Spotify, a European company offering streaming online music, finally reached the United States!  Very popular in Europe, Spotify offers a huge listening library of “over fifteen million tracks”.  Listeners can share music and playlists easily.  Spotify works on PCs, MACs, and cellphones, for listening anywhere.  To listen to music on Spotify, one must download a Spotify player, or an app if on the iPhone.  The search capabilityis fairly sophisticated, with the capability of searching for artist, track, album, year, genre, label, irsc, and more.

There are three levels of accounts in Spotify.  The free account allows access to all of the music, and sharing, but there are ads.  The next level, “unlimited”, offers the same as the free account but with no ads.  A “premium account” includes mobile and offline capabilities.

The sharing feature of Spotify is particularly nice.  One can connect a Spotify account to Facebook, and share any tracks that you “like” with all of your Facebook friends.  

For more information see:

CNET’s How-To Tutorials for Spotify
Spotify for Classical Music?  – from NPR
Classical music on Spotify – blog from a Spotify fan
How to Search for classical music on Spotify