Spotify - anyone heard of it?

£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.

but shops were closing well before last year.

When I've chatted with managers and artists and labels about album sales, the numbers in 2009 are far less than they were for similar releases five years ago, including digital sales. (On the bright side: t-shirt sales are way up.)

Maybe people are more interested in watching dvds than listening to music nowadays? In my experience with people in general that is the case. Diehard music fans are a minority.

And yes, Spotify does make payments to labels and artists. What the scale is, I don't know. If Youtube is any indication, it means that Cake guy from the Portal game will (rightly?) make more dough from Spotify than any bands making albums-as-statements.

Someone speculated earlier it would be the same as last.fm pays: $0.0005 per play - meaning a million plays are required to get the artist $500.

@ Tourtiere (Owen Pallett) - I personally don't see many anti-music industry opinions here, and hope you didn't mean my post which was a little tongue in cheek.

It's pretty much taken as read by all consumers that (SLSK users & blog cruisers excepted) you don't get something for nothing. For majors to offer their catalogues in this way there has to be some idea that it makes financial sense. In context of a global financial crisis in which "£50 man" might the same way as Zavvi et al, so Spotify brings us the first step toward the rebranding of music not as an art, but as a utility like gas or electricity.

As an artist one can't help feel a more than little affronted by the notion that notion of music as an 'art' will finally disappear from the mainstream. Not that this is actually anything new. Obviously music has always been "product" to many labels, and indeed even up to the 19th century and its "heroic" composers much music served a utilitarian role (soundtrack to a coronation, mass, birthday celebration of a prince etc.). IMO the idea of music as an unquestionable high art is a 19th century pretension that probably deserves to die no matter how much my conditioned personality rails against this "debasement" of the art; it after all only in the late medieval times that composers even began to put attributions on their work, and they still kick the arse of most modern stuff!

The wheel is once again coming full circle.

online listening is killing piracy

gunships are killing pirates

@ Rombald. No, no, it's not an affront... I'm 100% "for" music as a utility.

The issue is strictly economical. Recording, mastering, rehearsing... all these things cost money. I mean, I love MPC-based records, Garageband-based records, Panasonic RX-FT500 records, records entirely made in-the-box for next-to-nothing.

But these new economic models will eventually render recording-with-a-budget impossible. You can tell me that "a budget don't make a good record" and I'd agree. But the bestest records of the last few months (Portishead, Animal Collective, Lindstrom, those Aeroplane remixes y'all love) all took gear and compressors and microphones and mixing consoles and nice mastering jobs. Erykah Badu, dude. That record was expensive.

One of the reasons why I think Bradford Cox is gonna be around far longer than any of us other bozos is that he's developed a method of record-making that is time-efficient and cost-efficient. Atlas Sound is the gorgeous sound of a record that cost nothing to make.

(I'm still waiting to hear about Spotify's business model.)

Entirety of Domino catalogue added today!

@ Owen:
Completely agree - it's just my own and others gut reactions to "utilification" are gonna die hard! ;o) I'd already resolved myself to and the idea that working from home studios is indeed going to be the future for most musicians whether they like it or not. I certainly do, and have recorded with a setup that cost no more than, oohh, £400 for the last 10 years (- that includes all instruments too!).

Shame that more conventional lavish recording sessions with orchestras/session pros/cocaine might be doomed under the new financial model, but on the plus side I think Spotify could well save the "album experience", which is definitely a great thing!

Please stop using the "@" symbol to show you're addressing someone, thanks.

Yes. I'm looking forward to trawling Spotify for Julian's Treatment or whatever.

@ Captain:

@.

Check out all the jazz on spotify. Plenty of Blue Note RVG editions

Did anyone else get the "oops someone stole all our password hashes" email?

I can't get into the Spotify website to change my password - there's probably a rush on.

Yes got it too.

no

Dear Spotify user,

Last week we were alerted to a group that managed to compromise
our protocols. After investigating we concluded that this group
had gained access to information that could allow testing of a
very large number of passwords, possibly finding the right one.
The information was exposed due to a bug that we discovered and
fixed on December 19th, 2008. Until last week we were unaware
that anyone had had access to our protocols to exploit it.

Along with passwords, registration information such as your email
address,birth date, gender, postal code and billing receipt
details were potentially exposed. Credit card numbers are not
stored by us and were not at risk. All payment data is handled
by a secure 3rd party provider.

