We've got Grooveshark and Slacker, and Grooveshark doesn't make you hear any ads even if you don't pay them. The other side of that is you can only use Grooveshark on your phone if you are a paying customer.
Apparently Pandora has good recommendations so I'll give them a try when they come to Canada. As for Spotify, meh. What's so great about them?
They probably don't have infrastructure for that yet and it also might be conscious decision. I've understood that the whole point of Spotify is that it is based on P2P-technology which eases their server load and allows good sound quality for users with fairly low connection speeds.
> and allows good sound quality for users with fairly low connection speeds.
P2P is all about lowering their costs, not about making better sound quality for low connection speeds. It doesn't matter if you're streaming from Spotify's data center or across the street, slow is as slow does. You're not squeezing more bits through a slow connection because of P2P.
You are right, I didn't express myself quite clearly. But if you are in, say, Australia and you're streaming from a server that is in Sweden there is probably some bottleneck along the way that doesn't allow you to get full speed of your connection. But if you're streaming from across the street you probably get more use of your connection. Your connection speed is obviously the upper limit.
I don't know if I expressed myself any more clearly :)
Guess there could be some uses for a web app, but the desktop app is just so much better than any flash/html5 app. Haven't touched itunes after spotify.
I use thesixtyone, earbits, grooveshark, last.fm in the browser and I have no trouble at all. The thing with music apps is that I just choose a playlist/station, hit play and forget. The UI doesn't even matter beyond that.
For a lot of people with that use-case the UI might not matter, but it is not the only use case for a streaming service. From http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/ one can see that almost 40% of tracks played are chosen actively as opposed to just continuing on to the next track.
You can't get the same level of service in a webapp. From technical papers on Spotify, one can see that they get an average of about 250ms to start playing a song, but still their own servers only need to stream about 20% or so IIRC of the total music played.
The client does P2P and local caching for offloading the servers. Apart from the technical issues in doing it browser side (for example, opening TCP connections), I seriously doubt that it could be done with the same level of efficiency.
Same thing here. I don't have any MP3s any longer.
Kindle is doing something similar to my book reading. We ditched all paper books sometime last winter (they're now in the office library), and I'm actually reading a lot more because all my books are with me all the time.
But don't you own those books on your kindle? (Ignoring the arguments about whether you truly own something they can delete remotely, etc.) If you bought them, access didn't replace ownership - it supplemented it.
As long as they have all the weird music I listen to, sure. Is there a way to check their selection without signing up? I don't see any way to check if they have Soul Coughing, Zyklon Boom, Любэ, the original Grand Theft Auto soundtrack, Tub Ring, etc? (These are the first few songs I see in my playlist on my iPhone.)
I'd be pretty pissed if I signed up and got a Top 40's equivalent for my money.
Sadly, there is no way to preview the catalog. I have an account and checked your list, though, because I've not heard of the majority of those and was curious:
Soul Coughing - Y
Zyklon Boom - N
Любэ - N
GTA - Only GTA IV and Vice City
Tub Ring - Y (these guys have a great sound, thanks for the heads up!)
I'm happy they've finally launched the US version. I've been a subscriber since it launched and had a lot of love for it since. I'm curious to how it compares with the other services users get stateside and looking forward to reading some American reviews..
I have been wondering the same thing. Learning about Spotify (and finding out it wasn't available in the US) led me to a paid Rhapsody account. However if the UI is better and selection about the same I'd probably jump in a hearbeat.
Rhapsody used to be quite similar to spotify. Their desktop app let you play free music. But lately they've fallen behind and their player UI hasn't changed much for like 5 years. They don't have a Mac app. But if you use windows, Rhapsody comes close to Spotify in terms of features.
Spotify Premium pricing
UK £9.99
US £6.19 ($9.99, converted using google)
The UK price is over 50% more than the US price. As someone who's been subscribing to Spotify Premium in the UK for over a year, this feels like quite a slap in the face.
Yeah I have noticed that quite a lot, its almost becoming a 1 to 1 transfer rate. I'm going to give up Spotify now for this very reason. Its rather disappointing.
FWIW, I've generally noticed Americans assign about the same value on USD prices < $100. $10 here is worth the same to an American as £10 is to a Brit. $10 isn't worth £6 to them.
This is hard to understand until you've lived in both places.
There isn't much excuse for the very large discrepancy between electronics pricing, however.
