Spotify - anyone heard of it?

700 year old gripe or something, annoyance may mostly be from other apps:

when I in Windows click the X in the upper right corner of a window, it means KILL. Not SLEEP IN A TRAY REQUIRING MORE EFFORT TO KILL.

Apart from that, well happy with the Spotify tbh.

and apparently now the richest man in asia (li ka-shing) has invested 50 million dollars in spotify. in other words, this thing probably isn't going away...

Thanks, Crucialmemory.com!

hate that cunt that leaves the voicemail message saying "it's great but i can't put them on my ipod"

NO GUFF, YOU DUMB CUNT.
"I like the look of all the houses in my street but hey, how come I can't just walk into any one of them and make myself at home? This blows!"

Apple refuses the Spotify iPhone app.

Hmm, the article you linked doesn't seem to say that (I can only read the translation into English you used; I don't read Swedish). It just says that Apple is taking a long time to accept it, and that this suggests a problem. Or did I miss something?

For Spotify probably ended up in a "sour cream" for specific test rather than the usual sex.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

ok what the fuck is this kate moss advert

whistling cunt advert is allover tv now

ah jesus that tune is annoying

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someone's either seen nathan barley or needs to

Can someone send me an invite please?

I don't think you need an invite - but you do need to be in Europe

http://proxify.co.uk works for Ireland (not officially available here yet)

I'm in America :(

I invite you to Europe

new spotify pet hate — well, music advertising in general pet hate — playing five seconds of that's not my name before announcer is all "THIS dramaticpause IS THE TING TINGS!" — while you're collecting data on my listening habits how about you work out I KNOW THAT ALREADY

i am very angry about having free music!

can't be very good if they're giving it away

how do you search for specific labels?

Spotify app approved for iPhone

Yikes.

Hallelujah!!!

how do you search for specific labels?

Put label:labelname in the search box, with quotes around it if it's more than one word.

find spotify a bit of an anti-climax, like i was really excited by it when i first downloaded it now i only use it to play "if you wanna be happy" by jimmy soul when i get drunk.

I wondered why the last 3000 tracks on your last.fm was that song.

spotify for iphone not tht big a deal in practice tho - it'll chew batteries

Ya.

Spotify has turned my whole listening behaviour upside down. From using iTunes almost exclusively for my music, I now use Spotify 90% of the time (on my iPod I tend to listen to podcasts, not music). Maybe I"m just bored with my iTunes Library (and the effort that goes in to updating it), but Spotify is the path of least resistance for me.

Will it chew batteries even with cached playlists and so forth?

Presumably they'll roll out versions for Blackberries/other smartphones now? Or have Apple snagged them into some kind of exclusivity thing?

My excitement centres around being able to use Spotify in the office, as audio streaming is streng verboten around these parts. So battery life isn't a major issue.

Presumably they'll roll out versions for Blackberries/other smartphones now? Or have Apple snagged them into some kind of exclusivity thing?

― Tuncay Stryder (Matt DC), Friday, 28 August 2009 08:55 (48 minutes ago) Bookmark

I had been wondering why there's never been any talk of Spotify on any other phones. I can't see exclusivity though. I hope.

If there's enough of a market and money there, they might look into it. The iPhone is just now a no-brainer for developing apps, especially of the streaming media type, because of market share and enthusiasm. As far as Apple's concerned, they're a competitor of sorts and it was questionable whether they were going to get approved when the app store review process is such a black box.

I thought I read about some Spotify/Android thing going?

Yeah - at the end of the BBC story linked to above.

Does anyone know anything more concrete about what the finances of this are like for artists? The only thing I've seen is this Guardian article, which seems to suggest they're pretty bad:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/aug/17/major-labels-spotify

Have any other major (or even minor) artists had their catalogues pulled?

In Sweden, where Spotify has been running the longest, Magnus Uggla – well-established since the late 70s – has withdrawn his music from the service. On his blog he said that, after six months on the site he'd earned "what a mediocre busker could earn in a day". Regarding his record label, Sony Music, he says "after suing the shit out of Pirate Bay, they're acting just like them by not paying the artists". When he found out that Sony had 5.8% equity in Spotify he wrote: "I would rather be raped by Pirate Bay than fucked up the ass by (Sony boss) Hasse Breitholtz and Sony Music and will remove all of my songs from Spotify pending an honest service."

I was told by a guy who considered investing in Spotify to a significant level, and who therefore took a look at the books, that the company makes fourteen pence per user, per year and his prediction was that they'd be dead before the end of this year. That was before the iphone deal but I'm not sure whether he considers them any more viable an entity subsequently.

The problem it seems to me, and this may have been mentioned, is that the adverts aren't intrusively frequent enough to steer the user toward the subscription version. I guess it's a tricky balance but it seems to me if they had more adverts they'd generate more revenue from both versions of the program.

does anyone know offhand how long they've been offering the subscription model?

Yes to the above, and in my month or so of using it I've gotten mostly ads for Spotify itself. That can't be good for their bottom line.

i sometimes get 2 ads every 3 songs so im guessing the longer you use it the more ads you get, but for newbies they dont overdo the ads incase it puts them off.

It probably varies by country, too.

surely the majors would step in and save it from collapse given they're now in on it plus the supposed piracy deterrence (depends how much value they put on that i guess)

Free streaming at 160 seems like a miscalculation on their part, because 160 is fine enough for me to make subscribing unnecessary. If they streamed at YouTube rates, then maybe 10 euros a month would be worth it to me. I can't see how this is sustainable in its present (excellent) form.

Got very few ads to begin with, sometimes whole albums would go by with no ads. But now I get a couple every 2 or 3 tracks so obviously they've got some algorithm that increases them the more you use the service. May well be a good strategy since I'm now contemplating subscribing although I still think £10 is too much, at £5 I would have already done it.

I'm told by someone who knows a Spotify insider that the plan is to make it subscription only next year.

maybe Apple will just buy it

it does seem that a lot of people would pay half the current rate for same bitrate but just no ads - seems a reasonably happy medium

Are they making enough noise about the Premium bitrate? I'm an uber-fussy audiophile, and yet Premium through the hi-fi sounds indistinguishable from CD.

I mean, that's how I'd advertise it: to compete directly with the concept of buying and owning CDs, pointing out the value and convenience aspects.

I was told by a guy who considered investing in Spotify to a significant level, and who therefore took a look at the books, that the company makes fourteen pence per user, per year and his prediction was that they'd be dead before the end of this year.

― N1ck (Upt0eleven), Saturday, 29 August 2009 12:58 (2 hours ago) Bookmark

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/25/spotify_exclusive/

think he got the numbers wrong: 14p per month per user from ads. that's dwarfed by the earnings from premium subscribers, obviously. sounds like they're on course for £2.3m revenue in a year from uk users. averages out at £14 per user per year, but obviously there's a massive disparity between free and premium subscribers. i assume they're going to keep the free option attractive until they've got many more people signed up - 170,000 in the uk is still tiny - and then gradually shift people over to the pay model. (which is a bit like the "?" step that comes before "profit!" admittedly)

One strategy would be to start shifting new songs (say, within 6 months of release date) to subscription-only, and keep back catalog free. I think they do this now with pre-release material? I doubt this would be enough incentive for me, though. Or some albums/acts/labels could become pay-only. That would help the gradual shift of people to the pay model.