I've been playing a bit (read: all day) with Spotify, which is the music streaming service that has debuted in the US to great fanfare. Apparently it's pretty big in Europe, and with a bunch of people clamoring for invites and whatnot, I decided to sign-up my email to wait for them to send me an invite. Got it yesterday.

I signed up for the "free" service... which is free & unlimited now, but apparently a free account's usage will be capped at some point. Which isn't really a big deal for me... I mean, I have given hundreds of dollars to Netflix over the years for being more convenient than illegally acquiring TV programs/movies, so I am willing to see if the service is worth 5 bucks a month (or 10... if I'm really enamored) to continue on with unlimited music, PLUS no ads. Which is actually the biggest con so far. Here are some more.

CONS:
-Had a bunch of problems getting songs to play, which I eventually fixed by "starring the songs". But once there was an ad that wouldn't play. And you can't really skip ads. So yeah... my speakers sat silent for 30 long minutes.

-Whipping Post from the album At Fillmore East by the Allman Brothers = not available. I'm assuming it's not available because it's 30 minutes long and the band didn't want such a long song featured on the service (not sure if I even really want to hear a 30 minute version Whipping Post, but I'd like the option...). I checked other 30 plus minute songs I knew of, thinking that maybe a lot of bands would lack those songs, but they all seemed to be available. Nonetheless, it's not necessarily as *complete* of a song library as I would possibly like.

-The Wikipedia article states that compensation for independent artists is almost non-existent. So... uhh, if I'm paying money for this thing and I listen to stuff from a smaller label, I'm not really supporting them in anyway. This is just a minor quibble, however... as it is much more important that I am really cheap.

-The absolute worst, however, is the ads. Again, if I were to pay any amount for this thing, the ads would disappear... and I understand why they are here for the free account. But the problem is that the ads are pretty much just random snippets of songs from major label artists--which is I suppose because they don't want to you to realize you're listening to an ad, and to discover that you actually the song and thus seek it out.

The problem is that I'm listening to They Might Be Giants' self-titled debut, and everything is fine, and a song ends. And the next song that plays is some shitty hip hop song. I don't know who Pitbull is, but forcing me to listen to his stuff while trying to listen to an album that has no musical common ground with the ad is not making me more likely to contribute any money your way.

It'd be completely acceptable if you were to just start off the ad sounding like an ad--with a voice stating the product they're about to pitch or whatever. But it just goes straight for the music, and--just, believe me, it's annoying.

PROS
-It's much cleaner than Grooveshark, which had worked for me in terms of streaming free music but made it a pain to find anything.

-The player itself is pretty nice too. Pretty easy to save music you want to keep a hand on, to find music similar to stuff you're already listening to, and it uploads your entire library from iTunes, in case you're feeling lazy and don't want to exert the 0.0001 calories it would take to boot that up. Still not as good as iTunes, but it's more decent than I was expecting.

-It allows me to listen to music very easily that I otherwise didn't have easy access to.

I mean, this is an obvious positive. But still. It's nice. I decided to go with a large serving of 80's music.

I tried to resist the temptation of including YouTube videos, but I'm caving in. I'm sorry. Here's what I've been listening to:

The aforementioned They Might Be Giants (just pretend this video's 2 1/2 minutes long, and you're just listening to the first song):



XTC:



The Dukes Of Stratosphear (well... this is just XTC under a different name, but still.):



The Jam:



So I suppose signing up for the free account is worth it. Not exactly sure if I'm going to continue with it once they start capping the amount I can listen to...

Damnit, the ad isn't playing again, which means I can't listen to anything else.

I'm sort of tempted to give them $5 right now so I won't have to deal with this problem again...

No, Alex... that's a stupid idea.