are subscribed to and subscribe to that playlist as well. As more tunes are added, if any to the list, yours will constantly be updated. Of course, you can create your own and encourage others to add to it by enabling “Collaborative Playlist.” That way, anyone with the link can add to your list.

Spotify also tweets out some interesting lists from their Spotify twitter account: @spotify.

There is an interesting site, Spotibot, that can create playlists on the fly from a seed artist much like Pandora does.

What doesn’t work or could be improved?

With any service, not everything is perfect. Like previously mentioned, finding people is difficult and not being able to update a profile picture without Facebook is a hassle for many. But perhaps one of the most glaring omissions right now is the support for lossless files like FLAC and ALAC. As many users slowly migrate towards lossless as the cost of storage and the barriers to use have decreased, that portion of your existing music library can not be played through the Spotify player. While offering lossless files through Spotify is certainly not necessary, being able to play your own would be a welcome addition.

Search, while blazing fast, can be improved. When searching for an artist name, or song title, you are presented with 30-40 matches that fit on your screen, seemingly in random fashion. Once you click a column header to search your results by Track Name, Artist, Album, or Popularity, you lose the ability to scroll down for further results. More granularity for search results needs to be added as well.

Additionally,  a couple of other minor annoyances. The “Share to Twitter” feature is relatively useless as there is no link-shortener built in rendering a long title or artist name coupled with the length of the URL file impratical to share on many occasions.

Also, while Last.FM scrobbling is built in to the player, it seems to be a bit buggy, prone to error codes and in need of lots of improvement.

Finally, while there is a small icon noting the difference between local files and Spotify files, the differentiation needs to be a little more distinctive. This is especially the case when creating published playlists to share with your friends. I imagine most people do not intend on creating a list that consists of many tracks that are not listenable to the people you are sharing with. Then again, the way that Spotify is able to seamlessly integrate your library with your locally owned music and the tracks you have selected is also a plus at the same time.

So there you have it!

Early impressions give Spotify an extremely high rating for user experience, music catalog, discovering new music, sharing and value proposition. Have you tried it yet? What did you like or dislike? What’s holding you back from trying it? We’d love to hear your comments or feel free to share some links to your created playlists in the comments.

Here’s my personal playlist of some tunes I enjoyed from 2010, parker’s 2010. We’ll be back in several weeks to get further feedback and reactions as more users try out Spotify and share a list of 2011 New Music.