Spotify - Music streaming at its best

You know that you love a service when it gets a slot on your dock next to Firefox. Spotify is that kind of service.

Spotify is a music streaming program that allows you to browse through a catalog of music and play it without delay (P2P streaming). 90% of the songs I have been searching for have been available so far, however some of the more exotic tunes are not available yet. The quality of the music is top notch and the songs start playing instantly, giving you the feeling as if you would be playing a song from your local iTunes.


The UI reminds of iTunes but it's slicker and has less clutter. Recent searches will be stored in a sort of history in the menu bar on the left which is quite useful. Needless to say it is also possible to create play lists that then can be shared with anyone else via http link. If you trust your friend's music you can let them add tracks and make it a collaborative play list. There are already websites like Spotyshare and YourSpotify out there where you can show off your compilation skills by uploading the http links to your play lists to share with others.

I had the pleasure to have lunch with the CEO and co-founder of Spotify Daniel Ek recently which has got me even more excited about the service. While I had a list with 101 ideas of features that I felt needed to be added to Spotify, Daniel made it clear to me that they rather want to be a platform and want others developing additional features rather than adding stuff in themselves. A good example for an added feature is that tunes you play can be scrobbled to your Last.fm account. But hopefully this is just the beginning. At least that is what I hope as Spotify will be opening up their data through APIs for gifted developers out there to create cool apps. Daniel describes Spotify more as a Music search engine and plans to add more track related information to the database. Who is the producer, the drummer, the lead singer on the track? What are the lyrics?

Daniel also got me quite excited about Spotify's mobile future. There are apps in the works that will bring you all of their great features onto your phone and I Can't wait to get my hands on a beta!

Although there have been some issues with the labels recently Spotify is still dedicated to expand their music catalog. If you want to give Spotify a go, drop me a comment and I can send you an invite. I highly recommend it!

Update 20.02: Found another good website with a good selection of playlists - Spotylist, and another one that has top lists, Topsify.