Discovering Spotify, one of the best music aps out there!

After subscribing to Sirius/XM radio for many years and cancelling the service upon having a few issues with their questionable billing tactics, I never thought I could recover from my 11 year blissful satellite radio high. The thought of listening to regular radio sounded as good as painting my hair pink for the day.  With a sad face, I decided to listen to music in my car via my smartphone and give a go to iHeartRadio on a recommendation by my favorite radio station on Sirius/XM. To my surprise, the switch turned out to be a cool thing for a while. Well, that is until I found Spotify!

I had heard my co-workers and employees talk about Spotify many times and thought to give it a try to see how I liked it. Spotify is a free music streaming app playing your favorite songs out there on the radio. All you have to do is search the name of the song. What makes Spotify better is its ability to save the song you enjoy so effortless and seamless. All you have to do is click on the check mark and the song instantly saves itself into your music playlist. To remove the songs, all you have to do is hover your mouse on the check mark and it turns into an “X” making it just as simple to get rid of a song you don’t like.

Spotify is a music streaming, podcast, and video service that provides digital rights management–protected content from record labels and media companies. It is available in America, Western Europe, and other countries. Music can be browsed or searched by artist, album, genre, playlist, or record label.

Spotify was launched in October of 2008 by a Swedish startup under the name Spotify AB located in Stockholm. Spotify Ltd. operates as the parent company with headquarters in London. As of June 2015, Spotify had more than 75 million active users and as of March of 2016, it had reached 30 million paid subscribers and I am one of them at a price I can afford!

Spotify operates under a “freemium” business model offering two types of streaming tiers: Spotify Free and Spotify Premium. The difference between the free service and the premium is that with the Premium service, the occasional pesky ads that pop up once in a while are fully removed. Also with Premium, there is improved audio quality and the best part, the user can download the music to their device for offline listening. 

With Spotify you have the ability to stream music with many devices and systems which include: Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows & OS desktops and laptops, through the Web, Sony PlayStations, and more. I listen to my music on Spotify while doing schoolwork on my Windows based laptop and stream music at work on my Android smartphone to help my day go faster and to avoid distractions.

Currently, there are 32 on demand for pay and free music streaming services out there on the web, enough to satisfy every music lover. Out of the 32, I have tried Napster (going way back to 1999 when it started), Amazon Prime Music, Apple Music via iTunes, Google Play Music, iHeartRadio, Pandora, SoundCloud, and YouTube Red.

For total cost efficiency, iHeartRadio and Pandora are free music services giving you the option to choose from a large array of music, radio stations, or podcasts to listen to. Both are great services and were my service of choice for a while. However, the drawback is that it does not work without internet service and you have to wait for the ads to play before enjoying more music. On IHeartRadio, some radio stations played ads for like 5 minutes after 3 minutes of music making the drive even more aggravating while stuck in traffic.

So in review, both services are fine with the exception of the occasional senseless commercials and the must have internet service for it to work. Unless you are using your smartphone then you are golden. Enter Spotify and the annoyance of commercials is totally gone!

To finalize, I like Spotify premium because I am able to save my favorite songs on my device and listen to my music on demand, when I want and anywhere my smartphone is nearby, on the go, on the fly and even inside my car.

I hope that Spotify stays around for a long time and who knows; it may become just as famous as Facebook and Google and add more features along the way. For now, all I know is that thanks to some very ingenious apps, I have fully and successfully survived being without Sirius/XM!