Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Tried it, but didn't work. Works ok looking at a single artist, but not a user afaik.

I see spotify has a web app now

I sometimes refer to it as "Snotify". Just letting you know.

I see spotify has a web app now

Oh yeah, I recently was told about MOG, which is pretty much the same thing as Spotify but browser-based (I think?) and has a slightly different set-up . I really don't have the time or attention to try and be on two different "social music platforms" and Spotify has pretty much replaced iTunes and downloading mp3s for me...

Anyone know if MOG is worth switching to? I kinda prefer a stand-alone application like spotify is, and it has built in audioscrobbling... But from what I hear the "cool kids" use MOG.

I used MOG for a bit a year ago. MOG didn't have the social/sharing side worked out as well as spotify at the time. perhaps it's changed.

MOG's ipad app was also hilariously bad. don't know if that's changed.

friend of mine swears by it. I don't know how their catalog or pricing compares to Spotify.

I use Spotify pretty heavily. Especially after I accidentally upgraded to iTunes 11.

No Kompakt and no Drag City are still the biggest holes as far as records I search for and then remember "d'oh, they still don't have that"

The biggest hole with Spotify for me is that every single track from a UMG label has some weird defective codec thing where it sounds like it's being heard through a table fan (kind of a rapid-rate whooshing that's especially audible on elements such as cymbals, chorus, reverb decay, and strings at a moderate dynamic level. Motown, Deutsche Grammophon, ECM, Decca, it's just a giant swath of classic records fucked up.

It's not specific to Spotify either, I first noticed it on UMG tracks from eMusic and Amazon MP3. Seems like when Universal went through the humungous task, several years ago, of converting all their holdings to MP3 in order to enter the digital sales realm, someone had something set to 'fastest conversion/lowest quality' or something.

aka the mistake was so huge that there's so question of UMG reconverting their entire library.

Computing power is pretty cheap these days. I can't imagine it would be that difficult to reconvert their entire catalog to MP3, assuming they were halfway smart about archiving everything in a lossless format the first time through.

Lewis OTM, noticed similar issues.

Is there a playlist or app or something that actually lists everything new added to Spotify? I subscribe to someone's weekly releases playlist but he misses a lot of stuff and the What's New doesn't have nearly everything that's new...

There really should be something that plugs into your Last.fm or w/e and tells you about new-on-Spotify releases. There's this I guess, trying it out now: http://spofm.net/

anyone having issues with the browsing function today ?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/business/media/streaming-shakes-up-music-industrys-model-for-royalties.html?hp&_r=1&

Even for an under-the-radar artist like Ms. Keating, who describes her style as “avant cello,” the numbers painted a stark picture of what it is like to be a working musician these days. After her songs had been played more than 1.5 million times on Pandora over six months, she earned $1,652.74. On Spotify, 131,000 plays last year netted just $547.71, or an average of 0.42 cent a play

...

Complicating the issue, each type of service pays different rates. Pandora’s are set by law. Spotify declined to comment on its rates, but according to a number of music executives who have negotiated with the company, it generally pays 0.5 to 0.7 cent a stream (or $5,000 to $8,000 per million plays) for its paid tier, and as much as 90 percent less for its free tier.

The companies behind streaming are ballooning quickly. Pandora, with 67 million regular users, is publicly traded, with a market capitalization of nearly $2 billion, and Spotify’s investors have reportedly valued the company at $3 billion. Yet so far they have contributed relatively little to the American recording industry’s $7 billion bottom line.

In its last four reported quarters, Pandora paid $202 million in “content acquisition costs,” including licensing fees, and Spotify recently announced that it has paid $500 million in royalties since its inception. Downloads, by comparison, had $2.6 billion in sales in 2011, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

For those whose income depends on royalties, the biggest concern has been whether streaming cannibalizes CD and download sales by offering a cheap or free alternative.

Cliff Burnstein, whose company, Q Prime, manages Metallica and other major acts, said that even if streaming hurts sales, all is not lost as long as the number of paying subscribers continues to climb rapidly.

“There is a point at which there could be 100 percent cannibalization, and we would make more money through subscriptions services,” Mr. Burnstein said. “We calculate that point at approximately 20 million worldwide subscribers.”

Metallica recently announced an exclusive deal with Spotify.

I've bought more records (many of which were used, I'll admit) since I started using spotify. I bought several new Blue Note reissues last month solely because of the ILM Jazz poll and my ability to quickly listen to the placing albums on spotify. If they find a way to make spotify sustainable for artists and I end up paying more for the service, that's great. I won't complain. But if some quiet car riding contingent finds a way to ruin this model, I will never forgive them. fuck your downloads.

(I will disclose that my future career will benefit from a sustainable increase in bandwidth demands on data centers. But streaming video will make that happen anyway.)

spotify is horrible for artists and lacks any form of curatorial instinct or interest in remedying either of these issues; i'm inclined to think something better will come along but i'm absolutely an addict

The curatorial part comes from the sharing/subscribing. I think that i prefer it that way. Mog had better guest lists and suggestions, but the lack of sharing/collaboration was a bummer. The spotify apps are also better.

i think he means how a lot of artists' old records are randomly missing even when they're on the same label as the available ones and thus clearly licensed

spotify et al aren't going to ever be 'sustainable for the artist' - or at least the avant cello player types - because people just don't value music the same way they did before it became just another form of 0s and 1s. remember the prison riots whe netflix raised prices a few bucks?

but does spotify hurt an avant cello player so much?

