Recently Virgin mobile released a plan with Spotify to give you more access to the music you want, when you want. The Spotify subscription includes other mobile features such as data and call, but obviously the main attraction is the built in use of Spotify’s premium features.

The biggest and most well-known feature of Spotify premium is to access all the available music on the go, straight from your smartphone, and today we’ll be looking at what the Spotify Android app has to offer.

The Spotify Android app gives us quick access to more than a life time’s worth of music, no matter the genre. The application has been designed with simplicity in mind, and it’s clear that this design has stayed true throughout the application.

The front page gives us access to the most popular new releases, as well as downloadable playlists created by our Facebook friends, as well as their most listened tracks. You’ll also see your listened music posted to facebook, making it extremely easy to share new sounds through your social sites.

If you’re looking for a certain artist or album, the search engine can help you to pinpoint exactly who you’re looking for. The search will look through song, album and artist names, but for those looking for a certain genre of music, the search bar is a little lacking, and you’ll find search results based on the title information.

The radio station helps to remedy the above problem though, by allowing you to search for stations dedicated to certain genres, or an artist’s name, a station will be created with songs matching the genre of the information you’ve provided. The radio station feature is very similar to the workings of Last.fm, and to integrate them both into a music experience on the go, you can collect your scrobbling information straight from your last.fm profile to use in Spotify radio.

If you can’t access the internet whilst out and about, Spotify mobile allows you to download playlists straight to your smartphone. Whilst browsing music you can long press a song to access options such as ‘share’ ‘add to’ and ‘star’ to make finding your favorite music easier later on, but most useful is adding your music to playlists, allowing you to download almost every song you could need to listen when offline.

Spotify is all about giving the user control over what they listen to and how, and the Spotify app for Android follows suit. You have control of audio quality, crossfading, radio stations, playlists and a whole lot more. Spotify has really strived to make listening to music a much simpler experience, and although there is a price to pay for premium services, it is very much worth it.

Download Spotify from the Google Play store here.

Please visit http://www.virginmobile.com/vm/home.do for mobile deals.

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While this could be considered a “major win” for the music industry, I think it becomes a scary reminder of what the Internet has become. It used to be that we could access whatever site we wanted, naturally at our own risk and discretion, but court orders like this are indicative of what we may have to expect moving forward.

We make our jokes about the Great Firewall of China, but it’s not just China where sites are being blocked. Among the ISPs in the UK forced to block The Pirate Bay are Sky, O2, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, and–ironically enough–Everything Everwhere. They may have to change their names to Some of the Stuff in Select Locations.

Of course, there are ways to circumvent this block, like using proxies, but that’s up to you.

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