Spotify Music review

Spotify is the application for listening to music and podcasts. It was founded thirteen years ago, in April 2006, by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. The application referred to as freemium service; therefore, the basic features are free, but if you want more, you need to buy a premium subscription.

Large base of high-quality music

It is not a secret that Spotify is one of the most popular applications for listening to music around the world. As of March 2019, the base of the songs contains more than 50 million tracks. Besides songs, Spotify also offers a big amount of podcasts categorized by different genres and topics. In October 2019, the app has more than 248 million monthly users; almost half of them are paying subscribers. One important fact, the platform only provides users with DRM-protected music. It means that all intellectual property rights of authors are protected and strictly regulated by law. The company has a pretty interesting system of compensation for authors: unlike other application that pays a fixed price of albums or song sold, Spotify “pays royalties based on the number of artists streams as a proportion of total songs streamed.” Although around 70% of their total revenue goes to rights holders, such a paying system faces with regular critics from several popular artists, including Taylor Swift and Thom Yorke.

Note, that the application is not available in all countries. It is most common in such areas: Europe, North America, New Zeland, Australia, and some parts of Asia and Africa. The app is available on a number of platforms: iOS, Android, Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

Free and premium subscriptions

There are two types of subscriptions: free and premium. Both allow you to browse new music, create, edit, and share playlists, and search by song’s name, author, and genre. Moreover, Spotify has a large base of pre-ready playlists that updates on a regular basis by the company. Besides free features, the premium subscribers can:

• Download music on the device to play it offline;
• Enjoy the music without advertising;
• Listening to music with better quality.