I realized that for as much as I’ve prattled on about loving music and wanting to share that love with others, I haven’t compiled a mixtape that gives (in my unbiased opinion) a great sampling of the music I enjoy.
Luckily, that’s all changed. I made this playlist using Spotify, a UK based company (founded in Sweden) that offers streaming music for free or a premium version beginning at $4.99 a month. If you don’t have a Spotify account and would like one (hopefully in order to listen to this mix), you can comment in the bottom of this post and I’ll send you an invitation. If you request to join through their website, your invitation should come fairly quickly. I got mine within hours.
Here’s a Spotify promo for their US launch:
What do you think? Enticing? It must be really hard to choose background music when the product you are selling is based on an incredibly large array of music itself. They chose to go the big band instrumental route. Although that may not have been my first choice, it definitely doesn’t alienate audiences.
Although you can’t transfer these songs to your iPod, you can import your iTunes playlists into Spotify and share the ones you create with friends. You can also post them to Twitter and Facebook for even easier access and share-ability.
The only real downside is that in order to listen to it, you need to have a Spotify account and unlike Pandora—which can simply stream from the website—Spotify downloads an external application onto your computer to open it, very similarly to how iTunes exists on your computer as its own program.
Spotify was a hit in the UK long before it hit our shores. Although music software competition is incredibly fast-paced, I hope that Spotify is able to thrive in the US because so far, I’ve really enjoyed what it has to offer.
Listen and Enjoy:
