Spotify: What it is, How it Works, and Why You Should Care

Though users in Europe have been reaping the benefits of Spotify since 2008, music lovers in the United States got their first taste for the first time today, when it officially became available in North America. At first glance, Spotify must appear like yet another overhyped streaming music service, but upon further inspection users will find that it could very well be the future of the music industry.

It's not that Spotify is particularly unique -- in fact, it's quite the opposite – it actually blends some of the best features of several competing streaming media services. Like Google Music, it uploads music you own to a cloud library, and like Qrocity allows you to stream full albums and songs from a database of millions of songs to a wide range of devices. Like Amazon Cloud Player, you can even access it from a wide variety of devices, including your PC, Mac, tablet, or smartphone. But most important of all, it's like Pandora in that it's completely free, subsidized by ads.

In other words, it's damn near perfect.

The foundation of the service is the desktop client, an iTunes-esque portal to a world of infinite possibilities. The user-interface feels familiar, presenting songs in an organized list, with a side bar that displays your library and playlists, playback controls and album art. 

When you first initiate the software, all you'll encounter is the music you already have localized on your computer, but hidden just below the surface is the exponentially larger cloud library that you will gradually discover. 

Unlike digital marketplaces like iTunes or Zune, however, Spotify doesn't present the cloud database as a storefront, but instead relies on search, an unintrusive listing of most popular songs and albums, and social interaction amongst users for new music discovery. 

The Top Lists present 100 of the most popular songs and albums on the service, which can be filtered by locale (U.S., U.K., Spain, etc.), and a New Releases panel shows off the newest additions to the service. 

But what really drives the service is social interaction and search. Spotify integrates with Facebook, which allows users to find friends who use the service, and share public playlists with each other. It also allows users to copy direct links to their custom playlists, which can be shared publically, though obviously only users who sign up for Spotify can access them. 

Browsing custom playlists from friends is a great way to get a sense of their tastes, but using the search tool to dig into the larger database is the best way to expand your library. 

Spotify has built a library of over 15 million songs, with 10,000 new tracks added every day. Currently the site's foremost publishing partners include Sony Music, Universal, EMI, Warner Music, and others. 

In my hunt to find music on Spotify, I've found most or all of the tracks I've been looking for, with only a few limited instances where I couldn't. To attest to how broad and expansive their offering is, I was able to find over 30 songs from a small independent band, Pollyn, based out of Los Angeles and features one of IGN's own video producers on guitar. 

Shameless plug? Perhaps, but it's also an incredible testament to the breadth of media available. 

But what about the biggest names in music? They're here too. Among those topping the Spotify charts are Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Eminem, Lil Wayne, Katy Perry, Bruno Mars – the works, and each has most of their entire catalog available. 

Adding songs to your personal library is as simple as dragging them to a playlist, and there's no limit either; you can hold shift, click, and drag a whole block of music to your playlist in one fell swoop. 

Once you've built a large library, you can take it on the go using the Spotify mobile app for iPhone, iPod touch, Android smartphones and tablets, Windows Phone 7, and WebOS. 

Of the various versions of the app I tried, all had surprisingly speedy high-fidelity playback, even over 3G. Browsing music using the mobile UI was also pretty intuitive, though obviously browsing thousands of songs is preferable on your desktop or laptop. 

The one catch, however, is that only users who pay a monthly subscription fee will be able to stream their complete music library on their mobile device. While the app will allow free users to browse the Spotify library, only premium users will be allowed to play tracks, and flag songs to be cached for offline playback. 

The fee for unhindered access is actually pretty reasonable, however, at $9.99 a month, which grants you unlimited offline mode playback on both your PC or your mobile device, as well as higher audio quality and the ability to remove ads. 

Of course, nobody likes paying monthly subscription fees, but the beautify of Spotify is that the core service of unlimited access to the larger streaming library is free, so if you decide you don't want or need a premium account, you don't lose any tracks you've organized. 

For those who don't care about mobile access and offline functionality, but loathe ads, there's a separate option called Spotify Unlimited that costs $4.99 a month and eliminates ads. 

If you're cheap like me, however, you'll want to stick with the ad-subsidized version. And, to be honest, the ads aren't even that bad. Over the span of two hours, my music playback was interrupted maybe twice, and the interrupts were less than a minute in length. Not only were they brief and infrequent, but also the ad content was kind of pleasant. The audio ads either advertised functions of Spotify or played a sample of a song available on the network. 

There were also banner ads built into the player, but since the service was minimized and playing in the background most of the time, I hardly noticed them. 

When my day started, I was annoyed by how flooded my Twitter stream was by people freaking out over the arrival of Spotify, but after a day of exploring new music and exploring its vast library, I understand the hype.