If you know what Spotify is about and got an account, skip the first two paragraphs. If you live in Sweden, Norway, Finland, UK, France or Spain and listen to music you should pretty fucking interested and couldn't wait to get reading what this is about. Otherwise, I'm very sorry.


What is Spotify?
Spotify is the best thing that has happened to your music listening since your first cd player. It's a free music service that works by streaming. They've got a vast library of music you can listen to legally and free. Throw in a search term, a name, label, whatever, it gives you all they've got and you can listen to it. Download playlists someone else has made, check what Spotify is recommending you based on what you've been listening to or choose genre(s) and decade(s) and use it as a radio.  Of course the collection isn't perfect and they've got some big holes in it because of some labels or artists being jerks, but usually if you aren't looking for something completely obscure you'll be able to find at least an album or two, in many cases much, much more.

It has to funded somehow, so Spotify has ads. Some in the UI and some audio ads between songs. Not too many, maybe once in an album (this depends on where you live), but they are there. There's also the premium account which costs a little (around 10e/month I think) and gets rid of the ads and as a new feature gets you better sound quality on some albums (the normal one is OGG equivalent of 160kbps I think, which is fine for 95% of people). They use some kind of cloud computing system (think of torrents) and I don't know how the hell they do it but songs start to play practically immediately when you click play and I've never had one stop to buffer. Oh and it has integrated Last.fm support.


This is awesome, how do I get it?
If you live in Britain, just http://www.spotify.com and make yourself an account. If you live in the other countries listed in the beginning, Spotify is in invite only beta. This means you need an invite, but there are ways. One is a nice trick that worked at least a while ago. Go to http://spotifyinvite.tk fill in your info but as the postal code insert 13004 and the country should be France. Just remember to change those afterwards, Spotify won't let you use it from "abroad" for long. Also there are a lot of websites taking invites from donors and giving them away. Some to try are
http://skxpl.eu.org/spotify/
http://invitify.fleo.se/

I'll add these if I come across good ones.

If you live elsewhere, Spotify isn't available, though they've got plans to expand overseas. If you can figure out some nice way (proxies?) to cheat, post it.


GW playlist
Spotify has a neat feature called collaborative playlist, and GW needs one. Here you go: http://open.spotify.com/user/marges/playlist/7eTiOnnCpgxWAYSKZLkQWp

Anyone can add stuff and remove stuff, so feel free as long as it's good. The one rule is not to be a jerk. Being a jerk includes
-adding lots of songs from one artist (let's keep it at max 3-4)
-adding stupid stuff like Korn's 5 Seconds of Silence or something
-removing other people's songs unless they are being jerks
-lots of other things I can't even think of because I'm not a jerk

Here's the list I made to start with:

GO!

Sort of, but instead of being just a radio you can actually choose what songs to listen.

I only used Pandora briefly, but isn't it more an internet radio that plays songs, you rate them and it plays you more the stuff you liked?

I use Spotify like I use foobar/winamp, they've just got a lot bigger library of music than I've got on my hard drive.

Yeah one of my friends told me about this, you can just have a huge album of music online without downloading it. Sounds like a pretty neat idea.

So yeah, I've been using this for a while now too and so far it's pretty great. For me, Spotify has mostly replaced using youtube/warez for music. Less hassle and the sound quality is actually pretty good. They're still missing some big name artists though (Beatles, Metallica, Led Zeppelin for example) and you won't find anything too obscure.

Spotify is really awesome. I still download and buy my music but I use spotify to check out new artists and it's great that I can do it easily instead of going to myspace, pure volume, youtube etc. to listen to some songs. Plus I prefer listening to albums and Spotify makes that possible. I haven't tried any of the playlist features but the idea of GW playlist is p.cool so I might contribute something later.

Also, the library is huge but there are a lot of artists, albums and songs you aren't going to find. But that's pretty obvious and they are constantly adding more music which is cool, you can't really expect more when it's free unless you want to become a subscriber.

Seems pretty similar, yeah. Both have the same basic idea at least. Seems like Deezer has a bit more features while Spotify has more songs and you need a Spotify client which works as a music player like winamp, foobar etc. I'm surprised that I haven't heard of Deezer before.

Yeah, DS's right. Deezer seems to insist on adding stuff to playlists though, I don't get why I can't play them straight away. On first look it also seems more radio and community centric, with stuff like email between users. Spotify is more about just a massive catalogue you can listen to, playlists, radios and all that is just extra features. I just found a way to check how many songs Spotify has, in Finland it currently lists around 300k albums and 3,5 million songs.

I read somewhere that Spotify has around 6 million songs in total.

Spotify has only been around since October and is officially still in beta, I'd be surprised if they didn't expand to rest of Europe after a while. Going overseas is another thing then. I guess you could create an account through a proxy (like http://spotifyinvite.tk/ which I linked in the opening post) and use it for the two weeks Spotify allows you to be abroad, but after that you would need a new one. I did a quick google but didn't find anything useful about actually running Spotify through a proxy. Could something like Tor help?

Wiki claims most of the music on Deezer is there without permission, but I don't where they got that.

I use grooveshark if i want to stream stuff, it's pretty good