Spotify vs. Zune Pass
Well, I’ve finally come across a product that I may decide to purchase instead of a Microsoft product. Spotify has spread across the virtual world like a wild fire with shared songs on Facebook and a mobile app for iOS, Android, and even Windows Phone. It offers basically the same thing Zune Pass offers, except with less expensive versions. For free, you can listen to 20 hours of music per month on your computer. For $4.99, you can listen to unlimited music on your computer with no visual ads along the sides of the program. For $9.99, they offer the option of “offline mode” (called “downloading” in Zune Pass). It saves the song to your computer or mobile device for listening while not connected to the Internet. The song selection is also quite impressive. I’ve thus far found every song from the Spotify store that’s available on the Zune Marketplace. The only thing that makes this a more desirable service to me is that if I decide I want an iOS device (not likely) or a Mac (extremely unlikely) I can transfer all of my music, where as right now, I must have a Microsoft device to transfer all of my music. Purchasing this service instead of the Zune Pass would render my Zune HD useless, but I could go for an iPod Touch if I can get unlimited downloads like I can with my Zune.
The one downfall is that I would have to use a third-party application, while the Zune software is built into Windows Phone, but with multitasking enabled on Windows Phone, it is no big problem.
