Music Monthly May 2014 | Page 9

SPOTIFY WORTH IT OR NOT?

Spotify, worth it or not?

Spotify is a free music browsing application for computer, smart phone and tablet alike, which was created by two Swedish men, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. The idea of Spotify at first belonged to a previous company which belonged to Martin, but in a short while it became its own corporation and a million dollar business.

Spotify itself has become a worldwide application with millions of users all over the world. At first as Spotify was planned, it cost its users approximately 10 €/month. A few years back Spotify expanded their selection to a free/trial version, and the normal version which costs. The Spotify used in this review is the free version accessible to everyone with internet access.

What does Spotify then promise? According to their slogans and webpages, they offer next to free access to all the world's music in one library. And this they achieve pretty well. The first appearance on Spotify is great. It seems simple and easy to use. You can search for artists, playlists, songs and albums. Spotify almost lives up quite well to the expectations, but the idea of all of the music being available is still a lie. There are a couple of bands still out there refusing to give rights to their songs over to Spotify. For example the most renowned of these bands is AC/DC. To have a such a ambitious goal to spread out all the world's music for free and to achieve this much makes the application remarkable. Usually all music browsing applications cost their users some money, but Spotify is completely free of cost. Although Spotify ompensates this by advertisements in between songs, Spotify as a music application is great.

Onto some other downsides of Spotify. Depending on what device you listen to your music on, Spotify's practicality varies. For instance since this review is completely concentrated on the free version of Spotify, the users must meet some requirements in order to start browsing through music. Internet connection is required to listen to anything on Spotify, which might be tricky in some cases when using a mobile device.

And when it comes to mobile devices there is another drawback. Listening to music on a smartphone can be extremely excruciating because of the restrictions Spotify's task force has put on it. They have limited the amount of songs you can skip per hour down to six. Meaning that once you have skipped six songs you cannot skip another song for another hour and the only way this restriction can be eliminated is by becoming a premium premium user and paying the monthly fee of 10$. So is it really free?

One more flaw to Spotify is the advertising. It is extremely annoying how the application plays the same advertisement and you have to listen to it every time, again and again. Skipping or muting the advert isn't an option either.

Spotify is one of the biggest, if not the biggest music library out there. It is free and accessible anywhere with internet. Although Spotify corporation is trying to make their users go premium by setting some restrictions to the usage of this program, Spotify really lives up to its expectations. The vast variety of songs, artists and genres make Spotify suitable for many different kinds of users and because of it being 100% free, trying it out is completely worth it. Spotify in my opinion is the best music browsing program out there.

Elias Peltonen

Onto some other downsides of Spotify. Depending on what device you listen to your music on, Spotify's practicality varies. For instance since this review is completely concentrated on the free version of Spotify, the users must meet some requirements in order to start browsing through music. Internet connection is required to listen to anything on Spotify, which might be tricky in some cases when using a mobile device.

And when it comes to mobile devices there is another drawback. Listening to music on a smartphone can be extremely excruciating because of the restrictions Spotify's task force has put on it. They have limited the amount of songs you can skip per hour down to six. Meaning that once you have skipped six songs you cannot skip another song for another hour and the only way this restriction can be eliminated is by becoming a premium premium user and paying the monthly fee of 10$. So is it really free?

One more flaw to Spotify is the advertising. It is extremely annoying how the application plays the same advertisement and you have to listen to it every time, again and again. Skipping or muting the advert isn't an option either.

Spotify is one of the biggest, if not the biggest music library out there. It is free and accessible anywhere with internet. Although Spotify corporation is trying to make their users go premium by setting some restrictions to the usage of this program, Spotify really lives up to its expectations. The vast variety of songs, artists and genres make Spotify suitable for many different kinds of users and because of it being 100% free, trying it out is completely worth it. Spotify in my opinion is the best music browsing program out there.

Elias Peltonen