If there’s one reason to get a featurephone (or ‘dumphone’), then it’s the integrated AM/FM radio available in many models. Despite the bevy of radio transistors available in smartphones (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, 3G, 4G) the humble FM Radio is usually unavailable. This might have to do with the extremely tight design of most smartphones, or it might have to do with evil executives wanting to deny you free music and forcing you instead towards their music stores, like Apple iTunes. Muhahaha.
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iTunes, and Google Music for Android, do offer plenty of free content along with paid tracks. For spoken word fans, free podcasts and Uni course lectures are bountiful. For music fans, there are podcasts which play free original music, and free tracks otherwise crop up every so often. But for most people, grabbing a track while on the go means plonking down $1.19. But for something close to (in many ways, far superior to) a radio experience, there's Spotify.
Spotify is not the first free streaming music service. MOG, last.fm and Pandora have been around a while, but usability is king. Spotify on iPhone and Android, finally available in Australia after debuting in 2009 in the US, seamlessly blends Spotify’s service with the native controls available on the iPhone and in most Android builds.
First, what is Spotify. Spotify is a Swedish streaming audio company that somehow stays in business, despite its dirt cheap business model. It might be the future of the music business. Spotify sports a 16 million track library (and growing), which is free if you can put up with visual and audio ads. For $7 a month, you can get the same with no ads. For $12/month, you can download the tracks, get access to competitions and special offers, and get higher bit-rate tracks (better audio).
Spotify also sports a list of innovative features, including active playlists and integration with native iPod or Music Player controls. When playing through Spotify, the app will take over your iPod controls, and will even respond to all the same commands from your native iPhone headphones- click once to play/pause, click twice to skip a track and three times to go back a track. Clever.
BUT, the real innovation with Spotify is its integration with Facebook. To sign in, you can simply log in with your Facebook details, and away you go. You can immediately start sharing your playlists, and also listen to playlists created with your friends.
Good :)
We tried Spotify in Armadale, Victoria, only a few kms out of the Melbourne CBD. We’re on the Optus Network, with an Amaysim Unlimited plan. This plan includes 4GB of data. We used the app non-stop for about an hour, listening at high quality, and used about 4MB of data.
The experience itself is almost seamless on 3G. On a decent 3G connection, the songs clearly have a 30 second buffer. We turned off 3G data and the song kept playing for about half a minute, which is impressive. This means your connection should remain mostly uninterrupted if you pass through an area with spotty coverage. This beats other streaming radio apps, like TuneIn radio, which is a little more sensitive to poor coverage.
The range on offer was decent. Not being a huge music lover, I didn’t go digging too deep. Hit songs from popular artists are well represented. I did a search for Frank Zappa, and only got his orchestral work from late in his career – nothing from his time with The Mothers. So it’s not strictly for the obscure (obscurish) music lover, though a number of indie labels do crop up.
Bad :(
Not much ‘bad’ per se, but one has to wonder how long this can last. For $12 a month you can get all you can eat music to download and keep, from a big library. For $7, you can listen to as much as you like without ads. For free, you can listen to as much as you like with a few ads (although in other countries, the Unlimited free services converts to a max 10 hours a month, after six months). Major labels take part, but only because it’s an alternative to radio. Smaller labels don’t get actively promoted on the site or the app, so their return on revenue is miniscule.
It’s not going to replace iTunes or Google Music just yet. Streaming or cloud-based music is a fantastic idea, but interrupted music is awful and we don’t quite have ubiquitous 3G data on the cheap, just yet.
That said, if our test was any indication, the app doesn’t use a HUGE amount of data – but once you start saving songs on a Premium service, that can get a bit close. Some plans come with only 50MB of data – make sure you know how much data you use and have available before using this service. For parents – if your kids are going to use it on their phone, Go to settings and disable the ability for that app to be used on 3G, to avoid bill shock.
Spotify for iOS – Free
Spotify for Android - Free
Spotify Premium is currently available as a 48 hour free trial.