First launched in 2008, Spotify is a digital music streaming service with a freemium business model. You can listen to a huge library of music and podcasts for no charge if you are prepared to have shuffle play (with limited skips), interrupted listening and lower audio bitrate. Alternatively, there’s the option of Spotify Premium. In the UK, a subscription costs £9.99 per month for an individual account. This gives you streaming music at 320 kbps, the ability to download music, and full functionality.
Spotify provide a semi-official app for the service which uses Chromium Embedded Framework (think bloated memory footprint). But third-party clients are available for Spotify Premium users. Spotify blocks API access to their audio for non-premium members.
This article recommends our favourite GUI Spotify clients. Here’s our verdict summarized in a legendary Linuxlinks-style chart.
| GUI Spotify Clients | |
|---|---|
| spotify-qt | Billed as a lightweight Spotify client using Qt |
| Spotube | Flutter based lightweight Spotify client |
| Psst | Multi-platform Spotify client with native GUI |
| Spot | GTK/Rust native Spotify client for the GNOME desktop |
These clients require a Spotify Premium account and do not work with free accounts.
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