5 Reasons to Ditch iTunes and Get Spotify Premium

Spo­tify is the wildly pop­u­lar music stream­ing ser­vice that took Europe by storm with its “any track, any time, any­where” con­cept, and just recently launched here in the States.  I was beyond thrilled when I heard Spo­tify was com­ing to the U.S. and even more so when the invite code showed up in my inbox (cur­rently the ser­vice is invite-only).  Spotify’s library cur­rently con­sists of 15 mil­lion tracks, and is grow­ing by approx­i­mately 10,000 tracks per day.

As a heavy con­sumer of dig­i­tal music who said “good­bye” to phys­i­cal media a long time ago, I’m always on the look­out for the best solu­tion to man­age and access my ever-growing music col­lec­tion.  Until I dis­cov­ered Spo­tify, iTunes was such a solu­tion for me (and I’m not even a Mac user).  Now, I real­ize com­par­ing Spo­tify to iTunes is rather like com­par­ing apples to oranges because iTunes is not a stream­ing music ser­vice, nor does iTunes only deliver music.  The two ser­vices can cer­tainly co-exist peace­fully as there is a strong demand for what both plat­forms do.  How­ever, for my needs and the way I con­sume music, I’ve decided that the bet­ter solu­tion is Spotify.

Here are five rea­sons why:

1. It’s Super Affordable

Spo­tify Pre­mium only costs $9.99/month and is essen­tially an all-access pass to all the music and fea­tures Spo­tify offers, with zero adver­tise­ments and streamed in pre­mium qual­ity.  If that still sounds too expen­sive, Spo­tify also has an Unlim­ited account for $4.99/month which gets you unlim­ited stream­ing music with no ads.  A basic Spo­tify account is 100% free, but you’ll be served both audio and ban­ner ads while using the ser­vice, plus the song library is lim­ited and you won’t have access to all the fea­tures that make Spo­tify so great, like mobile streaming.

Spo­tify Pre­mium is the only level of the ser­vice that really com­pares to iTunes, so that’s what I’m focus­ing on for the pur­pose of this blog post.  It boils down to this:  For $9.99/month you could have unlim­ited instant access to all of the music in Spotify’s library (as well as your own) from any­where, or, for the same amount, you could down­load 10 songs from iTunes to keep for good.

2. A Netflix-Like Expe­ri­ence for Music

Spotify’s inter­face is clean, sim­ple and fast —the ben­e­fit of a native appli­ca­tion ver­sus a web-based one.  The music tracks are pre­sented along­side album art, track infor­ma­tion, artist biogra­phies, a pop­u­lar­ity meter (based on num­ber of plays), and related artists.  Load­ing up a new song is as sim­ple as double-clicking on any track you see, and in my expe­ri­ence, it all hap­pens light­ning fast.  It’s easy to search for music by artist, song, or album name and sort the results by the same para­me­ters (as well as oth­ers).  The Related Artists fea­ture is a great dis­cov­ery tool that serves up music sim­i­lar to the artist you’re cur­rently viewing/listening to.  The over­all Spo­tify expe­ri­ence is stream­lined and incred­i­bly easy to use, mak­ing it a breeze to hop around from artist to artist, track to track and play any­thing you want on a whim.

3. Lis­ten From Anywhere

Lis­ten­ing on mul­ti­ple com­put­ers and devices is easy, as Spotify’s light­weight client is avail­able for Win­dows and Mac , with a Linux ver­sion in the works (cur­rently avail­able as a pre­view).  Spo­tify Pre­mium users gain access to the Spo­tify mobile app that’s avail­able for iPhone, Android, Win­dows phones, Palms, and Sym­bians.  There is no com­pli­cated sync­ing, import­ing, or other non­sense to deal with because all of the music lives within Spo­tify. It’s sim­ply there, ready to be played from any device.

4. Effort­lessly Man­age Your Per­sonal Music Library

If, like me, you have hun­dreds of gigs of music files liv­ing on your PC or an exter­nal hard­drive, Spo­tify can man­age and play them as part of your music library as well—all with­out any effort on your part.  Even with­out doing any­thing, Spo­tify auto­mat­i­cally finds music files on your PC and makes them avail­able in your library.  If you have an exter­nal har­rdrive or some other USB device, you can point Spo­tify to those sources to import your music files, which are inte­grated seam­lessly into Spo­tify and made avail­able for stream­ing (even while offline), search­ing, incor­po­rat­ing into your playlists, and social shar­ing.  You can even import your iTunes library.  Spo­tify is even nice enough to auto­mat­i­cally fill in any miss­ing music file info with Gra­cenote.  (By the way, Spo­tify imported my entire 150GB+ music col­lec­tion in about 2 min­utes flat, com­pared to the lit­er­ally HOURS of wait time I’ve expe­ri­enced with iTunes.)  In short, Spo­tify makes your entire music library—not just the Spo­tify library—easily acces­si­ble from anywhere.

5. Built-In Social Sharing

Unlike iTunes, Spo­tify doesn’t try to re-invent the wheel when it comes to socially shar­ing your music.  With built-in shar­ing fea­tures, you’ll never have to leave Spo­tify to tell your friends what you’re lis­ten­ing to.  Shar­ing your music is as easy as con­nect­ing your Face­book and Twit­ter accounts.  From then on, you can right-click on any track (or an entire playlist) within Spo­tify and choose “Share To…” for a sim­ple pop-up menu of options.  Are any of your friends using Spo­tify? Add them to your Peo­ple list and you’ll be able to see their pub­lished playlists, Top Artists, and Top Tracks (based on num­ber of plays).  You can even sub­scribe to other people’s playlists so you’ll always have access to their lat­est addi­tions and favorites.

Conclusion

If you’re mar­ried to the con­cept of own­ing your music out­right by indi­vid­u­ally pay­ing for every track you want to lis­ten to a la iTunes, Spo­tify prob­a­bly won’t be your cup of tea.  Spo­tify Pre­mium deliv­ers more of a Netflix-like expe­ri­ence where you’re essen­tially pay­ing a small monthly fee for unlim­ited access to mil­lions of songs, with the added ben­e­fit of being able to man­age your entire per­sonal music library and lis­ten to it from any­where.  As a ser­vice, Spo­tify doesn’t try to be all things to all peo­ple, but this is one of its strengths; for exam­ple, there are far bet­ter ser­vices out there for dis­cov­er­ing new music or noti­fy­ing you of new releases.  By focus­ing mainly on one thing and doing it really well—that is, giv­ing you fast, sim­ple, and afford­able access to as much music as possible—Spotify, quite frankly, kicks the asses of most other online music services.

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