Spotify – Free Streaming Music in Sweden

2012-03-12. Published in Life in Gothenburg
by Nina


Oh. My. God:  Spotify.

If there is one thing, hands down, that I could pick that ROCKS about living in Sweden, it's this website. For weeks, I was encouraged by my Swedish family and friends to visit the site and see what the ruckus was about, but for some reason, I didn't bother to until about two weeks in (I had other things to do: bank account, personnummer, you know...) But man, when I finally did--it's like someone turned the light on for me for how truly good life could be.

Spotify, for those of you coming as international visitors, is an amazing website/software program that allows you free and unlimited access to archives and archives of music. It's basically a free and constantly updating iTunes. Picture Grooveshark and Pandora mixed together, and sprinkled with a heavy dose of FREE. You can literally search and listen for whole albums, entire artist discographies, and create playlists of individual songs that you can access from any computer via your login that has the software. Oh, and did I mention it costs nothing?

At first, I couldn't believe it. So I did a test search: I wanted to find the music from my favorite artist, Andrew Bird. Not only did I find his most recent albums, but I found albums of his from when he was training in classical violin! I didn't even know you could find those albums. I then searched some older artists like Nina Simone and Patsy Cline; found them, too. Spotify has a serious collection: 10 million songs, apparently...



For the small price of a couple Swedish commercials, you can have unlimited access to music that you can arrange how you want, listen to as many times as you want, and share with as many people as you want! Spotify has a feature where you can either send people songs, entire albums, or specialized playlists. You can even make collaborative playlists between friends that updates everywhere whenever you add to your own playlist. It’s freaking brilliant. And you can only get a username and password here, with an Swedish IP address. And, I know this from experience, even in other countries, you can continue to access your Spotify account anywhere you are…once you’ve got one. :)

If you want more information on the features of this demi-god software, you can find it here: http://www.spotify.com/se/about/features/. You can also pay a small fee and have Spotify on your smartphone with unlimited access and no commercials. All of this you can research yourself on their very comprehensive and approachable website.

/Nina, Misi.se team 2010-2011



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