Interesting that the price is 4,99 USD, while in Eurozone it's 4,99 EUR. So it's actually cheaper for Americans.
I know it's common for products originating in the USA (games, electronics, etc.) to make the USD -> EUR conversion 1:1 but it's interesting to see it's also done the other way around.
I am not complaining though, Spotify is an awesome service and well worth the money!
edit: Seems there's more people who noticed the same, it's even the same with GBP, which has an even bigger difference than the Euro.
I (and I guess any other EU subscribers) have a number of invitations if anyone here wants to try the Free version before committing to Unlimited. Anyone interested in one?
Edit: can only send if your email address is on your HN profile, of course.
Spotify made me throw away CD-s, delete all mp3s and other audio files and stop being less-than-legal. It'll be interesting to see how big a foothold they get in USA, to me its a truly awesome service and currently on par with vim as the most essential tool on my computer.
The pricing is a lot cheaper than in Norway, but even here I think its cheap ($18 / month for premium) and would gladly have paid four-fold if that was the cost.
Does anyone have a guess as to why they are doing an "invite only" style opening here in the US? I would think with their success abroad, the infrastructure is strong enough to support the added subscribers...
Most of the servers are also located in the UK AFAIK and the first 30 seconds are always streamed from their servers. Managing demand could be a reason.
> Does anyone have a guess as to why they are doing an "invite only" style opening here in the US?
They're not - you can pay for a premium or unlimited subscription right now. I've just purchased one for my brother in NY, so I can share playlists with him from London.
It's not just to create scarcity, but for people who want to try it and aren't creative enough to go find an invite, it probably means higher conversion into paid subscriptions.
I have a whole bunch of invitations - however, I will be leaving town for the weekend and will probably be without internet connection. So if anyone is late on the train but still interested, leave a comment with an email here and I will try to get them to you on monday as I will check the thread as soon as I get back!
I can tell you why I might give up Rdio for Spotify, depending on how this trial goes.
I have been a Rdio subscriber for about 3 months now, and I really only have two complaints. The first is that when I'm listening to Rdio at work (which is where I use the service most often) the stream tends to hang up and/or "stutter", to the point that I eventually get frustrated and turn it off. Now, we have pretty decent bandwidth at work, and other similar services (e.g. Pandora) don't seem to suffer from this problem, so I'm not sure what Rdio's problem is.
The other problem I've observed with Rdio is that a noticeable amount of time passes between the time I press "play" and the music actually starts. This one's not such a big problem, but it is a problem.
So, I've just signed up for a Spotify Unlimited plan and I'm going to see how it stacks up, especially with regards to the aforementioned problems. If it seems to perform more consistently than Rdio has, I'll probably switch.
I'm an Rdio user and I've been trying Spotify today. I'm not thrilled with their music library. There are a bunch of bands that I love that Rdio doesn't have (Arcade Fire, Shins, Ramones, Pink Floyd, older Flogging Molly, newer Eisley, etc.). There are only a few albums that I really want that Rdio doesn't have, by contrast.
I feel like Spotify's UI is just a gray iTunes, whereas Rdio's UI is more in line with how I think about music. The search function in Spotify is really poor compared to Rdio.
Rdio blows away Spotify in terms of the discovery and social aspects. I really like the ability to follow people that have the same tastes as I do. I've found a bunch of new bands that way. With Spotify, you have to find friends on Facebook and Twitter. And no offense to my friends, but I think their taste in music sucks.
It's true that most of the bands you listed were not available a while back, but I believe all of them are available now. We are missing some Pink Floyd though.
I just cancelled my Rdio subscription because of missing artists. There's one really really easy way for you to fix this issue though. Let me manage music that's not in your catalogue so I don't have to pull out iTunes, and so I can mix and match those songs into Rdio playlists.
I'm pretty sure that dstone meant to write that Spotify was missing those bands (e.g. Arcade Fire et al), not Rdio. I've been listening to a good bit of Arcade Fire on Rdio lately, and just confirmed that they aren't available on Spotify.
First thought: How is this any different from Grooveshark (from a user experience perspective - I know Grooveshark doesn't give a shit about artists rights etc).
Edit: So far, search on Spotify is much faster, but the music library is nowhere near as complete... and I like that in Grooveshark when I search for a song I can see other peoples playlists that it shows up in and play those.
"For now, the Radio feature will not be available for U.S. users."
