Spotify - anyone heard of it?

They're adding quite a bit of stuff at the moment too, just after the cull the track count was just over 2 million and a quick look shows they've added another 40,000 or so this week alone.

I'm on the free plan at the moment but I'd be tempted to subscribe just to make sure it doesn't go belly up. Tenner a month doesn't seem much really for unlimited music, cost of a cd I'd listen to a handful of times then stick on a shelf and forget.

I wonder if last.fm will respond in some way soon. It's got a much higher profile than Spotify but other than scrobbling, which I guess Spotify will implement sometime, there's little reason for using it now.

Spotify already scrobbles to last.fm - you can switch it on in the settings. It works perfectly - you even get a little Spotify logo on your last.fm profile page to tell you where the music's coming from.

last.fm is still your best place for recommendations and unexpected surprises - whereas Spotify has replaced most of my iTunes listening (and it's much less bloaty, of course).

Now all we need is someone to crack it and remove the thing that triggers the ads in the free version...

(shame)

xpost

I knew that Spotify scrobbles to last.fm, my point was that now I'm only using last.fm to check my listening stats (sad bastard that I am). The social networking aspects of last.fm haven't really mattered to me (antisocial bastard that I am), so I don't spend much time on there now. I'm happy to find stuff via playlists and random searches, I enjoyed a lot of your best of 2008 for example and can now find stuff in a much easier way than before, the Paarvoharju album for example.

Not sure if this has already been mentioned -

http://www.gustavsoderstrom.com/?p=45

^ former Yahoo Director of Business Development now heading up Spotify Mobile.

fucks sake an advert every 3 songs now

argh whistling bastard advert

going to get board of spotify quickly unless they get some less mainstream label stuff up. its good for mainstream music but if they need obscurer stuff.

-if

still atm I'm listening to CCR albums and all is well.

findanyfilm.comadvert fuck off every 3songs

And now 2 ads in succession. Anyone else getting this or is it just an anomaly?

In better news, some Spotify sites:
http://www.spotify.com/blog/archives/2009/02/19/spotified-cd-collection-and-some-other-community-sites/

From the spotify updates alert thing. I thought my playing artists I already own cds by was pointless enough, but no:

This morning a user posted his Spotified CD Collection on the blog which I thought was amazing and really creative. What he’s done is he’s taken a digital picture of his CD shelf and then linked each jewel case to that artists in Spotify. So now he can sit and look at his CD collection online and decide what to listed to but instead of sticking the actual CD into a player you launched the album on Spotify, so cool.

Also:

Some other fun sites that have appeared recently include: Spotinews, which highlights new additions to our catalogue, Spotify Search which is an addon for Firefox to lets you find music from any web page in Spotify and a web page that finds new albums recently added to Spotify that match the top 50 artists from your Last.fm profile.

We love stuff like this so if you’ve done something creative with Spotify please let us know, we’d like to see it and share it with everyone.

The last.fm thing seems to work quite well. It's told me that a load of old Animal Collective and Disco Inferno are up.

yeah, what Neil said.

Ooh DI Go Pop is on there, I've been wanting to hear that for ages!

It's great! I've been wanting to hear it without fetching the cd for ages too, so everyone's happy.

http://twitter.com/TheWordMagazine/status/1230055579

There is fun to be had here.

"Morning, Spotifiers. In what we believe is a first in rock and roll media, we're handing over the virtual decks on the WORD office to you, the reader. All day today (Friday 20th Feb) we're going to play the music you choose.

There's a collaborative Spotify playlist linked below, which you can add to and help build up. We'll play it all day and listen to whatever you select (and we'll choose our favourites for another, Best Of You Are The DJ list). And we'll be playing it on shuffle, so no need to worry if you get started late. Your track has just as much chance of being played as an early addition.

The Spotify list is here – click and it'll launch (as long as you've got Spotify). If you need to download Spotify, it's available here.

And of course, you can play the list via your own computer and assess the musical taste of the WORD Hive Mind yourself.

THE RULES
1] Post one track at a time. No complete albums or huge runs of a single artist – we'll delete them.
2] There are no other rules.

We'll be tweeting our reactions here so you can see what we think of the tracks as they play. And you can monitor exactly what we're playing right now via the miracle of our Last.fm page, which will be scrobbling the tracks live.

Comments welcomed below, of course, or sign up to Twitter and stick your oar in live and direct. The Spotify list is live NOW so let the uploading of Blackout Crew and New Riders of the Purple Sage rareities commence!"

Just added "Come With Me" by Special D.

Hope they have Metal Machine Music!

Sadly the full 60 minute version of Dopesmoker by Sleep is unavailable.

I think when Word Magazine's Spotify playlist be all up in your face you gotta be like YAHHH TRICK YAHHH

Word's last.fm profile: possibly the indie-schmindiest of all time: http://www.last.fm/user/TheWordMagazine

They're about to get injected with a poison...

