Online streaming: Pandora vs. Spotify.

Listening to: Pandora online 'Apocalyptica radio'

Pandora is the only online radio service I use on any sort of regular basis. It’s the best legal option we have in the US for listening to music online, I've found. It's very easy to use and free. So there are the occasional ads, whatever. I am also a huge fan of Hulu for tv shows, same idea. 

I've discovered that there is a new service available only in Europe called Spotify, which is very similar to Pandora but way smarter and more awesome. Spotify is a legal peer-to-peer online music streaming service. With Spotify you can create playlists of any songs you want, drag and drop to line them up (just like you do on your iPod or iTunes), hit play, and the music starts immediately (because it’s streaming not downloading). 

There are three tiers of how a listener can use Spotify: first and most popular is the free option. Just like Pandora, if you want to use Spotify for free there are ads inserted into your playlist every so often. The second tier for those slightly less cheap among us is a 24 hour pass of ad-free listening for 99p (pence, that is), and the third tier of unlimited ad-free playlist streaming is £9.99 per month.

What makes Spotify unique is that you install the application and when you log in, drag and drop any number of songs into your playlist, and then can listen to all of your saved playlists on any computer. 

With the premium membership you can even select which playlists you want to be available offline, in case you won't be around internet.  You can also share your playlists with friends by simply sending them a link, save a playlist to your phone, and even combine your personal MP3 collection into your Spotify playlist.

Whenever Spotify comes to the US (I hope soon?) it will totally take over.  The industry is changing and Spotify seems to be the most sensitive to what people want.   Perhaps we don't have it yet because there are some bugs they still need to work out or something, but when it does come over, it'll be big news.


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"Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years." -William F. Buckley, Jr.