Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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

well they're worth something in that they're more likely to be converted into a paying user if spotify works well

Are free accounts still unrestricted in the US? When it switched to 10 hours/month (or whatever it is) in the UK, a lot of people jumped ship but I assume some proportion were incentivised to subscribe.

I had a free account and then it ran out of freeness so I got a paid one, I think you just get a few months or something

Really? I've had a free account for a while now. I guess I don't use it that much though.

Good article by a Galaxy 500 dude on what Spotify does (not) do for artists:

http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8993-the-cloud/

Oh and to be clear I still don't care.

I still do not believe it is Spotify's problem. They are legally offering this music. If artists are upset they should be bringing it up with their labels.

you gotta feel for damon but at the same time it's hard to square this:

"As businesses, Pandora and Spotify are divorced from music. To me, it's a short logical step to observe that they are doing nothing for the business of music-- except undermining the simple cottage industry of pressing ideas onto vinyl, and selling them for more than they cost to manufacture. "

with this:

"In fact, I subscribe to Spotify for $9.99 a month (the equivalent of 680,462 annual plays of "Tugboat") because I love music, and the access it gives me to music of all kinds is incredible."

that's to say 'the business of music' includes the consumer side of things too

Not harshing on the artist (well I guess I am kinda) but he's not getting anything from the vinyl edition of the tugboat 7" since they first got sold way back when. I'm under the impression small vinyl runs still often sell out these days?

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/27/spotify-the-social-network-arrives-begins-rolling-out-follow-features-to-users/

Rooting for Spotify, can't decide if I feel guilty about that or not.

had that follow tab for months

it told me to follow lana del rey. couldnt find a fuck off button.

i still don't have it

give me yours

months is an exaggeration but def a few weeks at least. I wouldnt say its a big deal tbh

I dont trust its recommendations one little bit either
http://i.imgur.com/us20Q6F.png

so you can have them markers!

skrillex is your favorite band

daniel ek knows you better than you know yourself

i was more upset about the xx and lana del rey

the last fm app is waaaaaaaaaay better

that seems like a company without a future but it's been here for a while and it's still around so

last.fm is great.

i just got this update. it says people are "following" me who haven't received the update. kinda strange.

the last fm app is waaaaaaaaaay better

no, the last.fm app on spotify is better at recommending than the new spotify feature

I got this today. Cheeky fuckers.

http://mikeatkinson.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/spotifyfail.gif

wow they know you so well!

I had no idea personal recommendations had been rolled out yet.

I just also subscribed to Mog. In large part bc they have the ECM catalog, which for me is no small deal.

Spotify doesn't seem to understand the whole point of recommendations is to introduce you to unfamiliar music you'd probably like based on what you listen to, not stuff that's all over the radio that you already know

if you've had spotify installed on your iphone since upgrading from iOS4 you might wanna uninstall it and reinstall again from the app store. have a feeling i'd been running the older version for iOS4 for ages when i could have had this slick new version!

They just released the Spotify app for my Samsung TV in the US, woo!

weirdly, for about a day this weekend, the whole pink floyd discography was available on spotify (the remasters)....now it's gone again....

but i listened to obscured by clouds on my phone you can't take that away from me

All still available on Mog.

Got the update today and now search seems helluva slow and clicking on artist link from search results doesn't do anything. Anyone else having problems?

Yeah search is bollocksed and the new interface is weird.