I have been using Spotify for quite a while, I got an invitation back in October of 2008. At first, I was very happy. The promise of cloud computing seemed to come to life, I had access to all the music I could ever hope to listen to. But gradually the service started degrading. Finally, last month I had enough and canceled my premium subscription and moved to grooveshark.

The thing that I liked most about Spotify in the beginning was the ability to easily access any music I wanted at a particular moment. If I was feeling indecisive, I could always choose a top-list and listen to that. Slowly the country restrictions started rolling in. At one moment I remember closing Spotify with an artist’s listing open. When I opened Spotify the following morning, all but one album had disappeared from the list.

To make matters worse, top lists would show all songs that I couldn’t listen to in pink. The real problem was, however, that the songs that weren’t allowed to be played in Finland seemed to be chosen arbitrarily from different versions of a song. For instance, if I clicked on an artist’s name in the list, I could choose another version of the song to listen to without problems.

So, not only did not Spotify’s country restrictions not work, but they also made my experience worse.

This fall I was happy that Spotify released an Android app, I immediately purchased Spotify premium to try it out. The first big hurdle was that the Spotify app wasn’t anywhere to be found in the Android market. As it turned out, Finland didn’t have, and still doesn’t have,  an official Android Market. This isn’t in any way Spotify’s fault, it’s Google being slow in realizing that the world extends beyond the United States.

Sorry, got a bit sidetracked there. Anyway, the Android app was alright, but not really worth the 10€ a month it cost. The offline playlists were a welcome addition, as I often listen to music while bicycling and at times I’m not within HSPA coverage. The app was a bit buggy, stopping between tracks until the app was taken to the foreground again. This made it impractical while doing anything else since I had to take out the phone every once and again to resume the music.

When I decided that the Android app wasn’t worth paying for, I canceled my Spotify premium subscription. To my horror, I found out that during the two months I had been premium the amount of ads had exploded. Not only had the banners grown larger and more obnoxious, but the audio ads had introduced a bug that caused the next song to start from the time that the previous song had ended on. This meant that if I listened to a long song, Spotify would skip through half of my playlist until it started a commercial.

I finally had enough and decided to check out Grooveshark, a service I’d used on occasion before. The interface had gotten a radical improvement since my last try and I really liked it.

If you clicked the Grooveshark link, you probably already noticed the first advantage that Grooveshark holds against Spotify: a web-based interface. Now I could listen to my playlists anywhere, without having to install any software.

The player interface on Grooveshark is different than on Spotify. When searching for songs you can click on any song to start playing it. But instead of continuing with the next song in the list, you can drag and drop songs into the play queue on the bottom of the screen. The queue remains there across searches and is in my opinion a very nice way to organize my listening. When I’m satisfied with a queue, I can save it as a playlist.

Even better, if you get tired of selecting songs for your self, you can press the “radio” button and let Grooveshark continue your list with similar music. You can then like/dislike the suggested songs to teach Grooveshark what you like.

Grooveshark also released an Android application recently. But as this post is starting to get way too long already, I’ll do another post about that shortly. Stay tuned.