Spotify trumpets move to US (and little else) UK-based music-streaming service Spotify has just announced that it's coming to the US. But that's all we know. The oh-so-popular service has merely thrown up a clickless web page with no information about when they'll be avalable for US listeners, what parts – all? – of its collection will be available in the US, and how much …
I'm in the UK, and find myself using grooveshark.
Has more music than spotify, is audio ad free (banner ads in the desktop client but no ads in what you listen to)
and best of all is free..
they do offer a "premium" service which gives you a slightly nicer client, plus access to mobile apps. However their mobile app, last time I tried it, was terrible and crashed all the time and failed to stream. BUT there is a 3rd party app that uses their api and works a treat.
If you pay £10 per month you can listen to ad free music and have up to 3000 songs downloaded offline. It's really handy if you travel or are somewhere without internet connection. You can use up to 5 devies I think with one account. The service is really good and streams instantaneously, however their iPhone app is such crap that it's almost insulting to all the paying users. And if you've seen the iPad app you'd want to go and shoot them all.
Sandy106, think of how much time and/or money it has cost you to put your music on your player, phone and computer, and to back it up. How much did you pay to have the storage space? How much time and money did it cost you to obtain the music in the first place?
If the price is right, and the choice of music wide enough, people will pay a monthly fee to stream music on demand to wherever they are, at a moment's notice, using whatever device they have to hand, using any internet connection. Moreover, only the free version has adverts.
In the not-too-distant future, bringing audio or video into the home on a disk will seem as archaic as bringing coal into the home for heating. In the future, all media will be piped into the home on demand.
I will grant that Spotify don't yet support lossless streaming, so they don't yet offer CD quality. I hope that will come soon.
What's not to like?
For the cost of a bargain bin CD a month you have access to a music collection way, way bigger than you could amass on your own.
I have rediscovered so many great tunes that I have lost over the years (I had my record/cd/tape collection stolen many moons ago and kinda stopped collecting music after that) not to mention all the new (to me) music I have discovered. Spotify has rekindled my love of music.
The ease with which you can switch products is nice too. I only enable a premium subscription when I know I am going away, and revert back to the £5 when I'm not out and about.
Collaborative playlists can be good fun. Send one to your coworkers with a title such as 'Guilty Pleasures' and see what gets added - you end up with some real gems that way...
Want something new? Trawl the web for Spotify playlists, there are thousands of them. Click the link and hey presto, a bunch of tunes ready to listen too.
It's biggest down side is clear. Not everything is there. It can be really annoying, but my annoyance is not directed at Spotify, but at the music labels and artists that refuse to join the party...
I've got the premium subscription as well (definitely worth it, even if only for the time saved in finding, downloading & transferring new music) but looking through my saved playlists lately I noticed that there seems to have been quite a bit of music pulled over the last while (e.g where are all Dylan's albums gone? Or the Dead Kennedys'? They definitely used to be there but now there's just a couple of live ones, or some newly released "Remastered" ones.) Did some label pull out of Spotify & I missed the news?
No it's not just you.
I've noticed the same thing over the past 12 months. Spotify have to comply with the requests of the copyright holders, be that artists, labels or the majors... some consent, some don't, some change their minds. So at times Spotify is a bit of a roulette wheel. Stuff you were listening to last week might not be there next week. On the other hand, stuff that hasn't ever been on Spotify might be there next week...
That was when I ditched premium for the £5 sub, except for the odd occasion when I am on holiday.
However, for the most part, Spotify is awesome and the choice of tracks mind boggling.
I use the ad supported Spotify and record songs using a sound recorder - great result and perfectly legal in Sweden and probably other countries. We pay a tax on empty CDs compensating artists for the right to make copies for personal use.
I really don't mind paying Spotify or the artists but fact is that a big chunk of the money payed will end up with MAFIAA and that's simply not acceptable.
Rather than messing around with my old collection of mp3s (copying 40gb of files to every device isn't fun, and keeping them in sync even less fun) I just use spotify these days.
If I hear a nice tune on the TV/Radio shazam gets me the name and spotify gets me the album.. nearly instantly, at no (extra) cost. If the album turns out to be crap it gets removed.. no loss. I've discovered lots of new music that way. In the old days I'd have probably gone 'nice tune' and forgot about it because the £15 for a new album (=3 months spotify subs!) is too much to risk on someone I'm not sure about.
Some people might prefer Grooveshark to Spotify but I think they're kind of missing the main point... Spotify needs money because it's legal and licensed; Grooveshark doesn't charge you because it's illegal and unlicensed. Yes, the bulk of stuff on there is fine but where legal content isn't provided they will play user-uploaded content. You might as well just watch YouTube?
Spotify are a Swedish company who are legally headquartered in London (at least for Europe).
1. Unless it's moved, Spotify is based in Sweden, not the UK although they do have London offices.
2. @Sandy106: You can pay to have the ads removed, and you can listen to any music. You're not limited by what you own elsewhere.
3. I'm very happy for you in the US, it's an excellent service. Now, can we in Europe have access to Netflix, Hulu, turntable.fm and all the other services you won't let us use?
Spotify started initially with a wave of excitement, partly because of the distribution model of invitations (only friends could invite you through a specific code etc). There are many happy premium consumers, although it would seem still not enough for them to break even, but now that it's pretty much all paid subscription only (the free models are now sufficiently restricted to be barely worth it), it's difficult to see that its launch in the US is going to have anything like the self-perpetuating excitement of its original European start.
And without a certain critical mass, it just doesn't work as a business. Not sure I'd be wanting to invest in it right now when (free) alternatives are still widely available and used.
Spotify... for those who do not know where or how to access music for free from USENET based services or similar. Why would I pay Spotify to stream at £10 when the same price would give me access to a client I can use to download such files including FILM VIDEO AND SOFTWARE at Accelerated download rates?
Answer: I need to be SEEN doing the right thing OR I am a jobsworth OR somehow buying only the very BEST PREMIUM music (a CD because it is LOSSLESS format) suddenly realises he is missing out on auditioning all that music he has yet to discover? Please... use the radio or a service providing similar podcast type sessions.
I JUST DONT GET SPOTIFY. NOW after all that someone please tell me if I have missed something.
You can listen to Napster's entire 11 million track library (except a few that have record company restrictions) for just $5 a month, or $50 a year. For $10 a month, or $96 a year they add mobile (ipad, ipod touch, android and iphone) listening, and offline listening - meaning you can download all of the songs you want to your computer. Of course, no ads at all. With tightening data caps, I like to be able to download a song once and having it on my PC to listen to anytime I want. I've been a Napster listener for years and I am very happy with the service. No, I don't work for Napster.
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