"The radio feature will eventually be available. However, I can't say exactly when that will be. Be reminded, that Spotify is not chiefly a radio service. The lack of a radio feature for the time being is a factor of licensing agreements with the rights holders but it will eventually be available.
So the lack of a radio feature in no way limits your ability to search for and play the song of your choice. Just to be clear, when the time comes, the absence of a radio feature will be available for free as well as Premium users, as it is not typically one of the main benefits of a Premium subscription. "
I don't know much about Grooveshark (or Rdio) but one of the early selling points of Spotify is that it uses P2P - the first minute or so of a song is streamed from their servers but the rest is P2Ped from other users. Which means you very very rarely get buffering (apart from today :-/)
Don't think I've ever experienced buffering with a modern connection on any of the services I've reviewed (MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody, Grooveshark, etc). It's really just a cost saving mechanism for them more than an anti-buffering agent for us.
They care about THEIR artists' rights, and by that I mean that they only care after an artist comes to them and agrees to their license. Until then, they'll play that artist and claim DMCA, even though it should be very straight forward to ensure this music doesn't end up on their platform.
From what I know, music rights are a lot more complicated than you may realize. That's not to say labels shouldn't get compensated, simply that things aren't ever as cut and dry as they may seem.
I've been using Spotify since the UK closed beta (a few years ago, now). At first it seemed like the most amazing thing ever, but slowly I fell out of love with it, and now I barely use it.
Why?
1) The ads. At first they were reasonably infrequent and unobtrusive. But gradually they became more frequent and more and more obtrusive. Eventually some companies were deliberately producing jarring ads to grab your attention.
Many of the ads were for music. Other music: music that I would never listen to and (more importantly) music that was totally incongruous and jarring to the music it was interrupting.
2) Disappearing Music. I created loads of playlists filled with interesting (often independent) new music. Gradually whole playlists disappeared and stopped working. It felt like my music was being stolen. To replace ownership with streaming (at least for the generation that owned CDs) the catalogue needs stability.
3) Missing Music. As usual it's the big, classic stuff. I bought a license for a christmas party at my parents house. The lack of Beatles, Stones, Queen etc caused a near riot. Spotify was booed off.
4) Skype. I don't know why (but I suspect its probably Adobe's fault ;-)) but Skype and Spotify on the PC seem to have a problem with each other. Maybe I'm seeing ghosts here but I frequently have problems with these two apps (and the Chrome Flash plugin). Eventually I had to stop using one or other.
5) The artist payments are miniscule-to-the-point-of-broken. See this:
I realise that the first problem would have been easily fixed by buying Spotify Premium and I was going to do this until my favourite music started to disappear.
Hopefully, the US launch will be enough to persuade the small labels to return to Spotify (maybe they already have?) and with a larger advertising base better ads could be produced and more appropriate targeting of ads could make the advert-laden experience more palatable. Similarly, a US launch may convince the big rock dinosaurs to join. That, at least, would improve next xmas.
Don't get me wrong: Spotify is an amazing thing and has a ton of potential. The US (especially teen US and low-income US) is going to love it. The App is fantastic (kind'a magical when you first see how quickly and easily it plays music).
If you have mainstream, modern taste and can stomach the loud ads you'll get great service for free.
If you're a fussy indie-kid like me who mostly listens to whispering soft audio as you work, you may want to check how many of your favourite obscure artists are onboard before you buy premium.
As for artists - while Spotify is a great innovation and a valuable way to move young people from illegally torrenting to legally streaming music it needs to generate more money for the musicians for it to be truly sustainable.
Edit: To make clear this is a UK account (not a US beta) so the falling-out-of-love took a few years.
I have been using Spotify in the US in closed beta as well for over a month, so just wanted to give my two cents on these points. I will respond in order:
1.The ads on the free plan are obtrusive, but it's free. I didn't find them any more obtrusive than Pandora's ads. That said, I love the service and wanted to take it mobile, so I upgraded to premium, so I'm no longer hearing ads.
2.I didn't experience disappearing playlists. I'm sure this happened to you, just pointing out that it's not a super common occurrence b/c I'm on Spotify hours per day with plenty of playlists and haven't seen the issue.
3. Agreed. I miss my Beatles and Pink Floyd. However, the Stones' library is on there.
4. Again, I'm sure you're seeing this issue, but I use both Skype and Spotify on my PC fairly often and haven't had any issues.
