The Problem with Spotify

An article by chrisbellman    1 Comment

Many people I know have recently started to use the music service Spotify for all their music needs, and while Spotify is an amazing and extremely useful program, the reality of the situation is that using it is a poor decision in the long run. I’ve been using Spotify for around four months now. Spotify’s great in the sense that I no longer have to download music myself and keep track of it / store it on my computer.  But the issue is it’s created a blank spot in my music history. If you go back in the past, I have all the popular songs from the past few years on my computer. Go back to the last 4 months: nothing. This wouldn’t be an issue if I continued using Spotify, but it seems there are more and more ads coming on and I’ve recently re-discovered how amazing Google Music is, so I want to switch. However, I don’t have any music from the past four months to upload to my Google Music. This sucks.

Granted, their business plan is incredibly intelligent – they basically found a way to keep you tied to their service once you’ve invested your time (and possibly money) even more than Apple has with iTunes (because there you at least have the music on your computer, even if it is annoying to deal with in other programs).  I can imagine how annoying this is for people who pay the $5 a month for Spotify Premium – do that for a year or two and then decide to switch services.  Bam.  No music collection for those two years.  This is only a problem if you decide to leave Spotify – but who wants to be forever locked into one service?

I’m now in the process of switching my music over to Google Music – or Google Play Music, as it’s now known.  I can buy music from iTunes, Amazon, or some other service, and as long as it’s in my Music folder on my Mac, their Google Music Manager will upload it to my Google Music collection.  Therefore, no matter what computer I’m on, I can always access ALL of my music through a web interface.  And the best part is, the music automatically appears on my phone.  No more plugging in my phone and copying all the .mp3’s over, now they’re all on it ready to go within a few minutes of me downloading them on my computer in the first place.

Long story short: I love Spotify.  I think it’s great.  However, after considering that I don’t want to pay for it indefinitely and don’t want holes in my music library, I’m switching to Google Music.  And I’m super excited about it.