TheWordMagazine

Recently Listened Tracks

Listening now using Spotify
Praga Khan – Injected With a Poison full track

Your musical compatibility with TheWordMagazine is Very High

Music you have in common includes New Order, The Shortwave Set, The Orb, John Martyn and Vangelis.

;_;

They appear to have stopped Twittering.

http://lutt.se/lastfm+spotify+new/lastfm.php?user=trailofgybe

http://lutt.se/lastfm+spotify+new/rec.php?user=trailofgybe

Your musical compatibility with TheWordMagazine is VERY HIGH
Music you have in common includes The Fall, New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Magazine and Kraftwerk

It's hardly a schmindie profile: just a very predictable one. You'd have to be a bit of an iconoclast to go "lol Bowie and Kraftwerk", no?

Anyway. Hamburger Lady by Throbbing Gristle is on Spotify, and thus should be an essential feature of any collaborative playlist.

Yeah fair enough, predictable rather than lol indie I guess.

This is fun, but Spotify can't cope with mixes very well.

Have just noticed that when I mute ads, they pause--this wasn't always like that, right?

1. Spotify iPhone application in action. Allegedly:

2. Anyone else finding Spotify won't scrobble to Last.fm today? It just tells me "can't connect to Last.fm server". Other Last.fm-related shit working absolutely fine.

That's cool. I might even go buy an iPhone for this.

(actually, I won't but it is cool.)

Reasons it might not be cool:

1. Apple won't allow the app in its store.
2. They will allow it but it will be a bit rubbish because it will drain the battery really fast
3. It won't drain the battery too fast but it will be annoying because it won't let you listen to music while doing other things on your iPhone because background processes aren't allowed.

Yeh, assuming the thing ever sees the light of day on non-jailbroken devices, #3 there is the real clincher :(

Battery's going to be bad, aye, though mine is already shot to ribbons by Google Sync. Background processes are a-coming, it seems, so that's alright.

Except then your battery life will get worse again, and it will all start crashing more.

I don't know why I am being so negative today.

the last FM app works plenty lovely, and can't see apple objecting to spotify app if last FM is ok

They have all the Helmet stuff inc the born annoying single. And I listened to Quicksand albums yesterday. Was pleased to find this stuff. Next I'm gonna search for Unsane, Butthole Surfers, GVSB and Prong. (even though I have all these on my ipod I do like the idea of these guys getting paid.

How much do you think a fair price to pay for a subscription is? £10 a month is too much for me. If it was £3 id definitely pay. How about £15 for 6 months access? £15 every 6 months is more than they would be getting now from most people.

£15 for 4 months even would be ok. £45 a year compared to zero as well.

I really do rather like this app... they've got everything right - the ads are infrequent enough to let you enjoy a few albums without interruption, but annoying enough to have you momentarily reach for your wallet. A great selection of stuff too and brilliant for satisfying idle curiosity.

However, looking at the page for interested artists and labels it's quite obvious that by using Spotify you are providing lots of valuable marketing information to the labels involved and indicates the future directions that the service will take: "Your own artist area allows you to build a direct relationship with fans, old and new, across the world. Develop revenue streams through the sale of downloads, merchandising, concert tickets and more, as well as earning a share of the revenues we create through our advertising and premium businesses. Powerful, granular, in-depth reporting is available to participating labels and artists."

I guess most people have implicitly accepted that signing up for Spotify means their listening habits will be open to the scrutiny of major labels. However, this might not actually be a bad thing... if your tasts are as varied as most here then hopefully they'll just throw their hands up at the notion of targetted marketing and the like and just concentrate on putting out QUALITY music that consumers might actually want. Alternatively they'll manufacture some kind of crazy Kraftwerk-meets-Porter Waggoner-and-Sugar Hill Gang combo.

p.s. everyone in the UK should listen to the Leon Rosselson and Roy Bailey album on there. In the absence of anything by Crass it's a good alternative... I think this recession business is 80s nostalgia gone too far.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7913959.stm

OMG, it's Roberta-from-Spotify!

Ooh, she's lovely. I always thought that was an actress reading the lines.

Hmm. This thing is becoming a bugger for not connecting to Last.fm (although I'm sure that's Last.fm fault rather than Spotify's). At the moment it's got tracks queued, apparently. Be interesting to see if/when/how it connects ...

The anti-music industry opinions expressed in this thread are... disheartening. Three years ago it might've been fun to laugh at Metallica and fuck the man. But instead we've got distros closing, indie labels cutting back their release schedule.

Anyway, I'm curious as to how Spotify is gonna pay the artists who's music they're exploiting for their own advert sales and subscriptions. (Not implying they don't, but there's nothing written online about it).

i'm with you, worried about the overfishing of the entire industry just because their product is now so easily copied and distributed. (is odd here in the uk because we all grew up with listenable radio stations and are used to tuning in and hearing good stuff. is easy to forget it's paid for by tv license.)

but spotify do seem to have major label support and i doubt they'd have that if the labels weren't being paid.

Don't you think the recession might have something to do with labels cutting back? afaik it's never been conclusively shown that pirating has significantly harmed the industry.