Is Spotify the future of music listening

How well Spotify fares in a larger market depends on several factors. The program's ease-of-use scores pretty low, since it's hard to find music without knowing what you're looking for. You can see lists of the most popular tracks, and some What's New album graphics on the program's home screen, but after that you're pretty much on your own. Using the search syntax means manually rolling your own searches, rather than simply choose criteria from a menu (can it be that hard to code), making searches complex. There's no power search, other than stringing together search criteria in the single search field. There's no recommendation engine, though the program does link with Last.fm, offering scrobbling. However, you need to then use Last.fm to get recommendations and click an icon to listen to them with Spotify. Finally, for Spotify to work, it needs to satisfy both record labels and musicians, and it seems that not everyone is happy.

The real weakness with Spotify--and other subscription-based services--is the inability to listen on a portable device (with the exception of an iPod touch or iPhone). You can't put music on an iPod unless you purchase it, which defeats the purpose of a subscription. While I spend a lot of time in front of my computer, what if I want to listen to music from Spotify in another location Well, there's always Airfoil. But I wouldn't be able to control the Spotify application.

Chris Breen has long been a fan of streaming services, and I've never really had opportunities to try them out before, as most are limited to the U.S. I don't know if I can be won over by Spotify, but in spite of its weaknesses, it has promise.

Senior contributor Kirk McElhearn writes about more than just Macs on his blog Kirkville. He has also been Reading Henry James lately.