As of September 2016, Spotify announced it has 40 million subscribers and this is no small feat, their number of subscribers grew 10 million since March 2016. Many people who listen to music and keep up with what is currently happening in the industry have, no doubt, realized the significance of Spotify. The streaming service has changed the way millions of people listen to music: by paying for access to the music rather than buying it and owning the music. Just in the month of September 2016, both Pandora and iHeartRadio have announced that they will be coming out with their own versions of streaming services. Apple Music is famous, as well, for being a popular streaming service although it has not reached Spotify's number of users.
Spotify is extremely popular and there are several reasons for this. The first reason being that the catalog of songs and albums that the service has acquired is astounding. There are tens of millions of songs available for streaming, and this is something that is very appealing for music listeners who want to be one tap or one click away from all their favorite music at any given time. Spotify is respectable because there is no such thing as an "exclusive" Spotify release like there are exclusive releases with Apple Music. The company has denied multiple times that they will ever move in the direction of having exclusive content. Spotify is also extremely fast, and the service does not take up as much room on a cell phone's storage as music downloaded from iTunes would.
Spotify playlists are a major appeal of the service. Any user with an account can create a public playlist that can be found by using key words in the search bar, and anyone can listen to these playlists. This is a great way to discover new music that a listener might not have discovered otherwise. In addition, Spotify as a company also has employees whose entire job is to create playlists with common themes such as "Running" or "Teen Party" that groups songs that are alike into one easy bundle of music that anyone with a Premium paid account can access.
Although there are several pros to using Spotify, there are, inevitably, cons as well. Many listeners complain about the price of moving up to the Premium Spotify tier, which allows the listener to download music that is available for listening even away from internet access. The cost of Premium is $9.99 a month for one listener account and $14.99 for the family account which allows multiple users. Another complaint would be that there are several notable musicians who refuse to license their music to Spotify. These artists include Taylor Swift, Tool, and Prince to name a few.
One major downside to using Spotify is that the user does not own any of the content they are paying for. The user is merely paying for access to the music, not ownership of his or her copy of it.
Overall, I personally am a huge fan of Spotify and I use it everyday. I love that I can listen to music anywhere I want and that I only pay a flat fee for access to it without the albums taking up as much room on my cell phone. I would recommend this service to anyone that loves music and wants to find new music to listen to as well as having access to virtually anything else.
