Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I'll never buy anything from Suitopia.

No shit - and that is the only ad I hear, other than Spotify trying to sell advertising. I've no idea what their costs are, but if they are making 14p a month from each user then I cannot imagine the service can possibly be sustained for very long:

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

I'm not trying to revel in schadenfreude over this; Spotify is the *only* streaming music service I use at all and in many ways it's superb. But I just cannot see how they make any money, or how they can possibly pay the licensing on the tracks from such a low income.

Spotify's demographic is around 40, and precisely the sort of impulsive media buyer defined by 50 Quid Bloke.

What on earth is wrong with suitopia guy's voice?

lol at new suitopia ad being an apology for previous ad

i have actually heard two or three different ads on this now!

REALLY ANNOYING: if you turn the volume on ads down below 40% they pause until you turn back up
ANNOYING AND KIND OF CREEPY: if you mute sound in yr OS spotify recognises this and again pauses the ads

also, really, really, really bad hot compression - anything with an isolated drum hit really really hurts to listen to

subscribers now get twice the bitrate quality btw

i think default compression is 160bkps

i mean range compression, it feels like some of that is going on. listening to music on spotify is more painful than listening to it via VLC player or similar. maybe it's me.

oh wait, there's a 'volume normalisation' box to uncheck

That chap on the ad singing David Watts is a champion tool, isn't he?

so now that I'm living in France I can use this thing, right? but I guess I need an invite? I filled out the form on spotify.com but is this like gmail where someone who's already using the service can invite others? and if so, would someone here invite me?

you should be good to go sans invitation

ok cool

looooooool if you turn the volume right down during an advert, the advert pauses XD

I went premium last month. Worth every penny. And you now get 320k streaming.

that's odd. so are they compressing the files as they stream them? or do they have both 320/160 versions stored somewhere?

if the area next to my hifi wasn't some sort of black spot for our wireless connection i'd def sign up for premium @ 320kbps.

also spotify has done wonders for the middle8haters/30secADD/girl talk fans. i'd love stats on what percentage of each song is played in full.

re: the 320kb streaming, could you feasibly record the stream from your computers soundcard and save each track as a 320 mp3? would it be perfect quality or would it degrade somehow?

it would degrade but not significantly. i'd probably re-encode it lower anyway as it doesn't seem worth having at 320 if it's not prime source.

seriously, this application makes my ears hurt

nice to see they had the jazz composers' orchestra record on there tho

how would it degrade, is it just something the pc soundcard does and you can't avoid? the end result would be better than a 128 wouldn't it?

The most tiny of tiny gripes (that still gets to me sometimes): The song progress bar at the bottom is sensitive far outside of the actual knob-moves-in-slot area. Thus, when only the bottom of the Spotify window is visible behind the bottom of another window on my screen, and I click on it to bring Spotify to the foreground, I usually accidentally skip to somewhere else in the track.

how would it degrade, is it just something the pc soundcard does and you can't avoid? the end result would be better than a 128 wouldn't it?

it's like taking a screen grab of a hi-res jpeg and re-saving that. it won't match the quality of the original source because any compression process (based on already compressed material) never can, but it would probably be equivalent to 256 ie not a big deal.

Yes. Though it would obv depend on how the rippage occurs. The thing is that soundcard-ripping is probably already one decompress-compress removed from what was sent to the computer. (Also, sounds from other computer activity -- email alerts etc -- will/may then also enter.) However, I've never really understood why it is not easy to simply intercept the received bitstream and just save that? Proprietary formats instead of eg mp3?

would say why record anything from spotify anyway? doubt there's much on there you couldn't get off slsk (latest version), often quicker

Yeah, this is the Big Thing -- perceived cost of disk space, cheap as it is, will go below perceived insurance cost of "omg what if ubiquitous net disappears!?" very soon. Ie: why hoard musics when you can just summon them from the cloud?

