by Jake Espinoza
The Spotify Radio app launched today.
The app gives users the ability to create personalized radio stations based around songs or artists in Spotify’s catalogue of around 15 million songs.
Of course the first thing I did was type in my own name (The Kid Espi), and I was happy to see tracks from KRS-One, Grouch and Eligh, and Sapient come through the play list.
Ken Parks, Chief Content Officer of Spotify, commented: “We can’t wait to hear what our users think of Spotify Radio, which offers unlimited stations and unlimited skips, as it begins rolling out this week. With the help of The Echo Nest’s recommendation wizardry and our multi-million track library, Spotify Radio is now a music discovery experience without equal.”
If you are new to the world of Spotify, it is essentially Netflix for the music world. Users are able to browse and stream music from its vast collection for free. If you’d like to upgrade to the premium service for $9.99 a month, you can bring Spotify with you on your mobile phone.
Artists get paid a (very small) percentage of Spotify’s monthly income based on the number of streams their music receives.
Spotify Radio’s big advantage over Pandora is giving the user to skip through tracks until they find the perfect jam. Pandora currently limits free users to six skips per hour and 12 skips per day.
Pandora also has a much smaller catalog with just over 900,000 tracks.
Being able to ban an artist would make Spotify Radio pretty close to perfect, but being able to skip through endless tracks works well enough. (Hopefully Spotify will add radio to their mobile application soon.)
It’ll be interesting to see what changes Pandora makes in the upcoming months to keep up.
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