Spotify - anyone heard of it?

- which confused me 'cause DEC sounds a bit like BBC.

White Lies had an advert when their rec was new.

And Lady Gaga too for a second.

U2 have a banner ad up just now, slightly ominously.

There was a while near the beginning where the only advert they were running was for Madagascar. 'I Like To Move It Move It', though great, is particularly obtrusive popping up two thirds of the way through a Sibelius symphony.

Arlington Road

Revolutionary Road?

If so: nope, I've heard nothing else. This business model worries me enormously.

There was that tax returns advert, but that's over now. They could start warning people about next year's maybe.

i hate the advert with the whistling guy so much

the only way they could do worse is if they got tiny from tile it all to do one(Grimly and Onimo might understand that one)

^ Think that's before my time north of the Border?

But FUCK YES, I hate whistling Direct Gov guy. He's just been on, actually. And I winced.

grimly its been around for 10 years at least but still on. I guess you dont have parents who listen to clyde 2 and you will avoid clyde1 on a saturday as you hate football.

Got it in one. Er, two :)

i dont mind whistling, its just that whistling with the teeth thing of that advert i hate. ugh. still not getting a tenner a month tho from me. i'll just not use it if it continues haha

This site seems useful.

For now, the co-founders are putting their own money into the company.

Can't accuse The Grauniad of being first with news here, but that's an interesting little line.

The guys behind it still seem to be basing the business model on the pay-for side of things, when it seems to me the free thing is what makes it.

link doesnt work

http://musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/spotify-why-it’s-been-so-successful-and-what-it-needs-to-do-next/

1. Key point not made clear by that article: Spotify allows me to listen to full-length albums with one click. Last.fm doesn't have anything remotely like as many full-length albums; also (and this might be a browser thing, but hey) it often gets pissy when a track finishes and require me to pop back to the requisite window before it starts playing the next one. Also: browser-based anything can suck dick for a whole heap of reasons.

2. Key point totally misunderstood by that article: mobile Spotify would rule so fucking hard that I'd shell out a goodly whack of cash for it.

yeah, if it's not a killer app already, mobile functionality would definitively make it so.

"Make it so!"

http://rodtsentrum.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/jean-luc-picard.gif

I have to say, despite my moans and gripes above, it really has been a revelation, both for old music and new. I sincerely, sincerely hope it doesn't fuck up :)

Me too. Almost seems to good to be true TBH, despite some reservations.

If I could get some of my shared playlists on the move I'd shell out too, aye. Though I'd need a 3g phone too, I guess.

Oh dear. Thought I'd have a listen to the last Spiritualized album -- which I never got round to at the time -- while I toiled over some books this evening. But Spotify ain't playing ball: it's stuttering and stopping as if ... well, as if it had just been hit up by thousands and thousands of new users and couldn't cope.

So I'm, er, using Last.fm to listen to it instead. This seems to mean pressing "play" again after every track, which sucks (perhaps I should try it in Firefox! Hmm) but at least it actually plays the songs.

I've seen this once before with Spotify ... think it was at the weekend. Again: if they're going to throw it wide open, they need the fucking bandwidth. Or do premium-account holders get streaming priority?

I bet they do. One song int the Hole "pretty on the inside "album and whistling fucker advert is on. Adverts every 4 songs now approx. bloody annoying.

it isnt worth £10 a month tho. £2 a month maybe.

xx-post That happened to me the other day, but assumed it was a problem at my end as my computer's pretty flaky at times.

(Although at other times I'll get time-outs off some website and think 'huh is my internet broken? has my router died' and spend ages desperately hoping nothing's actually broken and all the time I'll have Spotify running perfectly, signifying there is clearly nothing wrong with 'my internet' as such.)

I've not had that many adverts recently.

Thought I'd have a listen to the last Spiritualized album

This might have been a mistake, too.

Its a good album

I'm unconvinced so far.

It needs a month to sink in I found.

Hang on, why the FUCK is it not scrobbling properly? I'm listening to it FROM THE FUCKING LAST.FM PLAYER!

It's obviously one of those nights.

I had loads of Spotify time-outs last week, particularly around 6pm to 7pm. Late evenings were always OK. This week has been pretty much back to normal, though.

About the removal of tracks mentioned in the Grauniad article linked above: it should be unbelievable that the dinosaurs are still acting like dinosaurs, but it's sadly predictable. Even with meteorites hurtling towards them they will not change their ways.