> would say why record anything from spotify anyway? doubt there's much on there you couldn't get off slsk (latest version), often quicker

or you could, y'know, *buy* some cds...

no they suck

better than mp3s

why hoard musics when you can just summon them from the cloud?

yes - this is what Spotify does so well which is why the whole question of people laboriously ripping songs through either the soundcard or a program like AudioHijack is moot - if Spotify works as it should, it makes that activity feel like pointless time-wasting from the get-go

i just feel like it should have been ASCAP or PRS who came up with this, since Spotify is essentially a monthly license fee to listen to music

yeah, reason i ask is for sampling/re-editing purposes, not just for casual listening. and as good as ssk is, it's hard to find songs in decent quality, especially 50s + 60s (and most pre-00s even). plus having to wait 3 days for ssk's crappy wishlist function to come up with a song vs spotify + 3 clicks (record/stop/save)

i don't actually use spotify at the moment btw, just curious if it's any use for the above. is there any chance of a particular label suddenly deciding to remove all their material from the service?

yes there is, i believe a few have done it

i'm guessing you use a PC (since mac ssk doesn't have wishlist) but Audio Hijack for Mac is pretty fabulous at ripping whatever from wherever, as long as it's going through your computer, and there's little to no real degradation, though my ears are very tolerant

Tracer Hand, don't you live in France or somewhere? You can probably get Spotify there - I think they call it "Le Spotify".

It's been great for educating me about solo McCartney lately, but the adverts have become more and more frequent, and largely irritating. Ads for Spotify, call Spotify, If I Ruled The World and other mobile-phone BS, Alcohol: Know Your Limits by some tosser girl whom you want to disobey because of her horrible voice. It is all starting to make me think of subscribing.

Or is there something good about the horrible adverts, as a form of punctuation, or mortification?

if Spotify works as it should, it makes that activity feel like pointless time-wasting from the get-go

i did use spotify to record some sound effects type stuff tho (crowd sounds etc.)

Yeah, the creative use rather than listening, that I get. Didn't think of that, because it's not a thing I do.

from a listening point of view, the fact that some labels are actively taking down their music worries me too. as it gets bigger this could become common and doesn't make it much of a comprehensive 'cloud'.

thanks for the Audio Hijack tip, TH. i've got a mac as well so i'll get it for that. isn't there a pc equivalent? are soundcard rips done on a pc somehow worse quality than a mac?

brings me to another question for which i've never been able to get a satisfactory answer. if i take a 192kbps mp3 and stick it in soundforge then save it again as a 192kbps mp3, is the resulting mp3's bitrate the same as the first or are we losing quality somehow, like when you photocopy an image over and over? i'm guessing not, because it's a digital process and surely all the frequencies that a 192kbps mp3 deals with will be transferred over in full to a 2nd gen copy. do we have any pro sound guys on ilx who can answer this?

from a listening point of view, the fact that some labels are actively taking down their music worries me too. as it gets bigger this could become common and doesn't make it much of a comprehensive 'cloud'

Ach, I don't think so. I read something the other day -- if I wasn't about to head out the door I'd look for it -- suggesting that, thanks to streaming music services (not just Spotify but also YouTube), "the kids" are now turning their backs on illegal downloading and just listening to shit off the net as and when they want to hear it. (Yes, I know YouTube isn't exactly a paragon of copyright laws, but hey.) I assume most labels see Spotify as a medium- to long-term deal: it might not be making them cash at the moment but it's something they can probably turn to their advantage a damn sight more easily in the future than they could -- say -- Torrents.

Of course, the music industry is also renowned for being fucking cretinous, so I could be way off the mark there.

do we have any pro sound guys on ilx who can answer this?

yeah, can see why spotify is more appealing to the music industry than torrents/p2p. youtube had the whole thing with labels taking down their music videos though, it seems it's still a delicate balance, for now.

thanks siegbran, can you link to any articles/studies about this? how great is the loss each time, and what's the best way around it? ie. save each subsequent file at 320 or wav? is it the case that re-saving a 192 mp3 x number of times would result in an mp3 of nothing more than white noise?

Spotify sets its sights on iPhone

This is a game-changer. If they had this in the US, I would definitely pay for it.

There will be no Spotify iPhone app, because Apple will never allow an app that relies on a direct server connection, rather than using a proprietary app. Or at least that's what a much-more-techy-than-me friend said to me.

― zero learnt from nero (Neil S), Thursday, April 2, 2009 1:33 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark

http://www.spotify.com/blog/archives/2009/07/27/spotify-for-iphone/

It's still not publicly available, is it? I wouldn't put it past Apple to raise some kind of last-minute objection.

They'd be crazy, but ...

After having the ad drilled into me all day yesterday, I have now registered as a blood donor and booked an appointment for tomorrow lunchtime.

I WILL save premature baby Anna.

Good work Spotify.

fuck that, i'm still after a suitopia suit

p.s fuck you, adam from spoddify