For those who don’t wish to read the rest of this review and just need a simple opinion, we’ll put it up here first: Spotify will change the face of the modern music and it’s the most important thing you’ll download this year. Now read on!

Spotify is essentially a frontend for an online music streaming service, and if you’ve enjoyed using sites like last.fm or listening to internet radio then you’ll be instantly familiar with the idea. If not, you may just be won over by Spotify. The program runs on Windows and is currently only available in a select number of countries due to the complicated process of working out licensing deals across borders. This list currently includes most of Europe but not the US.

If you happen to be lucky enough to live in the country that does support the program, you’ll have access to literally hundreds of thousands of albums from just about every type of music available from soft rock to death metal. Despite having an already immense collection that will put any jukebox to shame, the Spotify team are adding a huge amount of content – singles and albums included – every single day.

The programs interface isn’t perfect, it doesn’t look particularly attractive and it’s certainly more bulky than it needs to be, but it functions well enough and you get used to its many quirks. You can access music through either searching directly or using the ‘radio’ function to play music from a specific year or genre. The radio function is alright but it doesn’t really set Spotify apart from a service like Last.Fm, and isn’t much good at recommendation either.

However, if you know what you’re looking for Spotify works a treat, and allows you to do all number of searches for title, album, year and even record label. An impressive amount of big names have already signed up to Spotify although only a few use the service to promote their newest albums and many don’t have a full library available. A very select few brand new releases are only available to subscribers paying around £10 for the service.

The catch with the program is that the free service has adverts throughout, including banner ads and voice ads. The voice adverts are obviously the most annoying and do ruin the immersion a little bit, but honestly, they are more than worth putting up with for free music and you can remove them completely for only a tenner a month – not bad for access to millions of songs.