Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Moka you could ask them; can they please sort all the faux/karaoke versions of songs somewhere away from the original versions? and why there are so damn many of them. i don't understand who on earth listens to such things.

also maybe ask if they are aware that Andy Williams' To You Sweetheart, Aloha has a bad case of fluff on it's needle. check it out! http://open.spotify.com/album/018i8iXSEKbGGJCyXW0XWj
fluff starts at track 3 and gets worse on subsequent tracks, rendering the whole thing inaudible by about halfway in. someone at WORD magazine spotted this first.

spotify is banned from our network @ work, so i can't check stuff, but my teenkid has it.
when i ventured into his lair last week, i noticed that he was listening to deadmau5, and in the listing for the latest album was a single track that consisted of a 47 minute mix of the whole album.
does such a track bypass the adverts, and if so, then surely spotify aren't going to be wanting such paractises when posting new albums ?

Ask why Stardust's "Music Sounds Better With You" still isn't on Spotify.

and why there are so damn many of them. i don't understand who on earth listens to such things.

Nobody sits down to listen to them.. Some people's kids like to have instrumental versions so they can practice singing along with the lyrics they downloaded and printed off...

Moka you could ask them; can they please sort all the faux/karaoke versions of songs somewhere away from the original versions? and why there are so damn many of them. i don't understand who on earth listens to such things.

I think this has to do with license availability. Sometimes it's very hard to pursue the rights to songs by well-known performers so I guess they just settle for cheap knock-offs from royalty-free music sites which respond more quickly and explicitly about their pricing.

I'll ask about fluff and errors on recordings (I'm very interested to know from where and how they get their songs... used to think they were user submitted?).

when i ventured into his lair last week, i noticed that he was listening to deadmau5, and in the listing for the latest album was a single track that consisted of a 47 minute mix of the whole album.
does such a track bypass the adverts, and if so, then surely spotify aren't going to be wanting such paractises when posting new albums ?

At least for now, the adverts are only played after the track finishes... having a 45 minute mix song is surely a problem to them. A big part of the conversation I'll be having with them will be about their business model and advertising. I will let you know any fun facts I can extract from them.

Moka, if you could please ask him how a company that has become so huge in a short space of time, contributing to the "this changes EVERYTHING" with regards to music consumerism etc., is not ashamed of itself for offering such a crappy, useless interface! Changing the order of playlists for one would be extremely useful, and doesn't seem like too much to ask for.

Also: a way to change incorrect spelling would be nice, since so much artist names and titles are wrong. It would also benefit them, because half of the online complaining about Spotify seems to be about this (and not without reason).

Yeah not too fond of the interface either, but as you said it's probably because they probably grew too fast too quick... I hope they will be releasing something better this year that they intend to enter the American market. I'll ask them about the possibilities of users correcting info and their plans in changing in interface.

Mmmm I think you can change the order of the playlists by moving them up and down in the left sidebar with your mouse.

better searching for albums too

yeah you can change the order of playlists i think

Moka, could you ask them if there's any plans to store your listening history a la Last.fm? Currently it only stores what you have when your session is open.

In addition can you ask why some artist albums have the odd track missing?

god yes that's annoying. you go to play an album but 1 or 2 tracks are sometimes missing, sometimes the missing tracks are available to buy via download.

On playlist ordering: oh shi... sorry, it is indeed possible (now).

i never spend much time with Spotify (even though I regularly use it for spinning single tracks that I can't be bother to download)

one thing I don't like is when you save an album in your favourites, it will display all the tracks. so if you have saved 10 albums in your favorites list, it is already a mess. bad for browsing, and it will not give you a sort of C:/albums in separate maps easy browsing experience, if you see what i mean

Subfolders, I endorse that idea Ludo :)

You can put playlists into subfolders now. Not on the mobile client tho, which is annoying.

Spotify mobile is p buggy but i use it every day and still think it's great.

someone please correct me if i'm wrong, but what is the point of doing a label search if you can still only browse some random top 50 results?

they need to fix album & label searches quick smart (and make it easier than what you need to do now as i cant even remember how to search for a label or an album)

how difficult can it be to have an option in the search box to search for albums or labels

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2011/03/whatever_happened_to_mobile_mu.html

You can put playlists into subfolders now.

ah, will try later. thanks. :)

One other thing if there's time, can they get the artist names sorted? Type in LFO or Suede for example you get all the material by artists who share that name, so instead of classic Warp techno you get a silky smooth boy band, or vice-versa.

Are they working on any Genius-style recommendation systems? the "radio" is hilariously useless, as is the what's new.

How does the itunes/winamp gracenote thing actually work? Does gracenote have massive list of songs that go well with each other? In which case it shouldn't be too hard to pop into spotify.(not that I could do it,but you know.)

Where have Popol Vuh gone???

;_;

Is there a 2011 collaborative playlist I'm missing out on?

Seem to remember posting this exact same question upthread last year.

This has been running a while. http://open.spotify.com/user/miketd/playlist/1VYiyGaPHrDzTWeovieeAL

weird and rubbish that spotify isn't yet available for blackberry. anyone know why this is and if it's set to change? as a result im thinking if getting this grooveshark thing instead. would anyone recommend it and how does it differ from spotify?

Moka, ask them about how serious they are about their social sharing side of the interface.

its really cumbersome and currently will only search Facebook contacts.

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.