Spotify is a new, on-demand music service that simply allows you to choose individual songs to stream from a library of 15 million songs. With its sleek design and ample song choices, it’s taking the market by storm. The service became extremely popular in Europe and is making its way to the top in the U.S. with 70,000 paying subscribers in just its first week. Spotify is very similar to the U.S. subscription service Rhapsody – which I happen to use. It’s been around for about ten years and has 800,000 users.

Spotify offers three different versions. There is an invitation-only, free service (which I’m also checking out at the moment) that allows the listener to have instant access to millions of tracks. You can have unlimited music for six months and you can play the songs as many times as you want, unlike many other online music services. The next tier is the unlimited service that costs $4.99 a month. This service allows the listener to opt out of the advertisements, but they will have to upgrade to the premium service if they want to access their library on a mobile device. This option costs $9.99 a month.

They have also added an ‘artist radio’ option. This is pretty similar to Pandora, but it lacks Pandora’s variety. With Spotify’s artist radio tab, you can see which related artists will play on the station you’ve created. When the station starts, it will play a couple of songs by the artist you chose and then it will rotate between related artists. There is no way to ‘like’ a certain song so the station learns what songs you like and dislike. There is also no way to add different artists to your station once you’ve created it, so your variety of song choices is definitely limited with Spotify’s artist radio. But this is the main similarity between Spotify and Pandora. They are actually quite different. Both Pandora and Spotify are vying for the same thing: to be the preferred online music service. Spotify is different in the sense that it’s more MP3-oriented. You can also listen to full albums, create playlists and share them on Facebook. Pandora is for people that just want to put on the radio and let it roll. If you’d like more control, I’d say Spotify is the service for you.

Mallorie McRea is Traffic Manager at The Radio Agency. Please follow The Radio Agency’s Blog “Sounding Board” by subscribing to the RSS link above. Visit our website TheRadioAgency.com