5. In fairness, I'm just interested in a streaming music platform - not starting a movement. There are plenty of inefficiencies in the record label industry, but I'm. Just a startup guy, not an artist so it's not my fight ;-)
One issue I will add is that Spotify stopped streaming on my Droid about two weeks into my premium subscription. However, customer service couldn't have been more responsive and helped me fix the issue pronto.
Sorry, I wasn't clear that that I have a UK account so the disappearances happened over a long period over a year ago.
My bad about The Stones. Maybe they were there that xmas.
I suspect that the issue the small independents have with Spotify is exactly linked to Artists' fees. Selling small amounts of CDs is actually worthwhile for a small artist - being on Spotify isn't.
The "disappearing playlist" the parent refers to is a licensing issue, not a technical one, as far as I could tell. When I was in the UK (now in the US), whole artists catalogs would go missing all at once. I eventually stopped paying for the service because of this (it wiped out about 10% of the content from my playlists).
Hmm. I wonder if they were making money from it indirectly, though. I use Spotify mainly as a try-before-you-buy service, and I wouldn't be suprised if others did too.
2. Probably a month may not be enough to experience the disappearing playlists (actually, that should be called disappearing tracks, as playlists are still there, just tracks are greyed out and you cannot play them anymore). I've got whole disks greyed out from my playlists and created a ticket on getsatisfaction about a year ago. Their answer was that this is not their fault, but the industry's… copyright, etc.
I don't blame them, we know what the industry is like.
3. Beatles not so much for me (I've got their discography on cassette, cd, mp3… so I sync it with spotify), but Metallica… sad but true.
4. Never had a problem with Spotify + Skype, but I would suspect it's Spotify's fault. Why? Because on OSX I use BetterTouchTool and I get this message everytime I resume from sleep: http://cl.ly/1Z1u2n0R3H3o0w27243d ← I believe it could be related.
I don't know why a company hasn't bought up all the ad spots with a short whispered message every ten slots that says "Ad free Spotify... brought to you by AwesomeCorp".
I've thought about bailing out because of this… but they've "promised" that it won't happen again. Still, some things are not available and I'm tired of paying premium for a limited catalog. La Roux suddenly disappeared for no reason even after they promised to behave.
As I think you have realised some of your issues (ads and artist payments) could be solved by paying for premium. Premium customers also get access to some music that isn't available for free (and early access to lots of new albums).
I think the problem for you though is the music you listen to. I have never seen music start to disappear (and I listen to a wide variety of music). It's also not reasonable to expect artists such as the Beatles to be on Spotify. They've only arrived on iTunes after years of Apple trying to get them. There is no way they will ever let you stream their music for free on Spotify.
EDIT: And as jsherry said the Stones are on Spotify. I have a lot of their stuff in playlists and listen to them regularly.
I think the best way to use Spotify is in addition to iTunes. I use Spotify premium to listen to music that I would never buy. And then I buy music from iTunes that I regularly listen to or isn't available on Spotify (like the Beatles). For the price of one album a month I don't think that is a bad way to use the service and probably how the record labels hope it would be used.
My bad about The Stones. To be clear this is my parents' taste in music rather than my own but lack of their favourite artists was enough for them to dismiss Spotify out-of-hand.
I never noticed the loss of the Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd because I already had the albums and they were pulled into Spotify via Local Files.
In the UK albums and tracks on Spotify often have a "Buy" button (links to 7digital) so you can guarantee access and high quality. But I think they are missing a trick by not showing music that is not streamable but can be bought. This doesn't help the Pink Floyds of this world but this would work for plenty of indie acts.
> I think the best way to use Spotify is in addition to iTunes.
I agree. I previously used Grooveshark for this purpose, but the number of times I found mislabeled or corrupted tracks sparked me to switch to Spotify a while back.
A win for iTunes over Spotify, for me, is AirPlay. I know I could use AirFoil with Spotify and achieve much the same thing, but then I lose the (fabulous) remote control from iPad/iPhone capabilities.
About 5): In Scandinavia, Spotify is the largest single source of revenue for labels. Three times the size of iTunes. If the artists don't get money, they should take it up with their labels.
The ads are obtrusive because streaming the better part of the earth's digital music collection to your doorstep at speeds that make iTunes seem like a turtle costs money. That bit may have evaded you.
Refuting your (IMO somewhat unfounded) statement on who in the US are going to love it, I'm a heavy music consumer (both in breadth and depth), and Spotify works especially well for me. In a purchase-song model, I'd be out many, many times as much per month than I am now (which also forms the disclaimer for this reply: I've been a premium subscriber for ages).
