By Caitlin Fry
Pandora what? The newest online music trend is the Swedish creation called Spotify. Now, unless you have zero friends on Facebook (or you have really lame Facebook friends) you’ve been seeing little notifications pop up from your friends using Spotify.
But what exactly is it?
Spotify is a music-streaming service of music from mainstream and independent labels. It allows users to sync their social media accounts from Facebook and/or Twitter to the program, which is where all those notifications are coming from.
Besides having the benefit of sharing what you’re listening to every single second with all your friends, you can also access other friends’ music playlists. If Facebook wasn’t creepy enough, you now can play “mini-music hacker.”
Apparently, Justin Timberlake— I mean Sean Parker— the former president of Facebook and co-founder of Napster, commemorated the integration that all new Spotify members would have to register with their Facebook login.
I have yet to jump on this musical bandwagon and I really don’t think I will be doing that anytime soon. While I haven’t tried the program myself, the tutorial video didn’t exactly wow me and I’m pretty sure Spotify doesn’t have the amazing film scores station like Pandora does.
Obviously, Parker and Spotify came up with the idea that one must have a Facebook login to access Spotify to not only utilize their social media capabilities, but to also receive somewhat free advertising.
Everyone knows that most people garner information independently. There are very few people who actively search out answers. We try things because our friends tried it.
But is Spotify going to be good enough to satisfy the really compassionate music lovers? Or is this just another fad that will disappear within the next year? What exactly makes Pandora better than Spotify, or Spotify better than iTunes?
iTunes has the “Genius” option where it can make a mix that is limited to your music, but isn’t that more appropriate anyway?
With the pending comeback of compact cassette tapes and the increasing popularity of vinyl records, why even bother Spotify? The “oldies” are here to stay!
