This means no more VPNs and APKs and repeated logins every 15 days to get to your precious playlists. Yes, we already have plenty of streaming sites and apps for music, but Spotify deserves a warm welcome for its massive library, useful features, and general aesthetic as well.

With a web player, and desktop and mobile apps, you can use Spotify across all sorts of devices. While the free version works fine for most of us, there is also the ad-free Spotify Premium which lets you download music. However, after the free trial, Premium comes at a price – which ranges from INR 13 for a day to INR 1,189 for a year.

Why Should You Get Spotify?

Firstly, for its sheer variety of playlists. Spotify divides music broadly into genres and “moods”. So basics like Pop, travel-themed, international and regional artists, and decade or year-based playlists are covered. But Spotify can cater to more particular life events too. Having a tough Monday? They have a playlist simply titled I Hate My Job. Going through labour? They recommend: Keep On Pushing. And the playlists just get more specific. If you like your classical and celestial stuff paired together, there’s Space Themed Classical Music or if you want your folk tunes to be in sync with the 21st century, sample Queer As Folk. You get the drift.

There is also an entire section dedicated to podcasts, audiobooks, recordings and other spoken word tracks (available on the global version as the Word genre). You can spend hours digging up gold with the likes of Hipster’s Guide to Poetry, Radio Crime Dramas, and Women of Comedy. There are also region-specific literature and language guides. Imagine getting a primer on Russian lit or learning how to say your numbers in Chinese on a long boring drive. Now login and do exactly that.

Of course, Spotify also has a “social” side like everything else now. You can create and follow public playlists and see (and judge) what your friends are listening to, but also keep your activity hidden with the Private Listening feature. You can even share tracks on your Instagram stories to show all your followers who has the best music preferences in town. And if you grow to be a true fan, you can even wake up to Spotify by connecting it to alarm apps.

So it is not hard to see why Spotify is fun. It enjoys a strong reputation as a great platform for discovering brilliant artists. And the Top Picks and recommendations just keep getting better as you spend more time playing your favourites.

Plus, they've already scored one million unique users in the country within a week so there's gotta be something there, yes?

It’s That Perfect, Huh?

Not yet. If you put on the ‘80s Jam Sessions playlist, you will find the song “Saturday Love” (so important for remembering the days of the week) missing. This is because Spotify is still figuring out licenses, and its current tussle with Warner has rendered chunks of the music library unavailable for Indian users. This includes tracks by major artists like Ed Sheeran and Bruno Mars.

Even on the domestic front, Spotify will need to expand its collections significantly before it can fairly represent the diversity of music from India. We appreciate the new categories (e.g. the Tamil and Telugu playlists, and that one called Gedi Da Tashn), but there is still a lot to wish for.

Moreover, other music apps will still hold their ground with their characteristic content. Spotify cannot replace the Hindi horror stories produced by Gaana or the lilting girl-next-door covers on SoundCloud right away.

But there is definitely enough to get started with. So go pump up those jams now.

Get it here.