I had a similar experience; falling-out-of-love gradually. They have a good selection of music, I think, although of course there are things missing. But, its all big-label music and when I was using Spotify all the time, I felt that my music tastes were gradually becoming less interesting. There is very little indy music and while you can look at your friends music/listen to radio/look for similar artists its not really suited for music discovery. It was when I realised that youtube would let you create playlists that I knew it wasnt for me (I don't need mobile and the restrictions on the free spotify service are quite severe now).
Your point number 5 is interesting because it's been backed up with that link. It shows that Spotify is at the bottom of the list but really you're comparing apples and oranges. iTunes sales are a one off amount but Spotify is a revenue stream.
I imagine that I would listen to some of my favourite tracks 1000 times over the next 10 years. That adds up to pretty much the same amount of money going to the Artist. That seems reasonable.
Anyhoo here are some invite codes:
e32yEp9pMNkVxUhy
cnYq9kG9uPmhwHEM
dBFVbcKeDcm9qw25
bdJTRS492mXnyzSY
a94W7mdcVTnGNugk
bGrMgcbLVL8LtZdM
e7RXhPe3yVWGHHDd
e7DUsN99VJP94YKT
bACewd924c2KLA4X
Is there a site that compares (up to date) catalog sizes of the different services? Rhapsody used to have the largest, but I couldn't abide their website. Rdio has a great site, but their selection wasn't so great. Mog has been a decent compromise, but I'm interested if Spotify has a larger library.
I've been pretty happy with MOG's library. Nobody but Apple has the Beatles, but MOG has all the major label stuff and better coverage of my obscure tastes than I expected.
I've also been impressed with their response when I've contacted them to request catalog adds. Both times a non-customer-support human responded and both times they managed to add it within a few weeks. I didn't even expect a respond, to be honest.
273 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadApparently Pandora has good recommendations so I'll give them a try when they come to Canada. As for Spotify, meh. What's so great about them?
P2P is all about lowering their costs, not about making better sound quality for low connection speeds. It doesn't matter if you're streaming from Spotify's data center or across the street, slow is as slow does. You're not squeezing more bits through a slow connection because of P2P.
I don't know if I expressed myself any more clearly :)
Other than that, its quite responsive.
At least it did with me.
Kindle is doing something similar to my book reading. We ditched all paper books sometime last winter (they're now in the office library), and I'm actually reading a lot more because all my books are with me all the time.
I'd be pretty pissed if I signed up and got a Top 40's equivalent for my money.
Soul Coughing - Y Zyklon Boom - N Любэ - N GTA - Only GTA IV and Vice City Tub Ring - Y (these guys have a great sound, thanks for the heads up!)
1. Crappy search (You don't get suggestions)
2. Not all artists are on there (Beatles for example) and they are somewhat slow on putting up new music
1:1 pricing aside, it's very good news that they're launching in the US.
The UK price is over 50% more than the US price. As someone who's been subscribing to Spotify Premium in the UK for over a year, this feels like quite a slap in the face.
This is hard to understand until you've lived in both places.
There isn't much excuse for the very large discrepancy between electronics pricing, however.
I know it's common for products originating in the USA (games, electronics, etc.) to make the USD -> EUR conversion 1:1 but it's interesting to see it's also done the other way around.
I am not complaining though, Spotify is an awesome service and well worth the money!
edit: Seems there's more people who noticed the same, it's even the same with GBP, which has an even bigger difference than the Euro.
Edit: can only send if your email address is on your HN profile, of course.
Edit edit: http://www.spotify.com/us/amanda/ will be less hassle for all whilst it lasts.
Edit: Thank you so very much!
Thanks
Thanks, would really like to try it out
Edit 1740: all gone.
To be used here by the way: https://www.spotify.com/us/invitation/
a9f6JVzTXAr5Kb2c was already used.
I'm starting to think it would be nice to have a service where people could share invite codes and keep track of which ones have been used.
The pricing is a lot cheaper than in Norway, but even here I think its cheap ($18 / month for premium) and would gladly have paid four-fold if that was the cost.
Is this just to increase artificial demand?
They're not - you can pay for a premium or unlimited subscription right now. I've just purchased one for my brother in NY, so I can share playlists with him from London.
