I’ve posted a couple of times before about being a long, long time fan of streaming music, and how it’s pretty much replaced every other way we listen to music. I’ve subscribed to Microsoft’s evolving Music services from the early days of MSN Music, through Zune, then Groove and have trialed and played with Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited. With Microsoft’s shuttering of Groove, I have now moved to a trial of Spotify Premium, and I’m blown away, especially as someone who uses an Amazon Echo Dot to stream music through my home stereo.
What’s so great about Spotify Premium?
- Spotify Connect:
- I’ll cover additional things below that I like about Spotify below but far and away the most impressive features is Spotify Connect, which integrates cloud streaming with smart devices and speakers, allowing you to stream music from a variety of devices including Amazon Echo, Google Chromecast and Sonos.
- And the magic here is that you’re not streaming music from your phone or tablet over WiFi of Bluetooth, the music is streaming from the Spotify cloud, and you use your phone, tablet or smart assistant to act as a remote control.
- Why is this cool? beyond obvious things like not burning up your phones battery you can start music playing, switch to other things, shut your phone off, even leave, and you’re music will still be streaming. And better, you can kick you music of from say your phone, but to then change songs, artists, etc you, or others in your house, can use Alexa to control your music with your voice.
- Large Music Catalog and Artists/Albums on Demand:
- Spotify boasts over 30 million songs, well beyond Pandora and Amazon’s “10’s of millions”, and while it falls short of Apples 40 million songs, 30 million is a pretty large catalog.
- And unlike some streaming services, it’s nice to play a specific song or album, or que up a series of albums.
- Download and Take Your Music off-line:
- Admittedly a pretty widespread feature, but for me the ability to download a portion of my music and carry it with me on my phone is a must have.
So there you go, a great music service, that plays exceptionally well with a wide variety of smart speakers/streaming devices and at a very reasonable monthly subscription fee.
Now if they’d only release a Spotify app for the Zune ;-)!
clarkb... 