Music Ally

This week’s big buzz in the mobile music world is undoubtedly Spotify’s iPhone app. Ever since the streaming music firm published a video demo on YouTube, people have been speculating wildly about two questions:

First: is it any good? And second: Will Apple let it onto the App Store?

Well, we’ve had a lengthy hands-on this week with the version of the app that was submitted to Apple, to answer the first of those questions. So, although this is very much a preview rather than a final review…

Is Spotify for iPhone any good? Yes, it is. It’s great.

The app does the basic music streaming stuff well, in terms of you searching for an artist, album or track, tapping on the one you want, and listening to it. It carries across the simplicity and efficiency of the desktop version of Spotify.

The sound quality is good, and since it requires a premium Spotify account, there are no ads to break up your listening.

But the focus of the iPhone app is as much – if not more – about playlists. Fire it up for the first time, and after logging in, you’re greeted with your existing playlists from the desktop version – those you’ve created yourself, and other people’s playlists that you’ve played before.

You can create a playlist within the app, though, and add any songs or albums that you search for to it. These new playlists, and changes to your existing ones, are then reflected back next time you use the desktop version. It’s seamless.

But the clever stuff – and the reason people are getting more excited about Spotify than its streaming rivals on iPhone – is the way it can cache your playlists to be played when offline – on a plane or tube, or simply when your network reception is dodgy.

It’s done via a big Offline playlists button that lets you choose which playlists to cache on the iPhone – it then downloads them over your Wi-Fi connection. As a guide, a 49-song playlist took around five minutes to download to our iPhone.

The key thing: it just works. I strolled into my local high street, which has numerous blackspots for O2 reception, and the music never faltered. Switching the iPhone into plane-safe mode produced the same effect.

It’s this feature that (for now) puts Spotify’s app head and shoulders above its rivals on iPhone. Are there limits? Spotify tells us that you can sync unlimited playlists, but the total number of tracks you can store is limited to 3,333. At over 300 albums, for a lot of people, that’s a CD collection’s worth.

To get the most out of it, though, you’ll want to spend some time creating playlists in the desktop version, though. The selling point of accessing your music when your data connection is down only holds true if you’ve actually created and synced the playlists you’ll want to listen to.

Without getting carried away, the Spotify iPhone app does everything it promised. The question now is whether Apple will approve it. We have to admit we’re surprised Spotify has chosen not to include iTunes Store links to smooth the process through. Rival streaming apps have done, and it’s always been assumed that this was at Apple’s behest.

We hope Apple approves the app, though. As we explained the other night, we think the benefits of having Spotify on the iPhone outweigh the risks to Apple of cannibalised iTunes Store sales.

From Spotify’s perspective, its app should provide the most convincing reason yet for users to upgrade to a premium subscription. Note, this also applies to the expected Android and Symbian versions of the application too – it’s not just an iPhone thing.

It will be fascinating to see which way Apple jumps in the coming days.

Tags: apple, iphone, spotify

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Digital Music News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.