Spotify Review
What is Spotify?
Spotify is a music streaming service with over 80 million songs and a range of apps for desktop, mobile and smart devices. Streaming quality is capped at 320kbps, which is higher than Amazon Music and Pandora, and the company has been touting lossless levels for years.
When it comes to accounts, there are two main ways to listen: free and paid. The free plan costs nothing and is paid for by playing ads between songs. The downside of the free service is that it has fewer features and there are restrictions on the music that can be played and where it can be played. With a free subscription, you can only randomly play songs from albums, playlists, or radio stations when using the mobile app. You cannot select a song and play it on the spot. It’s also not possible to listen offline, but you can use Spotify Connect to stream to other speakers over Wi-Fi.
Premium is Spotify’s flagship product, packed with all the compelling features that make it great. It costs $10 (£10, AU$12) per month and is available in over 150 countries worldwide. With Premium, you can play any song, album, playlist or radio station on demand. You can create your own playlists and add music to your library – a personal collection you can play over and over again. There are no ads, so you always enjoy uninterrupted music. And you can download music to your computer, tablet, or phone to play offline. Finally, you get better audio quality than most Apple Music tracks, up to 320Kbps.
As part of Premium, Spotify offers a family plan for $16 a month for up to six accounts. Everyone gets their own account, so your hip-hop playlist won’t get mixed in with your kid’s Imagine Dragons album. Meanwhile, Apple Music’s family plan includes 6 separate accounts for $17.
Using Spotify
When it comes to desktop and mobile apps, there are three main navigation sections: Home, Search, and Your Library. For mobile apps, these options are located at the bottom of the screen, while on desktop, these sections are located in the upper left corner. The extra space on desktop devices compared to mobile devices also allows for an expanded playlists section in the lower left corner (including playlists you’ve created) and a friends list on the right. The latter list enables users to see what their friends are playing in real time. Note that Friends is not available on mobile devices, although Spotify is reportedly working on a similar feature called Communities.
While it varies from platform to platform, the homepage consists primarily of playlists, from suggested playlists for a certain time of day to genre-based entries to “made for you” lists that organize your music into discrete daily mixes. By default, when you play a song, Spotify will play music continuously based on what you choose. If you like a song, you can long-press it, click the hamburger button (…) or right-click on your desktop for more information, or use the Like button to add it to your library. These songs are automatically added to the Favorites list, which you can then search and sort by genre.
The middle of the three options is Search, which opens up Spotify’s tools to find any song, album, artist, podcast, and playlist. The last tab in the menu is the location of your music collection in Spotify, called Your Music Library. Over the years of using Spotify, I’ve created hundreds of playlists and rely on them heavily, especially when traveling. The rest of your library includes tabs for your saved music, organized by artist, song, and album.
But there is still room for improvement
From the controversial $200 million deal with podcaster Joe Rogan to the industry’s lowest reported artist payouts, no other streaming service is as polarizing as Spotify.
In recent years, the company’s payments to artists have been at the center of attention, reportedly the lowest in the industry. Given the Logan deal, which is particularly irritating for some musicians, you might be hesitant to pay for podcasts you don’t even listen to. (Especially if you don’t have time to listen to a bunch of bros for three hours straight.)
Sometimes Spotify releases features that don’t work out. Take Car Thing, for example: the car-friendly dongle came and went in 2022, ending even before summer. Running was another high-profile feature Spotify retired, matching playlists to a person’s running pace.
Finally, Spotify is starting to show its age – from the green and black interface that’s been around since 2014, to the uncanny ability to hide new features like podcasts or audiobooks on the desktop version. Most of the service’s competitors have been able to showcase its ever-expanding range of offerings – from spatial audio to radio – in a much better way.