The Latest Music Platform is Taking Off

By Matthew Tulli 

Teenagers are always looking for ways to listen to music – from torrenting music off of illegal peer-to-peer sharing websites, like The Pirate Bay, to downloading music off of Youtube, with websites like www.youtube-mp3.org. But in recent years, the music industry had been changed by possibly the best legal music player available, called Spotify. Spotify is a free music app that can be downloaded for Windows, Mac, and even a Linux version, which is good for Penn Manor students, considering that our laptops run off of Linux. You can download Spotify onto your laptop by visiting the website, spotify.com.

Using Spotify, users can create playlists, follow favorite artists and friends to get recent activity, listen to Spotify Radio, and much more. Spotify users can either use the app for free with restrictions, pay $5 per month with fewer restrictions, or pay $10 per month with no restrictions. Some of these restrictions are listening with advertisements, only being able to play playlists on shuffle mode, not having access to Spotify Radio, and not being able to sync songs with iTunes.

Spotify has gained much success around the world in the past few years. In 2013, there were over 24 million active users, six million of which were paying subscribers. Also, Spotify pulled in over $1 billion dollars since its inception in 2008, and employs over 1,200 people worldwide. It has over 20 millions songs available at your fingertips, and over 20,000 songs are being released every day.

Basically, Spotify is a combination of Twitter, iTunes, and Pandora. Users can create playlists that other users can “follow” and listen to, and they can follow other users’ profiles. You can also see what your favorite artists are listening to. It’s basically a music-oriented social media website.

Personally, I think Spotify is the best music player right now. I have used Spotify Premium for a few months now, and it is definitely my favorite music player. I’m actually listening to Spotify as I type this article. With iTunes, you must pay for every song you want. With Spotify, any song you want to listen to is available with a quick search. It is what I use to listen to music all the time, and many of my friends do as well.

Sophomore and Spotify Premium subscriber Will Forrey says, “It’s much more convenient than iTunes. I usually add about 5 songs to my playlists every week, so its much cheaper to pay ten dollars than to pay $1.29 for every song you want to listen to.”

Freshman and Spotify Free user Alex Staub says, “When I want to listen to music I only use Spotify since it’s free and you can still listen to almost any song you want. I probably have about 2000 different songs on my playlists right now, and with iTunes, that would cost so much. I just prefer to use Spotify Free because even though its free, you still have almost any song you want in the app.”

If you’re wondering, you can’t just buy Premium and share your username and password with all of your friends. Only one device on a profile can listen at one time.

Overall, if you’re looking for a better way to listen to music, you have to try Spotify. I would definitely suggest it.

A chart showing what you can and can’t do with two different versions of Spotify. Image provided by Spotify.