Review of Spotify

I've been fortunate enough to get a preview of Spotify. Here's a review while comparing it to Rhapsody and Last.fm.  I'm mostly a Rhapsody user having rated over 5000 tracks.  Last.fm has just seen a few months of use from me.

Search

• The search is blazing fast.  Much faster than Rhapsody and slightly better than Last.fm.  One annoying thing I've noticed is that certain artists with odd spellings. !!!, M/A/R/R/S, and Ke$ha are impossible to find if you don't remember to type in the symbols.  This is also a problem on Rhapsody but Last.fm seems to get it right most of the time.
• While the search is fast, an autocomplete feature would be greatly appreciated to help with typos. Rhapsody and Last.fm have it.
• An annoying issue that seems to pop up on all music searches is the lack of an artist ID. This causes confusion when you see a new album by an artist only to see that it's from another group with the same name. Spotify isn't immune to this problem and related problems (Cream, MT, Beethoven or Ludwig van Beethoven) but they do a good job (Nirvana vs Nirvana) of fixing it when it happens.

Listings

• For each artist, all of the albums and tracks are listed on one enormous page which isn't a problem for more recent artists... but when you start playing artists from before 1970 it can become a pain to keep scrolling through giant lists of compilation albums (Ray Charles, Elvis, Mozart). Shortcuts/filters are going to be needed here to go through so much data.

On Demand

• The ability to play any song on demand is how I use Rhapsody the majority of the time.  Spotify kind of allows this but has no instant queue meaning if I just want to listen to three songs, I have to create a playlist first (not convenient). I say kind of because there is a "Play queue" that you can drag songs into but if you start playing an album directly, then all of the songs in the album get added to the queue.  It feels like it tries to figure out your queue based on context but if you can't clear the queue and it ends up being rather awkward.

Rating System

• Ratings are kept simple, similar to Last.fm. You give stars to songs that you like. There is no banning tracks like Last.fm allows for in the radio station. There isn't the overly complex rating system of Rhapsody. The KISS principle rules here and for much of the UI.

Radio Station

•  The UI for the customizing the radio is one of the nicest around. You can choose the artist radio which plays music similar to that artist or you can choose a custom radio based on any combination of genre/time period (e.g. Funk/Techno/1990's or Heavy Metal/Hip-Hop/1970's/1980's).  The only missing hole here is deeper level genres and allowing users to save radio presets so as to not manually re-enter different radio station settings.

- MT