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If you’re not one of the people that make Lifehacker a top 1,250 webpage in the world, and you don’t live in the UK, you’ve probably never heard of Spotify.  I heard about Spotify on Lifehacker and decided to try it.  Having not read the whole article, I missed the part that said Spotify isn’t available in the US yet.  It turns out if you use a UK Proxy and Google a UK Zip code, you can still download and install Spotify!

The install was lightning quick and the program is extremely light; something everyone loves.  Unlike Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes, or pretty much any other player, the program does not have to detect your music.  In fact, one of the few downsides to this program is that you can’t upload your music (especially if you have a lot of live music or local music that will probably never be added to the Spotify database).  What you give up for this is a speedy music search engine that will allow you to find tons of music to listen to. Lists of all artists and albums relevant to the search are listed above the results area to help you quickly filter through the many results.  Additionally, the radio section has a cool interface where you can pick the decade and the genre of music, and Spotify will spit back 3 song choices similar to Pandora.  Unlike Pandora, you can skip the tracks as frequently as you want!

The music is played via stream, so you never have to download it.  No internet connection? No problem! Spotify keeps up to 10GB or 10% of your hard drive worth of music for your non-streaming music listening needs!  Don’t have your computer with you? No Problem! When you log into Spotify, all your playlists and favorites are ready to rock.  Your five most recent searches are also saved next to your playlists.  Also, Spotify playlist are easily shared to Facebook, Delicious, and via Spotify URI.

Spotify has worked with music labels to get rights to play the music, so all of it is legal.  That does mean that some artists and songs are impossible to find.  Also, live bootlegs will be tough to find.  It also means that you either have to buy a cheap membership (something like $15/month, don’t quote me on that), or you get to listen to a few commercials.  I don’t mind the commercials really, but they do offer $1/day passes just in case you are having guests over and don’t want the music interrupted.  Another small downside to Spotify is not being able to download music to a personal music player.  Maybe iPhone will support a Spotify app (ya right!?).

Overall, I think Spotify has huge potential to become a major player in the Desktop Music Player market.  There is still a place for my 20,000 song music collection (for the random stuff they will never be able to get rights to play) and di.fm (because it’s hard to beat live DJ Mixes and Spotify’s electronica/techno/trance selection is weak from what I’ve seen so far).

If you need help downloading Spotify or you tried it, leave a comment and let me know what you think!

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