Spotify review

Last June my husband signed up for the promotional offer Spotify offered during the summer: 3 months of a premium account for 99¢ (regularly 9.99€ a month).

One of the reasons we decided to try a subscription service is that we have an AwoX StriimSound speaker which we can use to play music in from the Spotify smartphone app. If I feel like having some music in our apartment it's pretty easy (although the StriimSound was a bit complicated to set up the first time).

So what do I think of Spotify? I'm really satisfied. The catalogue is really complete and I haven't yet had a problem with a song or artist not being included. They offer a large number of playlists and radios, including things like "Hits en France" or "Global hits". Some of the other playlists I've enjoyed are "Travailler en musique", "Peaceful piano", "Motivation pour le sport", "Acoustic covers". And the "Discovery Weekly" playlist, a mix-tape made by Spotify's algorithms to match your music tastes, is just magically awesome.

With paid accounts you can download music to listen off line, although it "expires" after a month if you don't log back into your premium account.

We currently share one account, but this means that we can't both use the account to have music at work. For Christmas we got a Family account so my mother-in-law could have her own account. I haven't used Spotify to listen to music with headphones, so I can't exactly judge if their compressed file format is really noticeable.

Is Spotify better than Deezer? Hard to say, since they have pretty similar offers now. I used Deezer a bit a couple years ago and found it rather France centered, whereas Spotify seems a bit more international. But of course that may have changed for Deezer.

Having an almost unlimited catalogue of music at my finger tips has made me a bit more aware of the current music scene, which takes me back to my high school/college days when I followed my favorite bands much more closely and new what album was coming out soon. I've also made some really great discoveries of new and old groups thanks to all the suggestions "Similar to ____".

Here are some of my recent Spotify discoveries:

Benjamin Clementine
Eaves
Adam Cohen
Patrick Wilson
Paolo Nutini
Bear's Den
Thomston