More Than Living

Find out about music with Spotify

Inter­net music. To my ear, it never sounds quite right. Oxy­mor­onic, even.

But then I’m someone who didn’t even embrace CDs until the mid 1990s, at the point when every­one else had moved on to hurl­ing min­idiscs out of sky­scrapers to demon­strate the incor­rupt­ib­il­ity of the future.

So, as a glee­ful tech­no­lo­gical Lud­dite, not to men­tion a mean-​​spirited musical misery-​​guts, I was a good test sub­ject to try out the won­ders of Spo­tify, the newest way to enjoy music instantly – and leg­ally free – online (no downloads).

It prom­ises “A world of music”, though after watch­ing the intro­duct­ory video, fea­tur­ing a user adding a song to a “dinner party” playl­ist which was headed up by a five track Cold­play blitz, I wasn’t sure it was a world in which I wanted to live. Was I too hasty?

What manner of beast?

So what does Spo­tify do? Well, as a new user to inter­net radio sites, I was happy that I was able to get my head around it fairly quickly.

I was lucky enough to get an instant invite from a friend. Early users are gran­ted imme­di­ate access – oth­er­wise you may have to register your email with Spo­tify to wait for a free invitation.

At its core is a user-​​friendly ‘radio sta­tion’ which cranks out music based on your spe­cific­a­tions. You select from a range of 18 music genres in decade-​​long time frames, ran­ging from pre-​​1950 to 21^st Century.

For instance, if you har­bour a par­tic­u­lar love of 90s altern­at­ive music, you can con­tent your­self with the ran­dom­ised selec­tion which Spo­tify will pump forth from those narrow criteria.

How­ever, if you wanted to explore beyond this, you can try expand­ing the time frame from the 80s to the present day, or throw an inter­est­ing coun­ter­point of coun­try or hip hop into the mix.

And this is where it becomes clever. As well as nat­ur­ally alert­ing you to albums and artists you have never heard of within your par­tic­u­lar interests, by throw­ing vari­ous genres and time frames into the melt­ing pot you can sit back and exper­i­ence a genu­ine musical education.

In addi­tion there is a fea­ture which takes any artist and sug­gests sim­ilar bands, allow­ing you to play a ‘radio sta­tion’ ded­ic­ated to the spirit of your favour­ite singer.

It doesn’t go any­thing like as far as Last​.fm (explored recently by Jo) in terms of the over­all pack­age it offers, but for some people this could be part of the attrac­tion. I have a faint horror of an algorithm telling me what I may?

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​02-​​11 16:17:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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