Tuesday, February 23, 2016

First Impressions: Spotify

When Spotfy first launched in Malaysia, what really caught our attention was that it had rather a reasonable subscription plan. We signed up for the free account to give it a go, downloaded the app, and during lunchtime we realised we still preferred having the actual songs on our iPhone rather than stream it, for two reasons: we have limited data, and our battery takes a bigger hit.

A monthly data plan of 2GB doesn't really inspire confidence in us continually streaming music wherever we go, plus honestly data coverage isn't necessary great everywhere we are. Also, we can't plug in a pair of earphones and disconnect while in the office as we never know when someone may be calling us from across the room.

And so we made do with just a basic account, until the other day Spotify sent us an email with an offer for a Premium account subscription at RM2 per month, for three months.

Okay...that's tempting.

And so we decide, why not. And because we're trying, we tried to make an effort to use Spotify more, not only on our iPhone but also the PC version.

And now after 2 months, how do we find it? Well, while we do use it more than we did with a Basic account, but we're still using it less than we ought to. Mainly streaming music at work at very low volumes (unless no one else is in, like on the third day of Chinese New Year where we blasted the Opera radio throughout the day) through connected speakers, and on the classical/opera/instrumental genres (can't be blasting Combichrist's "What The F* Is Wrong With You?" now...).

Spotify's auto party playlists were great and came in handy during the New Year Eve's party and other meetups (and come to think of it why didn't we just let one of the easy listening playlists run at night when we're chilling in bed...).

We're also just realising we can use Spotify to preview albums to decide if their worth getting, especially since the last couple of albums we've preordered turned out to be...well, not that exciting.

Sure, there's loads of Spotify functionality we've yet to try out - discovering new music via their recommendations, the different radio stations...probably the only one we won't use is the Run function.

Our three months promo will be up by next month and we think we'll hold off continuing our Premium subscription for now...because there's Apple Music to also try out.

After that...see how.

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