Spotify - anyone heard of it?

New iOS app out today, has sorting and filtering in Your Music. Nice in the album view because you can now sort by artist instead of just by album title.

The sorting turns out to be a temporary casualty of some internal reworking to prepare for bigger improvements...

― glenn mcdonald, Wednesday, July 2, 2014 9:15 AM (Yesterday)

thanks for the explanation. I figured it wouldn't be a permanent change.

wait is the diff between the "4.99/mo" membership and the reg?

― socki (s1ocki), Thursday, July 3, 2014 4:26 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In the UK at least the main differences are offline playlists and high-bitrate streaming.

Yeah, I think offlining stuff and/or getting it on other devices are the main thing. This user-made chart may be out of date, I don't know, but perhaps it gets at the gist: http://community.spotify.com/t5/Newcomers-and-Contribution/Subscription-Comparison-Chart/td-p/666916

I can see lots of good reasons to pay the extra money, but they didn't fit what I need out of the site, so I was glad to save the money and very glad my friend told me about this secret, speakeasy-style system just as I was about to enter my CC info for Premium.

has sorting and filtering in Your Music

holy crap, gave up on this ever appearing on the mobile app a long time ago

There's a $4.99 student rate now too

Wait, really? Where's that? What's it offer?

https://www.spotify.com/us/student/

Sweeeeeet!

Hmmm, this is interesting but strange - I passed the student eligibility test, but when I try to go back and upgrade to Premium it's still talking about $9.99 a month.

what was your score?

i really love how there are two sizes for album art on the windows app: really small and extremely small

Does anyone know roughly what percentage of recorded music is on spotify? Like, how many albums have ever been released, and how many are on Spotify?

I went through a list of 1000 albums released in 1971 and around 500 were available on Spotify. So half.

That must have involved some serious typing. Thanks!

the amount of stuff getting put out through means other than a significant label now is so huge I bet that % is dropping

oh yeah, my percentage is probably wildly off the mark, even for stuff from the early 70s, as most private press and indie stuff only shows up if it was reissued at some point.

I wonder how many hrs of music youtube has by comparison

i bet you could listen to music on youtube for an entire day and never have to repeat a song

I went through a large bunch of my stuff. It came out around 70% on Spotify.

Certain licensing-sensitive genres like film scores are probably only about 10% present on spotify. But that's a genre where the majority of the music is out of print physically for the same reason.

the vast majority of ALL recorded music is out of print and/or has never been translated digitally so I'd be shocked if it was above single digit percentage points
http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub133/sum133.html

OTOH 85% of groovy Italian schlock soundtracks are represented so who gives a twat about crappy American soundtracks.

1989 isn't available so spotify should just quit imo

it was a good run

Red wasn't on there for a full calendar year and we all survived.

most of us anyway

I will wait until christmas when someone will def give me a starbucks gift card. I will then buy the album at starbucks with the gift card.

Dumb 1989 is better

$9.99 auto-rip from amazon is tempting, but then they're going to send me a cd! why don't they just offer the album digitally for $9.99?! what a disaster for the environment.

YouTube has the acetates of yer grandad farting in the bathroom, with all of the attendant good and evil about that...

I know this absolutely ACE garage rock album wasn't on Spotify in its entirety about six mod ago, so:

http://open.spotify.com/album/2rPBcCdWIUOo8iJ85Ks5Ed

Now you can hear We the People's "My Brother the Man"! And other fuzz punk gems!

is it true that apps are due to be killed?

not sure how i'm going to live without the blue note app :(

what apps do you mean?

I never really understood the apps but I usually just construct playlists like Albums Released in April of 1965

Giggle play's interface is so ugly, I'm tempted to switch back to spotify on aesthetics alone.

so Taylor Swift pulled all of her albums, eh?

I understand what pulling all streaming could do for an artist/label, but I don't get the singling out of spotify. I am just going to listen to Taylor Swift's old albums on rdio now. But I will continue to use spotify for everything else.

well it could obviously do something for her if she's in negotiations with them

dunno how effective an embargo is when there's plenty of other legal sources for what you're withholding

I guess I'm assuming that inciting spotify user outrage with spotify is the main play here. I don't know how much spotify makes off of plays from Swift's back catalog.

her new album sold more in one week than any other album has sold all year. it's very possible this is about driving up catalog sales by not letting spotify placate those who lost some earlier album on a broken ipod or whatever. or maybe they're trying to squeeze an advance out spotify, like the ones given up to get catalogs from rhcp, metallica, etc. it is funny that it's still on beats and the rest, but those services have far fewer subscribers

yeah not everyone is an streaming-service-savvy internet music nerd like we are, and a lot of those ppl wd probably spend $10 to hear her album if it wasnt on spotty

what's funny to me is that i'd usually argue album artists would benefit from putting singles on spotify, which is what artists like coldplay, black keys and beyonce have done, using the service like a jukebox/radio rather than a replacement for album sales. but in taylor's case she doesn't even need spotify as a promotional device - there's no debate that people will pay for it.

i mean, if you removed all but two-four songs from each album on spotify you'd still have an INSANE amount of music to play with, that's more than worth 5 dollars. only now record nerds and big fans would be forced to spend more than 5 dollars for the total package.

xpost:

Indeed, my ears always seem to be paying for it!

maybe taylor swift has an exclusive contract with beats?

that's definitely a potential outcome, esp considering taylor herself hasn't made any big political statement re all this, just big machine

good way to kill the competitors for the paymaster?

its so obvious why someone of her stature WOULD do this that it seems weird she'd ever consider putting her stuff on spotify at all

well as with metallica, rhcp, the john lennon estate, the advance might make it worth her while.

what's funny about any degree of backlash beyond "aw man my playlist went grey. rats." is i don't know why anyone would begrudge her maximizing her revenue from albums, as it's yet to be any worse than "you have to pay normal album price to get the album." it's just some people in 3 years decided they were entitled to all music ever for the monthly price of a happy meal.