For the longest time, I’ve been wondering if Canada was ever going to get Spotify. It felt like it was this huge deal everywhere else, but for one reason or another (dealing with regulatory and industry types I suspect), not here. That is, until today.
Spotify is pleased to announce that it is officially live in Canada — on mobile, tablet and desktop.
“Spotify is launching in Canada with a comprehensive catalogue featuring the best local music from every genre, region and generation,” said Ken Parks, Chief Content Officer, Spotify. “This is a Spotify that has been tailor made for Canadian music fans.”
Starting today fans have immediate access to:
*An unbeatable music experience: listen to whatever music you want, whenever you want, on any device. Discover, organise and share. Offering amazing audio quality of up to 320kbps and with a sleek design, playing your favourite music never looked and felt this good.
*Unrivalled music access: over 20 million songs at your fingertips and updated daily, mixing global hits with one of the most extensive Canadian music catalogues available including a comprehensive Quebecois library. Check out music from your friends and favourite celebrities. Add in our unbeatable music discovery and organisation tools and Spotify has all your music needs covered.
*Play your way: Download the Spotify app and listen to any song, album or artist, on any device on our fully licensed free tier. Shuffle play on mobile or play any song on tablet or desktop. Alternatively, upgrade to Spotify Premium for $10 per month and enjoy the ultimate music experience: download and listen to you music offline, fully on-demand, without ads, in highest quality audio.
If the downloadable offline music isn’t DRM’d to death and there are no hidden limits to how much you can grab in a month, that’s a hell of a deal and definitely something I’m going to have to seriously think about signing up for. I like the streaming aspect of things, but I’m still old school enough to want my music with me, even if it’s in digital form. What good are all my songs if the net’s down, right?
Man, I sure hope this thing is Voiceover accessible.
And while we’re talking music services, I’ve been meaning to throw a reccomendation in the direction of Songza.
Between the artist search and the activity/mood music chooser thing that I think they call Concierge, it’ll almost never let you down with its song choices. And if you do happen to passionately love or hate a selection, there are thumbs up and down buttons for you to make use of. the service claims to learn from this feedback, but honestly I’ve never had to worry about it. I can only think of one time when I stumbled into a terrible playlist, and then all I had to do was start again with something different and I was off to the races. I’ve been using it for a few months now and when I say use, I mean I use it quite a bit. While I’m doing things around the house, while I’m writing or while enjoying the sun. So one bad pick is pretty swell, I figure.
The free version is ad-supported, but awesomely, those ads don’t get in the way of the music. They’re text and image ads off to the side, not audio ones.
And yes, it does the Voiceover thing pretty well. There are a couple of tiny things they could maybe improve, but they’re mostly just labeling issues that aren’t so horrible that you can’t figure them out with a bit of button mashing.
You should give it a try when you’re done messing with our country’s shiny new Spotify.