Family Fun with Spotify

Last week the family and I took a Texas vacation (aren’t those the best) in which we visited Dallas for a couple of nights, spent a week on Surfside Beach, and then trolled through Austin for a night before returning home.  All the travel made for 20+ hours of being in the car.  Have I mentioned we have 3 kids?  To top it all off the DVD player we’ve used for 9 years in the car finally breathed it’s last breathe last month.  How did we survive?  Besides the sharing of two Nintendo DS’s, we used Spotify.

I’m going to hope that you’ve spent time reading online about the greatness of Spotify.  It’s basically a music service that puts the value on accessibility of music over the ownership of music.  Simply put, you listen to whatever you want whenever you want.  For $9.99/a month you get the music on your iPhone.  After purchasing a iPod compatible stereo in the car this year, we had a Spotify car-trip for vacation.  Besides introducing my kids to tons of music they’ve never heard, we made up a few games too.

• We started a Summer 2011 playlist.  (You can go listen to it HERE.)  Throughout all our travels the kids and parents, could choose to add a song we liked to the “Official Summer Playlist.”  If you got look at the playlist, you’ll see the absurdity of the collection.  It’s truly a Cliff family invention.
• We played a bunch of “name that movie” games with movie songs.  The kids thought this was a blast, and were pretty good at naming the movies the music came from.  Probably the most fun thing we did in the car with Spotify.
• Starr and I played a game where one of us chooses a song, then the next song has to be related in some way to the song just played.  It could be a shared word in the title, or same state mentioned in the lyrics, or anything else debatable that connects the two songs.

If you aren’t yet a user of Spotify, then go check it out today.  And make the investment  to hear the music in your car!  It’s changing family road trips for the better!