Half getting Spotify

Some related artists, earlier

I can't justify paying £10 a month for Spotify, the music streaming service, but I have dabbled with the free version, and now that it is possible, for instance, to specify that you want to play the tracks of a specific album in the mobile version (even if it has to be shuffled), I am finally starting to get the point of Spotify. Of course, it's useless for all my 70s concept prog rock albums, which have to be played in the correct track order, or Rick Wakeman comes round and duffs you up. But for a lot of others, shuffle is just fine.

However I do still have a bit of a problem with the streaming service (over and above the feeble royalty payments they make to the performers). The thing is, when I want music at the moment I typically go to my iTunes library and flick through it and I'm looking at stuff I know and love - I can browse it sensibly. But Spotify is too big to browse in an undirected fashion.

I find myself staring at the interface thinking 'I can play almost anything. What should I choose?' And I don't know where to start. If you go into Browse, it really doesn't help. I know I can, for instance, go into Pink Floyd and choose 'Related Artists'... and use that kind of mechanism to navigate through stuff I might like... but even so, it's hard work.

So much though I find the concept appealing, I think I'm still mostly stuck in old fogy iTunes land.

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