If you have an account that was created on or before December 19th 2008,
we strongly suggest that you change your password and strongly
encourage you to change your passwords for any other services
where you use the same password.

When choosing your password we provide you with an indicator of
the password strength to help you choose a good one. To change
your password please visit your profile page on our website.

https://www.spotify.com/en/account/profile/

For the technically minded amongst you, the information that may
have been exposed when our protocols were compromised is the
password hashes. As stated, we never store passwords, and they
have never been sent over the Internet unencrypted, but the
combination of the bug and the group's reverse-engineering of
our encrypted streaming protocol may have given outsiders access
to individual hashes.

The hashes are salted, making attacks using rainbow tables unfeasible.
Short or otherwise bad passwords could still be vulnerable to
offline targeted brute-force or dictionary attacks on individual
users, but you could not run attacks in parallel. Also, there
has been no known breach of our internal systems. A complete user
database has not been leaked, but until December 19th, 2008 it was
possible to access the password hashes of individual users had
you reverse-engineered the Spotify protocol and knew the
username.

We are really sorry about this and hope you accept our apologies.
We're doubling our efforts to keep the systems secure in order
to prevent anything like this from happening again.

Regards,
The Spotify Team

I went in and changed my password anyway

Sometimes there are benefits to being a slightly late adopter, I guess.

I would hereby like to register a hearty "fuck you" to The Script, and their corporate shill Jo Wiley.

Until they fix the Mac-client-not-scrobbling bug -- which has been discussed at length on the Get Satisfaction forums; apparently it'll be sorted in the next upgrade, whenever that'll be -- I'm not using Spotify. Missing out on the adverts cheers me slightly, at least.

oh are there no ads on the mac version? I haven't encountered any yet although I keep thinking after every song I listen to that I'm going to be hit with an ad for the new Kings of Leon album or something totally unrelated to whatever I'm listening to.

I think Grimly means he's not using it as a result of scrobbling probs, so he's not subjected to the ads.

^ Er, yes, exactly.

I'm refusing to listen to music played in shops or on builder's radios until they sort out the scrobbling problems.

A principled stand.

sorry, yeah, I just got my first ever ad (kings of leon as predicted), but it took about 20 songs for it to happen.

xxpost

Well, in fairness: "Oh, yeh, this is fixed now ... er, sorry, we can't be arsed rolling the thing out yet, though" (which is effectively what they're saying) is a bit of a cunty attitude -- especially from a company who force updates on their users whether they want them or not.

Aye they should say "Oh, yeh, this is fixed now ... er, sorry, we can't be arsed rolling the thing out yet, though, to be fair, free fucking music all day every day grimly wtf do you want for nothing eh eh?"

Pretty good bargaining tho: Give us some money or we'll keep hitting you with Script, Glasvegas and KoL adverts.

"Oh, yeh, this is fixed now ... er, sorry, we can't be arsed rolling the thing out yet, though, to be fair, free fucking music all day every day grimly wtf do you want for nothing eh eh?"

Umm. Sorry, but "it's free" != "excuse for shit customer service". Many, many services work on a similar "free" model these days (which probably won't last); when you've got 100-odd people saying, politely: "This isn't working properly, can you fix it?" and you're basically told: "Aye, it's fixed, but fuck off, you're not important enough for us to bother rolling it out" ... well, you might think that's reasonable, but I'm not so sure.

Also: if I was paying for it, I'd be in the same boat. <- Shittest argument ever, but hey :)

boycott spotify!

Do you not use it then?

i do but im getting bored of it. It's fine for well known music on major labels but if they dont expand to get more obscure stuff im gonna end up never using it.

Yeah I can see that. At the moment there's more than enough major label stuff to keep me happy though!

The huge selection of Blue Note Jazz is what's keeping me on it. Hopefully they will license stuff from some of the independent labels i like (southern lord,hydrahead etc)

Recommend some of said jazz. As you say, the dearth of alternative labels is bad, although recent additions of Domino and Warp are a step in the right direction.

wel the usual suspects of miles davis, john coltrane, sun ra, charles mingus are all up there along with Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Pharaoh Sanders,sonny rollins, alice coltrane, lonnie liston smith etc

plus pretty much all the Blue Note roster. Grant green, lee morgan, lou donaldson,wayne shorter , donald byrd, joe henderson, hank mobley, babyface willete to name a few.