I don’t know if I should be embarrassed or proud that all 867 of my Facebook friends now know I just listened to “The Climb” by Miley Cyrus.
Spotify, a popular music-listening service, is invading Facebook news feeds. The free application provides a huge range of music for free streaming with just a click.
The application offers both free and paid subscriptions. With the free subscription, users can only listen to music on a computer with an internet connection and spoken advertisements pop up every song or two. To get rid of the advertisements, users can purchase a premium subscription for either $5 for offline listening or $10 for access to listening on a mobile device.
The new service is popular among people looking to avoid high iTunes’ prices.
“[I use it] mostly everyday,” senior Nathalia Cibotti said. “It’s pretty much a replacement iTunes for me at this point.”
As part of Facebook’s new updates, Spotify provides live updates of songs your friends are listening to, simplifying the process of recommending and discovering new music. Under Spotify’s default settings, every song a user listens to shows up automatically on his Facebook profile. Though this may seem invasive at times, it’s easy to fix the privacy situation — a “private listening” option allows the user to hide certain songs from Facebook.
A Spotify team in Stockholm developed the original software in 2006 for listening in Europe. However, due to copyright laws, it only became legal in the United States in July. Originally, it was invitation-only but has since expanded.
Because Spotify offers free music, many students prefer it to iTunes. Its sharing feature is also a plus, since users can easily send a song or playlist to one of their friends.
“Being able to share playlists with friends is awesome,” junior Kaiwei Hsu said. “Spotify integrates social media with music, so friends can add music they think you’d like onto a shared playlist. It’s a really cool way to discover new artists.”
Regardless of the privacy issues, many users agree that Spotify is a great alternative to iTunes, where song prices can add up fast.
“I listen to music on Spotify almost everyday,” Hsu said. “If I were to use iTunes, I would have to pay $1.29 to buy my songs, but because I use Spotify, I can listen to all the music I want for free.”