The majors should have learned from Napster a decade ago and everything that's happened to them since and adapt to the new world. Instead they try to un-invent the wheel in a pitiful, Canute-like attempt to cling to their rusting old world.

The 1950s retail approach is dead and buried.

They all deserve to go bust.

Indeed. They're intent on protecting something that's past protection.

They don't seem to get that the Spotify guy (gonna take you high!) is OTM when he says their competition isn't the retailers but the pirates.

I still think the Spotify model is flawed as there isn't enough incentive to subscribe beyond avoiding the annoying whistling advert - but if it was portable I could see it being a huge success.

Marcello, the majors are all fully on board with Spotify. Interestingly, it's the artists themselves who have requested specific exclusion (the usual handful of suspects, basically), which suggests a more complex balance of power than I would have imagined. The rest of the deletions concern independent label releases where permissions hadn't been verified in the first place - the Spotify people were quite trigger-happy with their uploads when the service was still in private beta, and they see the situation as of their own making, and have apologised for it.

In the Guardian piece - or rather the headlines that accompany it -undue stress has been placed on the removals. Finger in the air estimate: the service has gone from 90% to 80% track availability at most, although this depends on how mainstream one's tastes are - last time I checked, all but two or three of the current UK Top 40 singles were available, for instance.

They're adding quite a bit of stuff at the moment too, just after the cull the track count was just over 2 million and a quick look shows they've added another 40,000 or so this week alone.

I'm on the free plan at the moment but I'd be tempted to subscribe just to make sure it doesn't go belly up. Tenner a month doesn't seem much really for unlimited music, cost of a cd I'd listen to a handful of times then stick on a shelf and forget.

I wonder if last.fm will respond in some way soon. It's got a much higher profile than Spotify but other than scrobbling, which I guess Spotify will implement sometime, there's little reason for using it now.

Spotify already scrobbles to last.fm - you can switch it on in the settings. It works perfectly - you even get a little Spotify logo on your last.fm profile page to tell you where the music's coming from.

last.fm is still your best place for recommendations and unexpected surprises - whereas Spotify has replaced most of my iTunes listening (and it's much less bloaty, of course).

Now all we need is someone to crack it and remove the thing that triggers the ads in the free version...

(shame)

xpost

I knew that Spotify scrobbles to last.fm, my point was that now I'm only using last.fm to check my listening stats (sad bastard that I am). The social networking aspects of last.fm haven't really mattered to me (antisocial bastard that I am), so I don't spend much time on there now. I'm happy to find stuff via playlists and random searches, I enjoyed a lot of your best of 2008 for example and can now find stuff in a much easier way than before, the Paarvoharju album for example.

Not sure if this has already been mentioned -

http://www.gustavsoderstrom.com/?p=45

^ former Yahoo Director of Business Development now heading up Spotify Mobile.

fucks sake an advert every 3 songs now

argh whistling bastard advert

going to get board of spotify quickly unless they get some less mainstream label stuff up. its good for mainstream music but if they need obscurer stuff.

-if

still atm I'm listening to CCR albums and all is well.

findanyfilm.comadvert fuck off every 3songs

And now 2 ads in succession. Anyone else getting this or is it just an anomaly?

In better news, some Spotify sites:
http://www.spotify.com/blog/archives/2009/02/19/spotified-cd-collection-and-some-other-community-sites/

From the spotify updates alert thing. I thought my playing artists I already own cds by was pointless enough, but no:

This morning a user posted his Spotified CD Collection on the blog which I thought was amazing and really creative. What he’s done is he’s taken a digital picture of his CD shelf and then linked each jewel case to that artists in Spotify. So now he can sit and look at his CD collection online and decide what to listed to but instead of sticking the actual CD into a player you launched the album on Spotify, so cool.

Also:

Some other fun sites that have appeared recently include: Spotinews, which highlights new additions to our catalogue, Spotify Search which is an addon for Firefox to lets you find music from any web page in Spotify and a web page that finds new albums recently added to Spotify that match the top 50 artists from your Last.fm profile.

We love stuff like this so if you’ve done something creative with Spotify please let us know, we’d like to see it and share it with everyone.

The last.fm thing seems to work quite well. It's told me that a load of old Animal Collective and Disco Inferno are up.