I have been a Rdio subscriber for about 3 months now, and I really only have two complaints. The first is that when I'm listening to Rdio at work (which is where I use the service most often) the stream tends to hang up and/or "stutter", to the point that I eventually get frustrated and turn it off. Now, we have pretty decent bandwidth at work, and other similar services (e.g. Pandora) don't seem to suffer from this problem, so I'm not sure what Rdio's problem is.
The other problem I've observed with Rdio is that a noticeable amount of time passes between the time I press "play" and the music actually starts. This one's not such a big problem, but it is a problem.
So, I've just signed up for a Spotify Unlimited plan and I'm going to see how it stacks up, especially with regards to the aforementioned problems. If it seems to perform more consistently than Rdio has, I'll probably switch.
I feel like Spotify's UI is just a gray iTunes, whereas Rdio's UI is more in line with how I think about music. The search function in Spotify is really poor compared to Rdio.
Rdio blows away Spotify in terms of the discovery and social aspects. I really like the ability to follow people that have the same tastes as I do. I've found a bunch of new bands that way. With Spotify, you have to find friends on Facebook and Twitter. And no offense to my friends, but I think their taste in music sucks.
I'm sticking with Rdio.
If there's something missing that you really want to see, make a request here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/rd.io/viewform?formkey=dHd...
And thanks for sticking with rdio!
You guys have a fantastic product. It's easy to stick with it.
First thought: How is this any different from Grooveshark (from a user experience perspective - I know Grooveshark doesn't give a shit about artists rights etc).
Edit: So far, search on Spotify is much faster, but the music library is nowhere near as complete... and I like that in Grooveshark when I search for a song I can see other peoples playlists that it shows up in and play those.
Is there a way to play a personalized station? I am a fan of having my music selected for me.
On the Mac app, the 2nd item is "Play Queue". "What's new" is first and "Inbox" is third.
http://www.spotify.com/us/get-spotify/free/
This table shows that it's only available for paid accounts.
"The radio feature will eventually be available. However, I can't say exactly when that will be. Be reminded, that Spotify is not chiefly a radio service. The lack of a radio feature for the time being is a factor of licensing agreements with the rights holders but it will eventually be available.
So the lack of a radio feature in no way limits your ability to search for and play the song of your choice. Just to be clear, when the time comes, the absence of a radio feature will be available for free as well as Premium users, as it is not typically one of the main benefits of a Premium subscription. "
http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/radio_mode_missing...
http://www.grooveshark.com/labellist
http://blog.grooveshark.com/post/7090813892/grooveshark-anno...
http://blog.grooveshark.com/post/7543767530/breakthroughradi...
http://artists.grooveshark.com/
Why?
1) The ads. At first they were reasonably infrequent and unobtrusive. But gradually they became more frequent and more and more obtrusive. Eventually some companies were deliberately producing jarring ads to grab your attention.
Many of the ads were for music. Other music: music that I would never listen to and (more importantly) music that was totally incongruous and jarring to the music it was interrupting.
2) Disappearing Music. I created loads of playlists filled with interesting (often independent) new music. Gradually whole playlists disappeared and stopped working. It felt like my music was being stolen. To replace ownership with streaming (at least for the generation that owned CDs) the catalogue needs stability.
3) Missing Music. As usual it's the big, classic stuff. I bought a license for a christmas party at my parents house. The lack of Beatles, Stones, Queen etc caused a near riot. Spotify was booed off.
4) Skype. I don't know why (but I suspect its probably Adobe's fault ;-)) but Skype and Spotify on the PC seem to have a problem with each other. Maybe I'm seeing ghosts here but I frequently have problems with these two apps (and the Chrome Flash plugin). Eventually I had to stop using one or other.
5) The artist payments are miniscule-to-the-point-of-broken. See this:
I realise that the first problem would have been easily fixed by buying Spotify Premium and I was going to do this until my favourite music started to disappear.Hopefully, the US launch will be enough to persuade the small labels to return to Spotify (maybe they already have?) and with a larger advertising base better ads could be produced and more appropriate targeting of ads could make the advert-laden experience more palatable. Similarly, a US launch may convince the big rock dinosaurs to join. That, at least, would improve next xmas.
Don't get me wrong: Spotify is an amazing thing and has a ton of potential. The US (especially teen US and low-income US) is going to love it. The App is fantastic (kind'a magical when you first see how quickly and easily it plays music).
If you have mainstream, modern taste and can stomach the loud ads you'll get great service for free.
