Quicker than I ever thought it would get there, Spotify announced yesterday that they are hitting the Apple and 
Android market.
As an avid music fan, this is really awesome.
Before now I didn’t bother with the iphone due to it not being able to hold all of my music – however, having spotify on your mobile is literally like having millions of tracks in your pocket.
Even half a year ago in March, Spotify had 2,582,501 tracks available. Doing a search now (this is done by searching for ‘”year:0-9999″ without quotes (thanks Brett) – If you’re reading this in the year 10k, I don’t know what to tell you) pulls up these results:
Tracks: (4,401,049)
Albums: (396,229)
Artists: (328,578)
One thing that I did have on my mind when reading the announcement was what type of mobile broadband the iPhone has. Is it even called that on the iPhone? Wifi and 3G I suppose. Will streaming use up a lot of bandwidth? Downloading a single file on my current phone is like taking my bank account around the back of the house and putting it out of it’s misery. My guess is that if you plan on using this app, you’ll want a contract that permits a lot of free data browsing or something which has a fixed price. I bold this so no one can complain that they tried it and had to end up selling their house to pay the bill.
Something else to be taken into consideration is Spotify Premium. To use the service on your mobile phone you’re going to have to pay £9.99 a month or £119.88 for a year for premium, this is purely for using it on a mobile – the service is still free on a computer.
For fun I tried to work out the price of a Spotify track if you were to pay the Premium price (thanks to Brett again ’cause I suck at maths); Spotify comes out at 0.000002 pence per month per track vs iTunes at 99 pence for track that you will own (this seems the most common price, I couldn’t find an average). We were going to figure out price per track listened to in an average lifetime… but we’ll leave that for later. It works out that Spotify becomes the cheapest once you listen to about 5000 tracks though (if you like to count payment towards the songs you listen to instead of the millions you might not).
Quality wise, Spotify has the upper hand with 320kbps. Needless to say, if you do buy premium it will also apply when using your account on a computer. Before this app was released, Premium was quite expensive for what you got in return (although what they’re giving away for free is a huge incentive to support them anyway).
However, here are the advantages as they look now:
- Exclusives
Exclusive access to pre-releases and concert ticket lotteries. - No ads
- Travel access
Go anywhere in the world and listen to your favourite music. - Mobile music
Use Spotify on your iPhone or Android device. - Higher sound quality
Stream music in a higher bitrate, up to 320kbps.
Here’s some of the features you’ll find on Spotify Mobile:
- Stream over WiFi or 3G
- Offline playlists
Play music even without a connection, for example when riding the underground or on a plane. - Access your Spotify account
All your playlists will be made available. - On-the-fly sync
Add a track to a playlist and see it appear immediately on your computer and vice versa
A quick look at the app in action:
With all the focus on the iPhone, I actually haven’t mentioned the Android much. I’m pretty ill informed about both of the phones, to be honest. After reading articles about both, I still haven’t haven’t figured out which one would be better for me. With this new app though, I think I might be buying one. The problem is, dear reader, I haven’t a clue which. Input appreciated!
Would you like to know more? (points for knowing reference)
Everyday Banter 