Spotify is the future

Thanks to another of my Drobo's funny turns, I haven't been using iTunes to listen to music lately, I've been using Spotify. And it has confused me – Spotify just seems to be too good to be true. It's library of music is vast (and growing), and (if you don't mind the adverts) it's free. If you pay (an extremely reasonable) £9.99 a month, you get the adverts removed, and the chance to listen to music on- and off-line on your iPhone or Android phone. And you use Android, you can even listen to music with Spotify while you're using the phone for other things, which is not currently possible with the iPhone. (This is one of what I think is a growing number of reasons to choose Android over the iPhone, but that's another story.) Sharing songs, artists, and playlists with friends or the whole world is so easy, it makes the days of borrowing CDs and making compilations on tape seem almost unbelievably archaic.

So, what are the drawbacks?

Well, you do of course need internet access. But if your connection is down, I think you'll probably cope with the lack of music. Radio does still exist, after all. And Spotify can buffer several gigabytes of data, so temporary network cut-outs shouldn't really be a problem. There are arguments against storing data (especially private data, such as email and documents), but the benefits of storing music on the cloud seem to easily outweigh the problems; storing and backing up a music collection is a job I'd be happy to pass on to someone else.

Spotify is an extremely simple app, and this unfortunately means that it doesn't yet seem to offer personal song ratings and smart playlists, so getting the best out of the huge library is less easy than in iTunes. But it might one day, and I don't think the current lack is too terrible.

At present, searching for some artists will produce a limited list, or nothing at all. This is of course a fairly major problem, but it's not one that cannot change in future. Maybe one day they'll have literally every song recorded in their library, and if the cost of that is £9.99 a month or listening to a few adverts, I think Spotify (or something like it) might just be the future of music.

Posted via email from Sam Lewis