Believe the Hype: Spotify is good

The Spotify player

So, I managed to grab an "exclusive" invite to Spotify. Those invites were so "exclusive" that music and tech blogs were posting links to what might best be described as mass invite engines. The service launched last Wednesday and I was trying it out by Friday.

What is Spotify? After Google, which also launched this month, Spotify is the most buzzed about music service since Pandora. It started in Europe, where it gained a ton of users, and had been gearing up for a U.S. launch for the better part of the last year.

Does it live up to the hype? I think so. I've never been a big Pandora fan. I've found it really hard to plug in an artist and not land on a song I really didn't want to hear within 15 minutes. I think I've been around for Pandora hitting that sweet spot for a good hour only two or three times. Generally, a good old-fashioned iTunes genius playlist is better. And the new Google Music instant playlist is even better than that.

But with those options, I don't get to hear music I don't have (even though I have a lot). Spotify solves that problem by giving even free accounts access to a huge library of music -- some 15 million songs. And you can listen to whole, unabridged albums. I started off by plugging in Ted Leo and the Pharmacists and listened to his latest Matador record The Brutalist Bricks in its entirety. Every so often, Spotify will queue up a 30 second commercial. I heard several pitches to buy Amos Lee records during my first day of testing the service.

Other benefits to Spotify include the fact that you can sync the service with Facebook, where you can find your Facebook friends who have the service in a little window on the right, look at their public playlists and even recommend artists and albums.

Now there are many services that you'll need to pay to unlock. The free account gives you an amazing access to music, but it's limited to 20 hours a month of listening. $4.99 a month gives you unlimited music streaming and no commercials. $9.99 a month gives you the ability to download tracks to your computer, smartphone or iPod touch.

Some of those features are pretty compelling, but I think that even the free service, as a means of discovering and listening to new music, is pretty valuable, too. There's a "what's new" tab in the player window that gives you the most recent releases and singles. So you won't be abe to rock Spotify day and night with a free account, but you could definitely use it to preview music you're thinking of picking up to own.

I'm going to keep the free account for now. Twenty hours a month will probably be plenty for me to try out new music for this blog, for example.  Though I can see some pretty good arguments for the paid service. With the sync-to-phone option, it's conceivable $9.99 a month is all you'd ever have to pay to listen to what you want to listen to again. It's pretty amazing, really.