I guess your argument is that spotify has devalued music, and all artists that cannot generate an income outside of their recorded work (such as avant cellists) are hurt.

nah music was already devalued, spotify's just offering it at the going rate

which is nothing

Leftsetz is convinced one of these services will eventually have enough subsribers to pay some musicians some money

Make a record that sticks, you'll get paid by streaming services for the rest of your life.

Which one?

Could be Spotify, MOG/Daisy or Deezer

the other thing that doesn't really get addressed enough is the supply side of this. there is a lot of music out there, there are a lot of musicians out there. there are only so many hours in the day to listen to music and so once everyone who values music enough to pay $10 a month for it is on spotify etc it becomes something of a zero sum game. like, when spotify adds the beatles that's going to hurt every musician on spotify who isn't paul mccartney or ringo starr.

Is the $ per stream linear with respect to streams from the same user? If you get 0.5 cents per stream, artists should get a spotify account, play one of their 2 minute tracks continuously for 24 hrs of every day, and collect $1,300 per year. open 25 accounts on 25 cheap computers.

I still don't think people are seeing the numbers right. A half penny per stream might not be so bad. The model I've used before is of an album that sells 10,000 copies. It has ten songs on it, so if everyone plays the album all the way through, that's 100,000 songs played. Over time, if everyone plays the album ten times, that's 1,000,000 songs played.

If it's an album that's streaming, that's $5,000 income on the million streams. Is $5,000 income so bad on the equivalent of an album that sold only 10,000 copies? Especially considering that there was no manufacturing and distribution involved?

I still don't think people are seeing the numbers right

Sorry, this sounds pedantic.

Is the $ per stream linear with respect to streams from the same user? If you get 0.5 cents per stream, artists should get a spotify account, play one of their 2 minute tracks continuously for 24 hrs of every day, and collect $1,300 per year. open 25 accounts on 25 cheap computers.

!

these companies take precautions against fraud, including little 'are you still listening' notifications and I'm sure if someone tried to listen to the same avant cello artist for a week straight, spotify would look into it

tho it'd be curious if an artist w/ a moderately large fanbase were like 'dear dedicated fans please listen to me on spotify...a lot...wink wink'

I'm using the free version of Spotify at the moment. I already pay for the Rhapsody premium service. I'm noticing a lot more albums from 2013 available on Spotify than Rhapsody. Rhapsody must not pay shite.

Is there anywhere that defines what exactly constitues a 'play' in all these services' numbers? Is it when the song is completed? Loaded? Played through at least 15%? I'm basically wondering if sampling a track for a couple seconds or even minutes and then skipping it counts.

spotify doesn't pay per play, it's part of the reason they don't have transparent statistics on most played tracks

where did you read that spotify doesn't pay per play

what fucks me off the most about spotify is that it lists the date of an album as the date it was made available on spotify, rather than the date of release. i.e. duke ellington and louis armstrong "together again" is listed as 2012 rather than 1966

So it turns out I'm not crazy, my ears weren't playing tricks on me, and there is a reason just about all spotify tracks (and emusic and amazon downloads etc) originating from UMG labels sound weird and fluttery. It's not, as I presumed, a defect in the codec they used to digitise their holdings; rather, it's a deliberately introduced, ostensibly 'inaudible' sonic watermark. Even the flacs you can buy of UMG material from sites like Passionato have it. The only way to get a good-sounding file of a UMG track is to... yes... buy it from UMG's own webstore. Where they only offer a scant sliver of their material anyway.

Mystery was unraveled here:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=89818

And neatly summarized here:

http://www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermark

So yeah do not ever pay money for a digital file of anything on Island, Motown, ECM, Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Def Jam, Blue Note, Impulse, the list goes on and on and on. And if yr listening to it on Spotify, yes it sounds fucked up on purpose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Music_Group_labels

(This all belongs just as much on the RIAA Armageddon thread I suppose, since the watermarks are supposed to be a way for the label to know what digital vendor an illegally shared file was originally bought from).

i've never understood why articles like the one just linked always seem to compare spotify's royalty rates to album or single sales when radio play is arguably a more appropriate comparison

if i buy a CD, i pay for it once and that's it. if i play a song on spotify, that play "counts" for the artist every single time.

xpost whoa that is fuuuucked! up!

why would the sonic watermark need to last the whole song? couldn't it be .1 seconds long and still do the job

it's deeply fucked up and kind of puts me off the digital delivery mode altogether, I mean this weird sound has been driving me crazy for ages!

xpost that's a good q and I think it's not on every second of a track, but on periodic swathes of it?

Yet another reason that I buy CDs and make my own rips.

it's pono or bust for the lot of us

porno or bust?!?

That's especially lame that they did that on the FLAC versions too, which are supposed to be lossless.

i may well be wrong on the per play point
but they're pointed about not sharing those stats

the thing I didn't know until that Times article is that Spotify pays a different royalty rate for whether the play was a free account or paid

it generally pays 0.5 to 0.7 cent a stream (or $5,000 to $7,000 per million plays) for its paid tier, and as much as 90 percent less for its free tier.

since only 25% of accounts are paid that seems like a huge percentage of plays that aren't worth shit really

also insane that the Gangnam Style youtube video has made $8 million