For years I’ve been playing music through YouTube and always wanted a easier way to listen to all my favourite songs on there (besides downloading them because that’s useless whenever you’re using multiple laptops/ computers) and I thought Spotify was the solution to my problem.

Over time I became more and more frustrated with Spotify, mainly because of a couple of reasons:

Advertisements - I hate advertisements and while there’s plenty of people out there who say “Well, if you hate them so much why don’t you pay to upgrade to the Premium version?” and that brings me to point number 2. “Premium” - The only feature of premium which I’d appreciate is no advertisements. It’s true I could do that but do I want to pay £9.99 a month, or basically £120 a year to listen to music? Hell no. Limited music selection - How many times have you went on to Spotify find a song that you recently heard and really liked, only to find out that it doesn’t have it in their library? This has happened plenty of times to me and it’s pretty damn frustrating to say the least.

I only found this chrome extension yesterday on r/startup on Reddit and loved it as soon as I tried it out. I later found that the creator, Sean Anderson (Reddit: MeoMix), had posted on r/music about his chrome extension which goes into great detail about the features of it and what’s planned. If you want to check out the post, just click on the title and it’ll take you there.

Streamus is so simple to use, I can easily search for music like I would using YouTube and then I can either play it straight away, or add it to a playlist. Not only that they offer a radio feature which is really neat because it plays similar music to the music you have been listening to.

Being able to quickly pause and play music by assigning shortcut keys is an absolute life saver! There’s plenty of times I have people coming over to talk to me while I’m listening to music and it’s always a struggle trying to find the tab I have open which is playing the music, now I just press one key to pause and play my music, no matter what I’m doing.

As it currently stands YouTube is the only thing that is supported but for those who use Last.FM and SoundCloud, you’ll be happy to know that both of these are on his TO-DO list.

I’m extremely grateful for this chrome extension. Sean Anderson has quit his job 7 months ago to work on this project which doesn’t seem to be monetised, if anything it looks like he’s keeping it going through donations. I find it strange that he didn’t include that he had a donations page (clicky) in his post and I hope that he gets the credit and money he deserves from such a useful chrome extension.

I know one things for sure, my days of using Spotify are over.