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What should a new Spotify user know about the service?

• I'm a huge Pandora user and occasional Grooveshark user. I just got Spotify Premium because I want the ability to play any song on demand from my iPhone. What else should I know about using Spotify? It seems a lot more complicated than Pandora and lacks the seamless user experience.

• Answer:

  Spotify takes several new approaches to subscription music. To put things into context, I'm a previous power user of Yahoo! Music (the original), , , , , and most recently, . 1.) Libraries. Spotify does away with "Libraries" and "Collections". On all of the other services mentioned, you're able to choose songs you want to add to your "library". This "library" is not downloadable. It's simply a list of songs to stream. Spotify, on the other hand, takes the approach that the 15 million songs available to stream are your library. Their philosophy: "The songs are always available to you, so what's the point of making another list?" You add songs to playlists for shorter lists and "star" songs to keep them in a specific "Starred" list, though its purpose is not to create a complete collection (although you could if you wish). At first, I didn't like the idea. But it's grown on me now, to the point that I think creating a collection is rather pointless. I make playlists for specific purposes, and with a drag of the mouse, share them with friends. I also collaborate on certain playlists with friends. Which brings me to the second major difference. 2.) Social. In my opinion, Spotify is the first subscription music service to get social right. As soon as you log in to the client for the first time, it prompts you to connect to Facebook. From there, it checks which of your friends has also installed Spotify and adds them to your Friends list. The beauty of this is that when you want to share a song with a friend, you no longer have the issue where your friend must also be a paying member of the service to hear the song. With Spotify Free, you can be 100% sure that your friend can hear the entire song as you heard it. This issue has plagued services like Rdio and MOG, whose social features require that your friends are paying members of the service. To share a song, all you need to do is drag the song over a friend's name to place it into their Inbox. The same goes with playlists. You can also opt to have collaborative playlists where both you and your friends can edit the contents. 3.) Ease of use and consistency. Spotify is one of the most fluid music experiences I've ever experienced. Granted, their discovery options aren't all that strong yet. But the speed in which tracks begin to play and their quality puts all other services to shame. Utilizing a mix of caching, P2P and CDN technology (as explained here: http://www.ietf.org/meeting/75/p2p-presentations/documents/spotify-gunnar-kreitz.pdf), Spotify is able to begin playing a track less than 250ms after you choose it. That's virtually unnoticeable and lends to the feeling that you're not streaming music but instead playing it straight off your computer locally. This is also the reason Spotify doesn't have a web interface like MOG and Rdio. It's almost impossible to use P2P through a browser. It is my belief that the three new approaches Spotify has taken to subscription music  as listed above will allow it to be highly successful in what some would say is an over-crowded industry.