Thicker, with less Jony Ive Special Preciousness, but a Shuffle just the same.įor now, the Mighty remains intentionally simple: You can play your Spotify playlists, and nothing more.

You can get the final version in black with blue accents, white with black, or orange with white. So it quibbled with Mighty's first design-a small square with six buttons on the front, a headphone jack up top, and a clip covering the back-because it splashed Spotify's signature shade of green around the buttons. But Spotify has no interest in building hardware, or letting someone make something that looks like an Official Spotify Music Player.

It helps that Spotify and Mighty want essentially the same thing: more people paying for Spotify Premium, which you need to use Mighty. The company finally fulfilled the last of its preorders last month, and starting today, you can buy a Mighty all your own for $85. Worked with Spotify on a new certification program, then spent months waiting for Spotify to negotiate terms with the record labels. Built the requisite iOS and Android apps. Figured out how to build and ship them in big numbers. People started wondering if Mighty was just another Kickstarter, a cool idea that went nowhere. Tech writers went bananas over the Mighty, and more 9,000 people dropped $70 or so to pre-order one.īut then. Mendelson raised a bit more than $595,000 from Kickstarter and Indiegogo 1. Mendelson envisioned it as a workout companion, a way of letting people run and hike and Soulcycle without lugging their phone around. At its most basic, Mighty is an iPod Shuffle for Spotify. So you can understand why Anthony Mendelson, a Google engineer turned winemaker, felt nervous launching the Kickstarter for Mighty last year. But when was the last time you ripped a CD, or dropped 15 bucks on an album? Even the idea of choosing 5,000 songs to carry with you and plugging something into a computer to load them seems like an ancient ritual. OK, maybe you have some Baby Driver-induced nostalgia for an iPod. Just up and drove a stake through its silicon heart as listeners traded 99-cent song downloads for $10 monthly subscriptions to all-you-can-listen services. Streaming killed the music gadget years ago.

Spotify ipod