1st Impressions of Spotify

Recently I've been hearing a lot of buzz about Spotify, the new in the cloud streaming music service.

The Good:

- High Audio Quality Streams
- Fast Streaming
- Pretty Good Selection

The Bad:

- the Queue / playlist

I'm talking about the general queue / playlist and not about making a playlist. This feature kind of drives me crazy. I hate how it won't just go through the list in order, it takes whatever song you just finished and adds it to the end of the queue. I feel this is completely unnecessary. When I go back to check my list after listening for a while, everything is all out of order. Also, I don't like how if you play something it doesn't automatically add it to the queue (like Grooveshark) unless you ask it to.

Multiple Tabs / User Interface:

If I search for something, and then tab over to another page, my search results are gone.. you either have to re-search or hit back. I also don't like having to go to a different page to see the playlist / queue. It would be much better if the playlist was across the bottom like Grooveshark or another pane on the side like for the playlist like Winamp / Windows Media Player. Basically I want to see the playlist at all times. There's really no reason not to have everything on the same page, there is so much space.

Artist / Song Selection:

Spotify seems to be just about as good as Grooveshark in terms of finding artists. It is seemingly better at finding more official releases. It finds some artists GS doesn't have but it's missing others the GS does have. It's missing a lot of artists in the electronic genre, and quite a few others from my playlists. But it balances it out by finding other rare artists, like Sophie Madeleine and her new record.

I do like how they organize stuff when you click on an artist, showing you all the albums and artwork and bio etc. That's better than GS.

It's missing weird stuff here and there. Like for Nirvana there is one artist page that has everything except Bleach... then another entirely different page that only has Bleach. Radiohead has a lot of bsides available... but no In Rainbows. A lot of Korn's stuff is there... but few bsides etc. Some artist pages get strange as well. Take Hum for example. Apparently there are several artists named Hum, and there's no distinction about who is who.

Having to D/L an Actual Program.

I think I see why they want to have an actual program available... but with their resources I don't see why they couldn't just make something that is completely browser based.

SUMMARY

Overall, I think it's a pretty decent service and a good competitor to Grooveshark. What would really seal the deal for a user like me though, is getting away from the Itunes Interface (I've always hated itunes). Fixing the user interface issues above... and really being able to offer me EVERY official release under the sun. If they could track down and organize all of a band's official albums, singles, bsides and compilations in one location in high quality. This would be ideal.