Recently there’s been a lot of talk about Spotify. I have to admit it took longer for me to check it out than normal because it was being compared to Pandora, and try as I might I just didn’t along with Pandora. I occasionally used LastFM‘s radio feature, but I own a hell of a lot of music. I’ve been buying CDs since I got my first CD player in 1989, they take up a lot of room.

Unlike a lot of people I don’t hate iTunes, it is a bit slow with the amount of music I have, and since I got my new iPod Touch I am no longer able to use iTunes on my win2k server machine. This means most of the music is run from a network directory making iTunes on my XP PC even slower. Not great… it also skips sometimes if I have FireFox open. I used to use foobar2k but as I have an iPod that needs this PC to sync now I ended up using iTunes more and more. I gave SongBird a go but found it slow and it was worse at dealing with networked music than iTunes.

Anyway, I finally gave Spotify a go the other night. Signed up for the free account as I wanted to see how the ads worked. I was impressed. Linking it up to my lastFM account made me happy as I really love my lastFM and probably wouldn’t use anything that didn’t update it. It’s very quick, it hasn’t skipped on me at all yet which is good as my internet connection is pretty dire speedwise and most things give me the dreaded ‘buffering’ messages. The image/text ads are really small and unobtrusive. I didn’t get very many of them either. It took a good while to get my first audio advert. This is where it really impressed me. It’s not particularly clever, it’s just a small thing that pleased me greatly. When you get the audio ads (mine were nearly all about Climate Change awareness so I’m fine with that!) you can’t skip them, that’s expected, but the best things I found were that they aren’t scrobbled to lastFM and also they don’t show up in your IM status if you have ‘currently playing’ selected. Awesome! How good is that?! So simple, yet it made me really happy.

One downside I’ve found is that the radio options aren’t very good for me. They don’t seem to be all that accurate. You can skip as much as you like though. The best use I’ve found for it is to create your own playlist (or find one on the vast number of spotfy playlist sites sprouting up) and preview albums/artists you’ve wanted to give a go, but don’t want to buy just in case you don’t like them.