Google Music Beta is a cloud-based music locker service that lets you store up to 20,000 tracks for free. You can then play back your music either via a Flash-enabled webpage or an Android smartphone app. The Android app includes an offline option to store local copies of your songs.
I’ve been using Google Music Beta for the past couple of weeks, putting it through its paces and comparing how it handles versus Spotify. Overall I’ve [...]
Spotify’s new MP3 download store has been getting lots of press lately, usually with the angle that Spotify is now gunning for Apple’s iTunes and other MP3 stores. One thing that most reports miss though (and which several followers on Twitter have asked me about) is the 30-day download expiration policy.
To buy an MP3 on Spotify, you must first purchase a download bundle of 1, 10, 15, 40 or 100 downloads. This work a bit like [...]
Despite my reservations about “saying hello to the iPod,” the new Spotify download service does offer several unique features and is more ground-breaking than it perhaps at first appears. For Premium users it’s mostly business as usual, but for freemiums there’s much to entice you to spend a few pennies. Plus it’s a doddle to use! There’s lots of benefits for both you the listener and Spotify the company: [...]
Spotify’s new feature announcement is great news for its freemium users, casual listeners and iPod owners. If you’re one of these: rejoice! You can now benefit from cheaper-than-iTunes MP3 purchases, wireless syncing and Spotify-lite on your mobile. But for Premium users like myself there’s not too much here to get excited about.
When I signed up back in ’09 for Spotify’s cloud service in the sky, I shifted [...]
Did you know you can drag-and-drop an album or playlist from Spotify onto your desktop or into any folder?
Using this technique you can easily replace your mp3s with Spotify shortcuts. I did this at the weekend and now have a much more manageable music collection.
For the past decade or so, almost all my music listening has been through my PC. I use Windows Media Player as my main mp3 player. Instead of storing my mp3s in alphabetical artist [...]
Time to reclaim some disk space: how much of my mp3 collection is now on Spotify?
I reckon Spotify has:
A fair amount of the synthpop and electronica (missing VNV Nation, And One, Seabound, Anthony Rother)
Much of the Industrial/EBM (except for KMFDM – I bought and ripped all their albums, so that amounts for a fair chunk of this)
Most of the Rock – Indie – Punk (except for The Toy Dolls – again, I bought and ripped [...]