What is Spotify?
Spotify (open.spotify.com) is a website where you can listen to music online for free, although it requires creating an account to use. To create an account, it only needs your e-mail (or alternatively your phone number).
Main Features
Search feature: you can search for songs, genres, artists, albums, and playlists on Spotify through its search box.
List-based music player: Spotify's player plays one song right after the other. There's always going to be a list of songs on the screen that will be played. You can also click on a play button to play a specific song, or to start playing an album, or playlist.
Like button and bookmarks: you can like songs on Spotify, although the button looks like a plus symbol for some reason and it stands for "add to liked songs." You can also save song to your library.
User playlists: you can create playlists of your favorite songs, or songs that you want to play at a certain event, e.g. if you're a DJ. You can also search for public playlists other users have made.
Algorithmic lists: Spotify can generate playlists of genres you search for, e.g. if you search for "instrumental metal," Spotify will include in the playlist results an "Instrumental Metal" playlist made "by Spotify" instead of by an user.
Artist profiles: Spotify has profiles for artists on the platform, which can include information about who they are, what they look like in person, and how popular they are.
Lyrics: Spotify has lyrics for some songs. You can see them clicking on a button at the bottom-right of the screen.
Podcasts: Spotify also has podcasts besides music.
Monetization
Spotify has ads that play between songs sometimes. You can actually play a lot of songs between the ads, but the ads are long.
Spotify Premium is a subscription that removes the ads. It also includes other features not available for free users, such as deciding the order the songs play, high quality audio, and even downloading the songs to play offline1. Wait, what? It allows you to actually download the song files? That's kind of amazing, to be honest!
Upon further investigation, you can not actually download MP3 files or other song files from Spotify, even if you pay for Spotify Premium. It's technically true that you can download and play the songs offline, in case your Internet is down, but the downloaded songs are only playable in desktop or mobile Spotify client. You can't just load them into Winamp or your music player of choice, and you can't burn them into a music CD either.
Spotify premium allows you to download playlists for offline usage inside the Spotify client. This means you will be able to listen to tracks when you don't have an internet connection.
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You can't however take those tracks (or any Spotify content) outside of the Spotify client for use in another program as you do not own the tracks.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Have-premium-membership-how-do-I-download-music/td-p/273758 (accessed 2024-04-17).
References
- https://www.spotify.com/us/premium/ (accessed 2024-04-17). ↩︎
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