Spotify - anyone heard of it?

blokely.com? what?

There's some banner ad on Spotify that my virus checker keeps telling me is trying to load Exploit:Win32/CVE-2010-1885.C, whatever that means.

Happy days, all of Underworld's albums are available at long last.

I see Dylan's gone too

I think he's been off for some time, apart from the dodgy out of copyright stuff.

The Lennon remastered albums were all put on then swiftly disappeared too.

The Smiths' Meat is Murder and The Queen is Dead are now up though, finally.

anyone care to speculate how the licensing works in the case of say REM, who's entire back catalogue of albums, reissues, deluxes and b sides collections is present and correct except one (Monster). what's going on there?

i see the entire Suede back catalogue has vanished. probably because they want to shift a fair few copies of the upcoming reissued albums. can't blame them mind.

Monster is on there.

Suede's back catalogue has been gone a while.

my bad it was UP i meant. it's weird innit.

was only a matter of time :

http://musically.com/blog/2011/04/14/spotify-cuts-back-free-service-10hrs-a-month-and-song-capping/

Does this still count if you're one of the original Spotify Free users?

hope so. then it will stop my teenkid killing the bandwidth soakup in my house.

Should read more closely:

The changes we’re having to make will mainly affect heavier Spotify Free and Open users

What’s more, they’ll only be able to play individual tracks five times ever, before they are made greyed out and unplayable.

There's just no easy money to be made in this industry. Oh well, was a good thing while it lasted.

From a pesronal pov this sucks, but if it's what they need to do to make the service work then so be it.

Actually if they can reassure Premium users that the service will remain the same and more music will be added in the long term I think I'd be willing to pay for it. If au contraire premium users end up seeing less artists and unavailable songs after a while then it will become progressively worthless.
Spain still doesn't seem to have the 20 hour limit tho, so maybe we'll be lucky and we wont be seeing any of these changes just yet.

"What’s more, they’ll only be able to play individual tracks five times ever, before they are made greyed out and unplayable" ... "Spotify says the changes will mainly affect heavier free users, and claims the average user won’t see the limit on plays for seven out of 10 tracks."

This is an interesting idea on their part, I guess. I mean, I feel like people who will i. find this inconvenient enough to do something about it ii. start maintaining an mp3 collection or alt-tabbing to youtube all the time rather than paying £5/month ... these are people that, really, they're never going to convert to a paid account. But, also, it means the word-of-mouth goes from "you really should get Spotify" to "Spotify is kind of annoying."

oh, here is a quick question! there's a label which is greying out all tracks more than ten minutes long by, at least, Sonic Youth and Rush — I'm on Unlimited — can anyone on Premium tell me if that holds true?

The question people need to ask that maybe they didn't have to before is: is it worth a tenner?

For me, the price of mobile Spotify and not having to faff around with 'alternative' online sources is well worth it.

oh, here is a quick question! there's a label which is greying out all tracks more than ten minutes long by, at least, Sonic Youth and Rush — I'm on Unlimited — can anyone on Premium tell me if that holds true?

Seems they're greyed out on premium as well.

yeah, one playlist I had was based on the content of the "Factory Records" box set, and now around 30% of that one is greyed out, not necessarily based on length or famousness...

e.g. Transmission is alright, "Sketch for Summer" and "She's lost control" is gorn.

Quick question: if I pay for Spotify premium, can I listen through my iPod touch?

Yes. Mostly. It won't run on first gen.

http://www.spotify.com/int/help/faq/mobile/mobile-ipod-touch/

Cool. That's a good enough reason for me to pay for it.

It is absolutely, 100% worth a tenner a month.

I've been listening to it all day, every day in work for the last 9 months or so, so I've got no problem with a £10 a month

I can't listen to music at work (it's not a company policy, I just can't do it myself I'd just do nowt), so I do record stuff onto minidisc for the journeys.

whatdisc?

It is absolutely, 100% worth a tenner a month.

Co-sign, I'm as tight as two coats of paint, but this is an absolute bargain and if you have a suitable mobile or ipod touch even more so.

getting spotify on my mobile made an absolutely gigantic difference to the amount of music i discover week in week out. it's a bargain for the ten quid, plus the ads are a distant memory.

yeah i'm on the five pound version 'cuz i don't have unlimited data on my mobile (dark ages, i know) but given i probably use it for around forty hours a week that seemed fair

someone started giving me an earful on supporting THE MAN rather than ARTISTS about it though

was on the 5 pound version until yesterday, new phone so might as well go with premium. can't understand why anyone would use the free version at all though.

Because it's free?

Currently on the £5 version but when I get a new phone I'll probably upgrade.

someone started giving me an earful on supporting THE MAN rather than ARTISTS about it though

me too...bastards.

Would totally pay £15-20 a month for a super premium record club account if they picked out the album you listened to the most in the past month and sent you a copy on CD to keep.

"Here is your monthly copy of Disintegration,
love
Spotify Record Club
PS Change the fucking record son!"

someone started giving me an earful on supporting THE MAN rather than ARTISTS about it though

Surely it's up to the ARTISTS to agree a better deal with THE MAN though?

exactly

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2011/04/spotify_not_so_free_as_it_was.html

....
But I'm hearing that Spotify had the move forced upon it by the record labels and the move reflects continuing tension between the fast-growing digital service and the music industry

it's hard to feel hard-done-by about this. i pay more than a tenner for the use of about eight dvds a month, so getting a spotify subscriptch is a nob rainer.

Actually this may actually be genius. Yes, some people are angry because nothing is completely free anymore, but a lot of people have grown addicted to Spotify and the monthly fee is actually not much compared to what people used to buy CDs for in the past. So this may well be the way for tomorrow's musicians to actually earn money from their work. Which I think they do actually deserve.

and no more blokely.com adverts hooray

until the £10 service gets some adverts and they want you to pay £20 to get no adverts and flacs streaming

I think that would be very difficult for them to implement without losing a shit-ton of customers. Especially given there'll be other similar services on the market before long.

This all made the front page of the Metro today!

I have premium and have it on the missus' & my phone, with both our laptops and the squeezeradio in the kitchen.

that's unlimited music on 5 devices in high quality .mp3 with no adverts or usage limits.

£10.

Can't complain when I have been known to drop £18 on an import CD when Tower Records used to regularly charge such a price.

still working out my "I love this on spotify, I'll buy it" vs. "I love this on spotify, I'll listen to it loads on spotify" threshold though.

i don't have a fancy mobile so am probably just going the £5 route

though what is 'offline mode'? i was talking to someone about this and they claimed it meant they just had a shit-tonne of music files they could listen to. but that can't be right, surely they must all vanish when you unsubscribe?

yeah, they're cached in the Spotify client/ app, then get deleted as and when you unsubscribe AFAIK. I wonder if anyone's cracked the app though?

Offline mode files disappear if you unsubscribe/don't log in for a month. You need it for mobiles cos you can't stream everything, but if you're only using an always online laptop I don't see the point.

It hasn't been cracked yet afaik. That would pretty much kill the service, surely.

Does non-premium spotify play local files too? That was such a good addition. I never switch out of Spotify for any listening now. £10 a month for this is stupidly good value.