Spotify adds Web2.0rhea The first major Spotify upgrade sees it treble in size, turning into a cross between iTunes and Facebook. The goal is to make Spotify "your only music source". It's also, according to the company, much more "social". What the word "social" really means in today's Web 2.0 jargon is "two solitary people in two geographical …
If you don't like it, then just don't turn it on. If you don't want to do social, then don't.
I won't be doing the whole facebook thing, but then that's not the only way to add users (friends). All you have to know is their spotify username to add them:
http://www.spotify.com/uk/help/faq/social/can-i-add-any-spotify-user-to-my-people-list/
Two reasons I went "Premium" on Spotify:
1) I have no problem with paying for music and this was an excellent service.
2) I got fed up with interruptions from Jonathan and eSuit2.0 or whatever they were
I'm still happy with 1, but it sounds like 2 is in peril. I just want to listen to music, ffs - no one else likes the crap I listen too and I'm not particularly interested in what my friends listen to either. There's plenty of play list sites out there and, tbh, I found them too hard to use (Wheat/Chaff syndrome)
/me gets back to the Happy Mondays
But not the other things - so I might as well stick to mediamonkey for playing my mp3's (until I re-encode all our CD's to flac or something else) and use spotify for the occasional music exploration.
thanks for the trying to second guess what I want though guys and galls.
ttfn
Swapping between the Spotify application and the media player on my phone has always been pretty annoying. I would welcome the idea of integrating both databases into one interface - assuming it will be available on the mobile version. The facebook stuff sounds a little bit what like last.fm already does, except last.fm doesn't care what source scrobbled the track in the first place(?)
The feature to index and play local music files is, on the face of it, useful. But it will also update your tagging info using Gracenote (that's quite neat) and who else gets to see your local playlists? I wonder if, not today, perhaps, but one day, the owners of Spotify (remember them) will quietly require that the local MP3 database gets turned over to them. And if some of those MP3s are purchased ones, they may be able to inspect the watermark to see if it was you who bought them....
Does this mean that the music quality will drop? At the moment the quality of the Spotify stuff is far better than mp3 and this is the sole reason why I use it.
If the level of Spotifyness drops to mp3 standard then I won't ever use it. All my CDs are ripped down to .flac and I would accept no less.
And if there is an element of peer-to-peer shaing, even if it ends up encrypted, then surely this is illegal for the user to share his or her music because this is effectlvely publishing a copyrighted piece of work.
Fail. Because this has, well, fail written all over it.
"Who uses facebollox anyway" about 350 million people worldwide some number of which are likely to be Spotify users I would imagine.
I haven't used Spotify in a while now and this is the final nail in the coffin. I don't want another media library tool thank you - I already have to have WMP and iTunes installed and I don't even use or particularly want them; I use Media Monkey and like it very much indeed but I can't get rid of WMP and I need iTunes so I can have the cable drivers that allow MM to synch my iPhone. I really don't want another bloaty media library tool and as for the rest of the nonsense they've put in, I'm not interested in it. I already use last.fm and I have no desire to Facebook, Tweet or anything else what I'm listening to.
Bye bye Spotify - the end is near seeing as you struggle to monetise as it is and I can't see this 'upgrade' helping much.
As out AC post before points out - Sony and such own shares in Spotify. With this new joined up wizardry will there be anymore information being sent back to the servers about your local 'previously untouched by spotify' collection. It would be really hard to resist getting all that information so easily.
What a bunch of nerdy server-side geek clones most of us are.. we're all stuck back in the days of lynx for web browsing and vi for editing...
unfortunately for us, technology has moved on, and gone mainstream... and with it, our revered profession... two options, sit back and sulk (as we seem to do quite a bit on El Reg) or move with the times... as much as I hate it, this whole "social" bollox is where it's all going...
soon, we'll all be "plugged into the collective" and we'll all have access to the most inane features of everyone else's lives, then it will be easy to force everyone one to do the same and think alike... "resistance is futile!" comes to mind...
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