If you're a fussy indie-kid like me who mostly listens to whispering soft audio as you work, you may want to check how many of your favourite obscure artists are onboard before you buy premium.
As for artists - while Spotify is a great innovation and a valuable way to move young people from illegally torrenting to legally streaming music it needs to generate more money for the musicians for it to be truly sustainable.
Edit: To make clear this is a UK account (not a US beta) so the falling-out-of-love took a few years.
1.The ads on the free plan are obtrusive, but it's free. I didn't find them any more obtrusive than Pandora's ads. That said, I love the service and wanted to take it mobile, so I upgraded to premium, so I'm no longer hearing ads.
2.I didn't experience disappearing playlists. I'm sure this happened to you, just pointing out that it's not a super common occurrence b/c I'm on Spotify hours per day with plenty of playlists and haven't seen the issue.
3. Agreed. I miss my Beatles and Pink Floyd. However, the Stones' library is on there.
4. Again, I'm sure you're seeing this issue, but I use both Skype and Spotify on my PC fairly often and haven't had any issues.
5. In fairness, I'm just interested in a streaming music platform - not starting a movement. There are plenty of inefficiencies in the record label industry, but I'm. Just a startup guy, not an artist so it's not my fight ;-)
One issue I will add is that Spotify stopped streaming on my Droid about two weeks into my premium subscription. However, customer service couldn't have been more responsive and helped me fix the issue pronto.
My bad about The Stones. Maybe they were there that xmas.
I suspect that the issue the small independents have with Spotify is exactly linked to Artists' fees. Selling small amounts of CDs is actually worthwhile for a small artist - being on Spotify isn't.
I don't blame them, we know what the industry is like.
3. Beatles not so much for me (I've got their discography on cassette, cd, mp3… so I sync it with spotify), but Metallica… sad but true.
4. Never had a problem with Spotify + Skype, but I would suspect it's Spotify's fault. Why? Because on OSX I use BetterTouchTool and I get this message everytime I resume from sleep: http://cl.ly/1Z1u2n0R3H3o0w27243d ← I believe it could be related.
I think the problem for you though is the music you listen to. I have never seen music start to disappear (and I listen to a wide variety of music). It's also not reasonable to expect artists such as the Beatles to be on Spotify. They've only arrived on iTunes after years of Apple trying to get them. There is no way they will ever let you stream their music for free on Spotify.
EDIT: And as jsherry said the Stones are on Spotify. I have a lot of their stuff in playlists and listen to them regularly.
I think the best way to use Spotify is in addition to iTunes. I use Spotify premium to listen to music that I would never buy. And then I buy music from iTunes that I regularly listen to or isn't available on Spotify (like the Beatles). For the price of one album a month I don't think that is a bad way to use the service and probably how the record labels hope it would be used.
In the UK albums and tracks on Spotify often have a "Buy" button (links to 7digital) so you can guarantee access and high quality. But I think they are missing a trick by not showing music that is not streamable but can be bought. This doesn't help the Pink Floyds of this world but this would work for plenty of indie acts.
I agree. I previously used Grooveshark for this purpose, but the number of times I found mislabeled or corrupted tracks sparked me to switch to Spotify a while back.
A win for iTunes over Spotify, for me, is AirPlay. I know I could use AirFoil with Spotify and achieve much the same thing, but then I lose the (fabulous) remote control from iPad/iPhone capabilities.
Refuting your (IMO somewhat unfounded) statement on who in the US are going to love it, I'm a heavy music consumer (both in breadth and depth), and Spotify works especially well for me. In a purchase-song model, I'd be out many, many times as much per month than I am now (which also forms the disclaimer for this reply: I've been a premium subscriber for ages).
I imagine that I would listen to some of my favourite tracks 1000 times over the next 10 years. That adds up to pretty much the same amount of money going to the Artist. That seems reasonable.
Anyhoo here are some invite codes: e32yEp9pMNkVxUhy cnYq9kG9uPmhwHEM dBFVbcKeDcm9qw25 bdJTRS492mXnyzSY a94W7mdcVTnGNugk bGrMgcbLVL8LtZdM e7RXhPe3yVWGHHDd e7DUsN99VJP94YKT bACewd924c2KLA4X
I think Spotify is absolutely worth the money. It's also great for playing your own music collection.
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Thanks!
I've also been impressed with their response when I've contacted them to request catalog adds. Both times a non-customer-support human responded and both times they managed to add it within a few weeks. I didn't even expect a respond, to be honest.