Spotify

CNET Editors' review

by: Eddie Cho on February 15, 2013

Spotify has been around for a good year and hasn't changed much; it's still one of our favorite applications for music on-demand and music library management. Taking cues from iTunes, Spotify integrates your existing music libraries with its own giant catalog of songs from artists all over the world. Where it trumps iTunes is that all the music is pretty much available to stream for free, with offline functionality for an addition ten bucks a month. In their in-app advertisements, claimss like "Piracy is overrated" are quite justified; it's seriously one of the most easiest ways to grab just about any song you can think of, and stellar for discovering new music.

And while we've already covered the highlights of the layout and the general functions of the service, Spotify has since then been pushing users to take advantage of its own app catalog to further enhance the playlist creation experience.

Apps are available from bigger names and sites like BillBoard charts and well known musicians, as well as discovery brands like HypeM to help users discover new music from just about any genre. And while users can already explore curated lists from their synced friends via Facebook, Spotify apps are in some sense the company's response to address the need for more curated lists.

It's not surprising that the actual number of apps in their catalog is rather small, but then again there's really only so much you can do with music playlists. From our experience most of the apps are centered around music discovery and suggestion, or syncing with well known discovery sites like Hypem. They are interesting for a bit but few apps really add any new legitimate features or functions to the music listening experience, except just visual reorientations of artist spotlights. My personal favorite was simply the TuneWiki lyrics plugin; it basically turned my Spotify app into a makeshift karaoke so I can secretly sing and rap to myself at work. Other apps that were also interesting included Fuse, an app that highlight music of artists that make headlines or appear on the news.

Your favorited apps will follow you whenever you log onto Spotify, no matter what machine you're on.

If you're looking for a free, legal way to get all your favorite songs on your computer, stop living under a rock and download this now.