Spotify = Love

I love music. A lot. Seriously, it's my drug, religion, and the fuel that energizes me daily. Anyone who knows me knows that music is a big deal to me.

I've used everything from Winamp to Zune desktop software, all with varying degrees of love and hate. Since I love my ZuneHD and use it frequently, I have been using the Zune desktop software for the past three or four years. That was, I did until a few weeks ago when Spotify arrived in the US.

I immediately purchased a premium subscription because I wanted to try out all that Spotify had to offer. I wanted to freeze it, ice skate on it, then thaw it out, swim in it, and then drink it in all it's yummy goodness. I'm glad I did.

Spotify has a ginormous library. 15 million songs is what they boast. That's a heck of a lot of songs! I have almost 130GB of music on my home NAS, the vast majority of it either ripped from CD's I own or purchased through Zune, Amazon, or even iTunes (back in the day; I quit using iTunes a LONG time ago!). It used to be that I had to either purchase a CD or music online to be able to listen to it or get a subscription to Zunepass (which was a great deal, btw!). Of course, Zune didn't always have everything I wanted, so I ended up having to purchase from many different sources. That was, until Spotify.

With few exceptions, I've been able to augment my own ample collection with lots and lots of music. I've been able to revisit music from my youth, and from various stages in my life. I'm in the process of putting together a late 80's playlist as well as some 90's playlists, and with Spotify, it's super-easy! Better yet, I can share those playlists with friends who have Spotify, and they can even subscribe to my playlists or I can subscribe to theirs!

The one major downside to Spotify is its ability to play genres or music based on a certain band. Let's say I'm a huge fan of Metric (and I am!) and I would like to hear music that sounds like them. In a service like Pandora or Grooveshark, you can do that. Spotify? Not so much. But for me, that's really the only downside.

Sound quality on Spotify is amazing, and for me, the Android app works quite well. I never was a big fan of listening to music with my smartphone, but Spotify has made me throw that old notion of bringing an mp3 player along with my smartphone since I can literally look up just about any song I can think of and play it on my phone now.

So, if you're looking for an amazing music service and you know what you want to listen to, give Spotify a try. Seriously; it's a great deal.

Note: There are three flavors of Spotify. Free (limits the user to 20 hours of ad-supported music), $5 a month, and $10 a month premium service which allows you to listen on an Android, Logitech, Sonos, or iDevice.