I had heard of Spotify some months ago but it had washed over me. I only took serious notice of it when I read an Economist article about it and I have become an instant convert.

For those of you who don’t know, Spotify is Yet Another Music Download Service. As far as I am concerned the main difference between it and the others, is that it is legal and it works. I registered with the site, downloaded the application and started listening to music. On my Mac, the application works really well so I would expect the Windows version to work as well — if not better. The search feature works well and it has all the usual playlist features but you can set up a queue of the tracks you wanted played. I find this really useful as I can set up my play queue for what I want in the next hour or so and the application just plays it for me — something you cannot do in iTunes without creating a custom playlist.

The Spotify music library is also very good. Apart from the usual suspects being missing (no Led Zeppelin which took an age to come to iTunes) I found plenty to listen to. I did end up using it rather like Friends Reunited — looking up music I had listened to at school like To Our Children’s Children’s Children and Close to The Edge. (I should point out I listened to these at school but they were released much earlier — I am not quite that old). I also managed to reappraise Goldie (it didn’t take long) and introduce my children to odd novelties of my youth such as The Laughing Gnome, Doctorin’ the Tardis and Star Trekkin.Not bought the premium edition — I can put up with the adverts. You can pay 99p to get an advert free day or £9.99 for the month

The question is whether Spotify can make music downloads work? After all there were MP3 players before the iPod and there are other music download services. In same way as the tell tale white headphone cables started appearing around the place, I keep seeing Spotify.  On a recent holiday, the hotel bar was using it to (illegally) play music and many people said they were using it at home. Spotify really could be the application that converts other people.

What will make the difference for me is the iPhone app. The idea of being able to go to the kitchen, put my iPhone in the dock and listen to whatever I want is really compelling. There is music I have not listened to since I was at school and I may never listen to it again (Sabbath Bloody Sabbath) but the ability to easily pull it up on demand is truly compelling.