What is so great about Spotify, the music streaming service. Is it that popular locally?

When it comes to music streaming services, very rarely will the subject be discussed without mentioning Spotify. A lot of people abroad use Spotify for listening to music over the internet and even for offline listening if they pay for it. What surprised me is that we recently asked people why they use Virtual Private Network services like Tunnel bear and some of them mentioned that they use VPNs to access Spotify.

So is Spotify that popular locally?

Before we get to what is so great about Spotify, we need your help with something. Now the problem with answering the question “is Spotify that popular locally?”, is that we simply don’t have the number to reference. Furthermore, if we are talking about the popularity of the app in Zimbabwe, it’s already a different story because not everyone has the data to stream music at all.

Now just because not everyone can buy a data bundle just for Spotify or even decide to use their existing data bundle for the service doesn’t necessarily mean that the app is not being used by people locally. So it might even have a lot of people using it in Zimbabwe. So if you use Spotify, please let us know so that we at least try to take away the guesswork and settle this once and for all. Right, now that you’ve commented (hopefully) whether you use it or not, let’s take a look at what makes Spotify so great if it is…

So is Spotify great?

You might be wondering why I’m even jumping straight to implying that it is great. I mean I could have asked, “What is so good or okay about Spotify?”. Instead, I went with great, let’s look at the numbers. Spotify recently announced that it now has 140 million active users every month and of those 60 million pay for a subscription which is $9.99/month.

Those numbers aren’t any easy feat to achieve for any app yet alone a music streaming service given how there are more options out there. So why are so many people using this music streaming service? Well, it all boils down to one thing that Spotify has nailed on the spot: Music discovery.

Music discovery is what makes Spotify great.

I recently wrote about the different music streaming services that one can use locally. Among the list were two other popular apps: Apple Music and Deezer. When you look at these two and compare them to Spotify, they all pretty much do the exact same things. You can search for a track, listen to it, create playlists, listen to already made playlists and even download for offline listening if you pay for the subscription on each of them.

All that is music discovery. Now the way Spotify does it takes the whole concept up a notch. The whole app is built around making it ridiculously easy for you to discover new music and to rediscover old music. It’s so dead simple that it almost feels natural. That all sounds like a fairy tale so what exactly do I mean.

Most music streaming apps typically show you the different genres, the top hits, new hits, their top picks and a tailored playlist that’s it. For some, that’s just about good enough but for some, that’s not because what if you want to listen to music according to your mood? What if you want to multiple different playlists generated for you? What if you want to listen to what your friends are listening to?

How does it have most of your music discovery needs covered?

Spotify can provide you with all that because they understand you. The app gives you 3 daily playlists tailored just for you from your listening habits. You can discover music based on your mood, for example, they have a chill hits playlist which you could listen to when you just want to relax or tune into a good vibes playlist when you want to get some of those good feelings back in dark times.

It doesn’t end there, if you connect your Spotify to your Facebook account, which the app recommends, you’ll be able to listen to what your friends are listening to if they also use the app. Maybe you’re not the type of person who uses Facebook or you just don’t want to give the app your information, what do you do?

Well, the community around Spotify is so big that you’re almost guaranteed that you can listen to a new playlist every day of the year if you wanted. All of them created by people using the app. If you know the person’s display name, you can search them up quickly and start listening to the playlists they have created. Or you could just jump straight into the discover weekly playlist created by Spotify themselves.

But is music discovery such a big deal?

Yes, it does, the point of using a music streaming service is so that you don’t download the music yourself or so that you don’t spend time looking for what’s currently a big hit or discovering new music. Since music discovery is so important and at the core of music streaming services, the fact that Spotify does it so well makes it great.

It’s quite ingenious how the app is just like every other one out there in terms of functionality but because it focuses on this one thing to provide a great experience, it has become one of the most widely used music streaming services. Everything else that the app provides like great sounding music quality, allowing you to play music from your phone on your laptop and access to old music hits including Zimbabwean ones like Pombi by Bhundu Boys from 1993, all come back to that one big thing: music discovery.

Of course, you cannot find every single Zimbabwean produced music but it does a great job that you might not even notice that lack. If you hadn’t commented down below whether you use Spotify or not, please do. Let us know what you like about it if you do use it? If you don’t, why don’t you use it or do you just not use any streaming services?

Also Read So you love music? Here are 3 apps you can use to stream some beats in Zimbabwe