Listen to music for free with Spotify

Load a web browser, type www.spotify.com into the Address or Location bar at the top and then press Return. When the website loads, click the Download button, beneath the green ‘Free’ image. Fill in the form on the next page, put a tick in the box to accept the user agreement and then click the ‘Create account and proceed’ button. At the next screen, click the Download now button and then, when Windows displays a security warning, click the Run button.

If you’re using Internet Explorer and it displays another warning, ignore that and click Run again and then follow the instructions to install the Spotify software (you need this to access the site, save playlists and so on). After it’s installed, the program loads and asks for the user name and password created in the previous step. Type these in and then put a tick in the Remember me box. Then click Sign in to start. After a moment, Spotify displays a welcome screen. Just click the Close button to continue.

Here’s the main Spotify window. We can see a selection of new albums, suggestions for artists that newcomers might enjoy as well as play controls down at the bottom left, a sliding volume control, buttons for shuffling and looping playlists (currently greyed out) as well as a panel of commands at the top-left and a typical Windows-style menu along the top. Let’s start straight away by clicking on the new Lily Allen album.

The windows changes to display the full album with each track laid out in a list in the correct running order with timings and room for a popularity rating (because the album was so new when we wrote this there aren’t any marks here). The progress bar along the bottom of the screen tells us how far through the first track we are and if we want to skip to another track we can use the next track button or simply double-click any of the other songs on the track list.

Leave the music playing and click the Home button at the top left to return to the front page. Then, click the Top lists tab at the top of the main window. This shifts the view and displays those albums and tracks that other Spotify users are enjoying the most. By default, the site lists the preferences of all Spotify users, but by clicking the ‘everywhere’ tabs it’s possible to choose another of the areas where the service is available, like France or Germany.

Spotify can be used like a radio. Click the Radio button at the top-left and then use the arrow sliders at the top of the screen to choose a decade (or more than one) and then click one or more of the genres below to refine the kind of music you want to hear. Here for example, we’ve selected the 80s and clicked on Pop and New Wave to see if we can track down a few old favourites. Spotify displays the radio playlist along the bottom, and clicking the play button gets everything going.

Listening to all this New Wave is bringing back memories (and some of them are even pleasant) so we’ve now typed the name of a particular song ­ Ghosts ­ into the search box at the top-left and hit Return. Spotify goes off and finds all of the tracks, artists and albums that include the word ‘ghosts’ and displays them in the middle of the screen. Scrolling down the list reveals the one we’re after ­ by David Sylvian. Double-clicking it starts playback.

Found a song but don’t want to listen to it right now? Just right-click on it and choose Queue from the pop-up menu to add it to a temporary list of songs that are queued up, ready to play. Here we’ve gone off exploring and found a few folkie-type songs we haven’t heard in a while, added them to the queue in turn and then clicked the Play queue button. Note that the earlier search results for ‘ghosts’ stays behind the newly-queued songs so it’s easy to return to them.

Occasionally, the music will be interrupted by an advert but when it’s finished, the music just starts up again, so it’s really not very intrusive. It’s also easy to create playlists by clicking on the New playlist button. Here we’ve created one called ‘The girls’. Then, we searched for Shawn Colvin, a favourite singer and opened her latest album by clicking on it once in the results list (notice that some albums include reviews). To add the entire album to the playlist, right-click on the title and choose Send to and then The girls.

Here we’ve continued adding tracks to the playlist in the same way and then clicked on it to display them all. Spotify makes it easy to re-order tracks and although it initially presents the playlist album by album, it’s simple to click the Track column heading once to sort the playlist into a more random order. Once a playlist has been saved, it can be added to, edited and ­ as we’ll see in a moment ­ shared with others.

Before we do though, let’s look at searching again because along with finding individual words, Spotify can recognise whole song and album titles to narrow a search down to exactly the right album or track. It’s also possible to find specific genres by typing, for example, ‘genre:pop’ into the search box and you can also limit searches to a specific year or years by typing something like ‘year:1979-1981’ and pressing Return to find only those tracks released in those particular years.

Meanwhile, back at the playlist, let’s have a look at Spotify’s sharing features. At a basic level this allows anyone to create a playlist as we’ve done and then pass it on via email to any other Spotify user so that they can also enjoy it. However, it’s also possible to share synchronised playlists with others so that anyone who shares the list can update it and everyone’s kept in synch. Right-click on the playlist and choose Collaborative Playlist.

The playlist changes colour to reflect the fact that it’s now ‘collaborative’. Launch your email program (typically Outlook) and write a message to a friend. Then, click once on the playlist name and still holding down the left mouse button, drag it into the body of the email message and send it. When it arrives at the other end, the recipient simply clicks on the link. If they’re not already a Spotify user they’ll get a chance to sign up, otherwise, they just click the big button shown here.

And here’s the playlist we created running on a second PC ­ we’ve chosen one running Windows Vista so you can see it’s a different machine. If the person running this Spotify account adds more songs to the playlist, it will automatically update the original version, thus keeping both collaborative playlists up to date. Spotify is one of the most exciting new music tools around and we encourage you to explore it for yourself to find out why.