What do you think of Spotify?

surprised no ones commented

In my defense, I only got up an hour ago and it's not been out that long.

 

Right now it's pay or invite only. Though, there is an article on Lifehacker.com that tells you how to sign up for a free account. What little I know of it stems from when I used to live in the UK. I'm looking forward to playing around with it if only as a possibly means to find new music.

 

I remember reading about the recommendations algorithm it's supposed to use and how it's actually very elegant and accurate.

kinda surprised there hasnt been a clamouring for invites actually

Can you send people invites? I used the Lifehacker.com method to get myself an account. So far I'm not seeing how it's different from Rio, I thought it was more like Pandora in that it could recommend music to you (which is what I really want).

I think that Spotify offers a really good service.

 

Quality once you're a member is pretty good. You can stream music as long as you have an internet connection and there's a good choice of music. Some big omissions though - no Pink Floyd, no King Crimson but there are some unusual things on it.

 

You can download albums to your player so you can play them without an internet connection and if you want to, you can buy albums as a download, drm free and play them on any player.

 

How they managed to do this with the law I don't know, but I really like it. It's helped me get to know music that I wouldn't have tried if it weren't for Spotify.

 

I'd recommend it.

 

Ian

I plan to skip it. I don't want to hear ads and I do not want to pay more for the premium service.

Further, I already have a fair collection of music and will continue to add to it. Used CDs are turning up for $1-$2 these days, so I'll continue to pick up a couple each week.

The ads are visual in the app. I don't believe they are audio. At least, I hadn't heard any.

 

So far my issue is that the only way to find new music is either to try out someone's published playlist or have friends recommend it to you via the app. Which does me no good at all. Maybe I'll try Pandora as Spotify doesn't seem to be the answer. People are saying it's the solution to digital music but I think it's missing one big part. There doesn't seem to be a solution for people like me, who don't know that many people who's music tastes are anywhere close to theirs (most of my friends prefer top 40's rubbish) so recommendations like that aren't going to help. And I don't know who to follow for good ones.

 

If someone could implement something like Pandora into Spotify it'd be perfect. But unless I'm mistaken (and I really, really want to be) it's not.

 

That and streaming on mobiles is only handy if you don't use subways so I'm still going to keep most of my music on my iPod.

I have slacker premium, completely blew my mind how awesome it is, do you remember a few years back when they said people would own no music and just pay to use it? That is close to what slacker premium is, it is incredible, epic, awesome, and getting better all the time. I have Pandora one, and I'm gonna let it rot, for Slacker really out did themselves this time.....

 

^^ I should mention, Slacker lets you cache stations, and slacker premium lets you play albums (selection is decent and growing) artists, on demand, lets you create playlists with music YOU DON'T OWN and load it on your device, for playback at your leisure, without an internet connection (PERFECT for Itouches, subway riders) why people are still using Pandora is beyond me (slacker has better music too, pandora plays weird remixes and stuff without telling you)

I'm on spotify's website... they mention nothing about radio... you have to pay with paypal or a debit card, what a pain in the @$$, slacker just gets added to my phone bill...

Edited by BattleBrat - 7/15/11 at 12:12am

I signed up for an invite, but didn't get one today :(

 

Hopefully I get one soon, I'm willing to try it out because of all the hype.  However, I'm probably gonna try it out for a couple days, then go back to my personal collection of music.  (Kinda how I tried out Google+ this whole week but probably won't use it anymore)

I just bit the bullet and bought premium. I'll play with it at work tomorrow... I don't think it will compare well against slacker, but I just bought 2 4th gen ITouches, and I need to keep my options open...

I'm ready to cancel on Rdio. Spotify sounds noticeably better, and I quickly found a few albums not on Rdio.

 

Question: Is there no way to tell which music is 320k? It all sounds good, but I'm a bit irked. I've read anywhere from less than 40% to well over 50% has been made available as 320k. It's possible false/misleading advertising on their part.

http://www.spotifyclassical.com/2011/07/dear-spotify-please-give-us-premium.html?showComment=1310694597584#c323909505152797955

 

"For the non-classical stuff, only 7 out of 25 tracks are in 320K. And other than the random tracks, which is all in 160K, all other songs are selected from their newest/hottest catalog...For classical music, it seems that only the Sony catalog is available in 320K."

ChiComm4: I don't know of a simple way to determine the bitrate.  I ended up checking the total network traffic while listening to a single song (every OS has a different method)  results ended up averaging to ~320kbp/s the couple times I tried.  

 

In my (half day of) experience, most tracks do sound quite good, but the ocassional track does not. I have yet to figure out if those cases simply represent the source material (I haven't been streaming many songs I am familiar with), or 160kbps material. 

 

There is an active support discussion regarding the classical music results you posted:

http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/why_so_little_music_available_at_320_kbps?utm_medium=widget&utm_source=widget_spotify

 

Spotify posted a not quite descriptive reply this morning but it is promising:

"It is true we say all our music will be available in 320 kbps, but it takes some time fro the new songs. All music we get is in lossless format. All music is intended to be converted to three different qualities. We get thousands of songs each day, and the converting process is always chewing new data. Surely some songs might not be converted yet, but I can tell you we're doing all we can to provide the users with 320 k ogg vorbis on every song!"

 

Might be worth following that thread to see if any details get mentioned.  In the meantime, I'm going to listen to more music...

 

Cheers

Brad