Spotify is an online music service with a slick Mac client. I had a coworker briefly show me the Windows client over the summer, and I can’t figure out why I wasn’t more impressed then. It has a dead simple, iTunes-like interface: search for songs, queue them up and they play immediately.
The “Artist radio” feature is promising, but limited to songs by (manually?) pre-selected, related artists. The other radio feature only lets you pick decades and genres. Spotify could really use a sprinkle of some of that Music Genome magic that Pandora uses. Browsing the music catalog, they show you exactly the information you want, and don’t skimp on listing full discography on one page, which is pretty cool. Though, if only the play queue and history persisted across app restarts…
What I really appreciate is that it feels like care was taken in the design of the app. While it’s nice to read that Spotify does aggressive caching on the client and uses P2P distribution, it’s a completely different, blown-away feeling when it actually works smoothly and nearly instantaneously. (Okay, granted, music is relatively low bit rate.) The UI is equally slick: “Top 10” lists are presented as a gridview with the top 3 items showing album art, a song’s popularity is always shown next to a song, there’s song de-duplication in search results and everything (searches, albums, artists, songs) can be grabbed as a link.