Steve Heyes .co .uk

My Experience So Far With Spotify Premium (and it’s not good)

This month, I decided to trial Spotify Premium. 

The idea of listening to (pretty much) anything I wanted to at any time seemed very appealing. At £9.99 it is the equivalent of buying one album a month from a store like HMV. 

Also, with the Premium package, you have access to the iPhone app. This makes it even more appealing as I can listen to anything on the go.

Saying that, my initial experience has been one of frustration and disappointment.

I feel Spotify falls down at one, simply question: “What shall I listen to?”

In my iTunes library, I can browse through artists, albums etc to see if anything catches my eye. If I need a pick me up then maybe a bit of Relient K to add some cheer. If I want some chilled out music then I can just browse through and choose from a limited selection.

With Spotify, this is almost impossible. There is no way of browsing music in the same way to find something that fits your mood. There is too much choice and no way to filter out this choice. There is only a search field, and searching for “chilled” does not really produce many good results.

It’s as though they expect you to know what you want to listen to before you open up the application.

Also, unless you download a playlist before hand, the iPhone app can be hit and miss at streaming the music. When listening to music on car journeys it often stops periodically to buffer a bit more. This is might frustrating.

It seems my listening habits may have to change slightly. And maybe it’s just teething issues. But so far, not great.

Has anyone else had any issues?