Have you been Spotified?
8th March 2009
Logo for Spotify
It seems as though the coming-of-age for any new Web 2.0 start up nowadays is its first security scare. Spotify, the new online music sharing application, had theirs a week or two ago when they announced that a flaw was discovered back in December which could expose users’ passwords. The company have reassured paying customers that their bank details are still safe.
I’ve been enjoying using Spotify for a while now, after jumping on the LastFM bandwagon a little bit late. The features that make it distinct are that you do not own the music, just the access to it; its free, although a subscription removes the advertising and it has a large store of music with blindingly quick searching and access to the tunes.
It has a curious hybrid approach to sharing and social networking. It isn’t a social networking application as such, but it does allow you to share compilations that you’ve made as well as recently introducing a collaborative playlist. This allows multiple users to add songs to a playlist. If we move to a suitably small office in the future then I may well investigate an office playlist.
Because of this, at the moment I’m indulging my slightly dodgy existing musical tastes and finding old albums I haven’t listened to in years as well as checking out bands like Sigur Ros who I keep hearing about but not actually hearing. The ability to look at what friends are listening to, like on LastFM, would make Spotify a more interesting experience.
Oh, and there is a neat little radio function where you can select the musical style and a time period and Spotify selects random tunes matching that as a query. Selecting pre-50s Techno did have a rather odd result, mind. Also, if there’s a banned list function I haven’t found it and so you do run the risk of bumping in to the new U2 album if you’re not too careful. And that way madness lies, obviously.
The other thing I’d like to be able to do is to search by record label, which isn’t there yet but as they develop the functionality hopefully they might indulge my more trainspottery tendencies. Of course, if they release an API any time soon then we might see all manner of new developments.
