Be Excellent To Each Other

Demo of the iPhone app:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNCb1IdmJ_0

Looks very nice. Has a really neat offline mode.

Anyone else noticed an increase in the ratio of ads to music on Spotify of late? I'm sure it used to be one ad for every six or seven songs, now it seems to be one ad for every two or three songs. Not that I can complain really - I guess they're just making more money either way (increased ad sales and more people getting sick of the ads and subscribing).

How much is the subscription?

Tenner a month.

I pay it gladly. It's an awesome service.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8507885.stm



GRR.

I stand by my earlier comments.

I'll just pirate any of their stuff then, on principle.

(the principle being that I'm too used to not paying for it now)

Well, it's over a year since you made them and it hasn't gone bust yet.
And I've listened to a fuckload of free ("free") music in that time.

I would imagine Spotify negotiated a licence to the content that lasted, ohh, I dunno, a year or so? So here we are, at (presumably) their first ever contract renwal, and the content provider has walked away from the deal, probably because there isn't enough money in it, probably because Spotify don't have a compelling business model.

I suspect it's all downhill from here for Spotify.

And you wonder why Warner don't want to renew!

I suspect Spotify will do just fine but the free service will be further curtailed in some way.

Warner have always been the first amongst arseholes.

A similar program with independent and unsigned bands version would be excellent especially if it was a social network as well. Cost of running and licenses wouldn't be anywhere near as high and would be more of a tool to promote bands than to make money for them.

Garageband used to be really good for that. Plus, back in the day if you reviewed enough songs you'd get a free CD off CDBaby. I usually ended up getting one by a band I'd reviewed & liked.

For a tenner a month Spotify is a truly astounding bargain, anyone who pays a subscription to Sky, but won't cough up for Spotify is either really fucking stupid, or deaf.

We signed up for the premium version mostly on principle, i.e. it's so damn good it deserves to be supported - (we pretty much have all the music we want on MP3 already, and since we're at the age now where 'all new music is crap' we don't need to have the latest X-Factor miscreants at our fingertips) - although despite that we get a fair bit of use out of it, Spotify is installed on every PC in the house and even if we have the track we want to listen to on the MP3 collection on the NAS, we use Spotify anyway as there are always the interesting links to other bands and tracks you hadn't thought about.

I'd be happy to see them nobble the free version in some way to make the premium version more attractive, but at the same time still keep the free version viable for folks who genuinely can't find the tenner per month.

If Spotify fails due to a lack of paying subscribers then the general public are thick cunts who deserve everything they do or don't get. For years the pro-piracy lobby always had the 'well the pirated stuff is easier to use and less locked down than the paid for stuff' argument to fall back on, Spotify blows that out of the water, and delivers what is basically all the music in the world (yes I know give or take, but when was the last time Pink Floyd did anything that didn't induce vomiting?) for a trivial subscription to any internet connected PC (which, let's face it, we pretty much all have).

If that doesn't tempt the 'won't pay' lobby into coughing up a few quid, then maybe 'the industry' was right all along and we're just a bunch of robbing freeloader bastards.

Spotify don't carry the majority of my musical tastes as I'm wikkid underground, so therefore it is a bag of shite.

You can get an exception too then I suppose, although I still think it deserves buying into on principle.

I like it but I hardly use it. I mostly listen to music in the car and I don't have or want an iPhone. Also maybe someone who has a Sky subscription and not a Spotify one prefers watching telly to listening to music.

The principle of paying Leona Lewis some more pennies? GTFF.

But on the other hand, you can get all you need from the charity shop:

That's a top class album.

She is deep underground.

As you very well know, the principle of establishing that a massive music catalogue can safely be made available to the 'pirating masses' and that if you make it good enough, and easily accessible enough, and charge a reasonable fee, people will be prepared to hand over real cash for it.

If Spotify becomes a massive commercial success (which admittedly looks unlikely now), it opens the doors to doing the same with films, games, books, television archives, you name it - the technology is already there, it's just that the companies who own the copyright on all the material don't think there's any money in it, and it looks like they may well be right

[mind boggles]



[Mind boggles again at the Youtube comment "Those who think Bernard was really a racist have no notion of what comedy is all about. Narrow minded bigots themselves. I've seen black people in Manning's club laugh louder than anyone."]

Call me old fashioned for enjoying the chase of getting some nice rare ltd edition music physical product rather than having it widely available to "the masses".

plus you can't sample the shite out it, stick it on turntables or make a mix up in Ableton with it.

I do more with music than just listen to it, I've touched on that before too.

Spotify doesn't even have my favourite album of the last, ooh, eight years?

Which is..?

I think I've used Spotify Free about three times in the last year, so no way is it worth a tenner a month in my eyes. I'd rather buy an album a month (digital or physical) and 'wear the tape out' than have the world's 'entire' music library at my fngertips and barely scratch the surface.

Doing a quick search now and there's so much missing from my CD collection, too. I'd go as far as to say that Spotify is aimed at the casual music fan who listens to the radio at work or 'Sit Down' by James as they've had it stuck in their head all day.

*edit* I have to admit it's been very useful for looking up all the 50s rock 'n' roll songs I need to learn, though.

I use spotify almost every day but there's no way I consider it worth paying £10 a month to listen to stuff I've already got for the most part. I can just use my existing Mp3s instead.

The adverts have got pretty annoying, especially the NME/Shockwave ones (can't be that effective as it took me a while to remember what it was advertising) but it's going to come to me stopping using rather paying for subs.

£10 seems utterly extortionate to me. I suppose it can save hard disk space.

Potemkin City Limits, by Propagandhi.

Not sure, as I haven't checked in a while, but I don't recall it having my favourite album of last decade either (Lift To Experience's The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads).

Sounds like student music to me.

It's got Supporting Caste, which that song is on.

Known, but the album (which doesn't have 'Potemkin City Limits', the song, on it) is a different thing.

How confusing

I have a seven day free trial of Spotify Premium.

First impressions:

On computer - awesome, though obviously would prefer it to be more comprehensive.

On mobile phone - intermittently awesome. Shit on trains, and oddly also whilst walking across London Bridge.

In summary - at the moment veering towards "No, I won't pay for this".

Storing your playlists locally solves this.
Oddly though, I've never know it not work while I've had reception. I can plug it into the car and drive from London to Bedford without it getting upset.

How do I go about doing this?

The storing of playlists, not driving to Bedford... you know SOMEONE was going to say it!

Look at your playlists and hit the big button on the top left marked "Offline playlists", then choose the ones you want to store locally. You need a Wifi connection (unless you change your settings).

http://www.spotify.com/int/blog/archive ... eneration/

Spotify goes all social networky and full blown media playery. Updates rolling out over the next few days. Could be interesting? May I suggest folk adding their username to this thread so we can all do the spotify bezzie thang?

My spotify username is, unsurprisingly, 'pupil'.

Shockerly, I am 'Grim...'

Haven't used Spotify for a little while now but I'm ukdevil (which is also my last.fm username if you want to mock my music tastes)

That's quite a blast of features, there, especially the bit about turning your Spotify client into a proper media player by importing your locally stored songs.

I'm MalabarFront not signing up to Facebook.

Bet you can't guess my spotify username!

Mine is "Nobbledy" - same as my last.fm username

Hopefully we'll be able to set up a Beex group.

myoptika

I'm Governmentyard, no-one has enabled Spotify social, apparently.

No update for me yet.

I'm Zio_XX, but there's absolutely nothing of note in my Spotify at the moment anyway.