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Spotify is the reason why I don't pirate music anymore. I say this as someone who used to be involved in the scene (low level FXP couriering in the late 90s and

Spotify is the reason why I don't pirate music anymore. I say this as someone who used to be involved in the scene (low level FXP couriering in the late 90s and early 00s) and has gigs of release from the RNS, EGO, etc days. It's much faster and convenient to use Spotify. I also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar. My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - thanks jjgod) and go native. A music player is a frequently enough used piece of software to optimize for performance.

kbouw 9y ago
What performance issues do you usually run into on the current iteration of the app? Just out of personal curiosity so I can take note next time I'm using the application.
- dopeboy 9y ago
  Mostly it's millisecond lag when changing songs or opening up new playlists. I get that everything is on the cloud but maybe more aggressive caching would be helpful. If it were any other application, I wouldn't care. But because this is the second most frequently piece of software I use (browser being first), I'd love for it to be as performant as possible.
  - fascinated 9y ago
    I definitely miss the very old version of the app too. That one was written by the uTorrent creators - it was incredibly fast, felt great.
- lambda_lover 9y ago
  Not who you asked, but I notice a lot of lag when I'm searching/navigating/etc in Spotify. I understand that it's fetching a lot of this data from their servers, but the UI itself is also laggy when I'm browing local files, scrolling through playlists, etc, so it's not just serverside. Not to mention the SSD-destroying & CPU-hogging habits of the application. That being said, I still use Spotify because I really value the music discovery and algorithms... and nobody else offers a streaming service with a dark theme :)
jjgod 9y ago
Technically Spotify doesn't use Electron, they use a customized version of CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework): $ ls -lh /Applications/Spotify.app/Contents/Frameworks/ total 0 drwxr-xr-x 5 jjgod staff 160B Nov 7 2016 Chromium Embedded Framework.framework drwxr-xr-x 3 jjgod staff 96B Nov 7 2016 Spotify Helper EH.app drwxr-xr-x 3 jjgod staff 96B Nov 7 2016 Spotify Helper.app
AlphaWeaver 9y ago
Really? My only experience with Discover Weekly (and any other suggestion algorithms, i.e. radios, etc...) has been pretty terrible... It doesn't seem to suggest songs I like at all, and recently it seized upon one single song in one of my playlist and only plays covers of that song and the other songs in the album for my discover weekly for the past several weeks... I love Spotify, but I use Pandora sometimes _exclusively_ for music discovery, and then add to my Spotify.
- KallDrexx 9y ago
  This is my experience with Discover Weekly as well. Everyone seems to be really divided on how well their algorithms work, they either work really well or terribly. I think it's because the quality of signals their algorithm can key off of is so limited due to it being such a passive medium. There's no way to know if I listened to that track in full because I liked it or because I had it on in the background while doing other work and it wasn't distracting enough (usually the latter is the case for me). Furthermore if I skip a track they don't know if I skipped it because I didn't like it or I wasn't in the mood for that style of music, or I was just sick of that song cause I've heard it enough in the past X listens. There's no way to easily signal to spotify why I'm taking an action, and yet their algorithms are trying to make assumptions over every little action.
  - pertsix 9y ago
    Add songs to your library. It's given more weight than simple up-thumb/down-thumb.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      That may be why my recommendations seem to work so well, unlike a lot of other commenters on this article. For posterity, I have a little under 1000 tracks saved from 200 or so artists (of which I am following around half), around 50 favorite album playlists and about as many "I should give this album a listen" playlists. So not really a huge collection in absolute terms. It is very much focused on hard rock and metal, though.
paulie_a 9y ago
Your reference to fxp just made me incredibly nostalgic
- et-al 9y ago
  Same here, but I didn't know what FXP was. Initially thought it was another release group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol
- dopeboy 9y ago
  It was my first internet community. Brought me into the world of IRC and VBB and programming. The 12/11/01 raids kinda ended it, atleast for me.
tomc1985 9y ago
Their coverage of indie labels and the dance music underground still sucks. Plus I don't think their streaming is lossless and you can easily spot the difference with something as simple as a pair of $100 wireless headphones (NOT beats) hooked up to a $100 USB headphone amp.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  Their streaming is not lossless. There are also two different quality levels for streaming that you can choose in settings, ensure you've selected high quality, I'm not sure what the default is. Upon saying that, even with my Sennheiser HD 202s and Macbook built-in audio I can tell the difference between Spotify and lossless FLAC. My Australian internet is so bad that I probably couldn't even stream FLAC anyway.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    Default is 160kbps Ogg Vorbis, high quality is 320kbps. For the mobile app, it's 96, 160 and 320 for normal, high and extreme, respectively. Chromecast and the browser-based player both use AAC, at a maximum of 256kbps.
- kridsdale1 9y ago
  How do you hook up wireless headphones to an amp?
  - tomc1985 9y ago
    PC <- USB Amp <- Headphone Base station
- dopeboy 9y ago
  It's not lossless, you're right. I'm an audiophile too (E10K driving DT770s) and I've never done any A/B testing between a Spotify track and a FLAC equivalent. I'm curious how much the difference is.
  - 9y ago
voltagex_ 9y ago
Me too, but I'm worried about what it will mean for my music listening when Spotify goes away. I think the last time I tried to price a single one of my playlists, it'd cost me thousands to buy the songs and that's without trying to track down FLACs.
- sandos 9y ago
  Literally everybody uses spotify atleast here in Europe. I dont think its going away to be honest? Not for a very long time anyway.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    Spotify is a major cash cow for the labels, so it's in their best interest to keep it going. It wouldn't surprise me if they end up killing their golden goose out of sheer incompetence, though.
longerthoughts 9y ago
>My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - thanks jjgod) and go native. IIRC they moved to Chromium to ensure decoupled releases and faster iteration (starting at ~9:35: https://vimeo.com/85490944 https://vimeo.com/85490944).
yamaneko 9y ago
I don't pirate music anymore for the same reason. However, I also don't listen to music as I used to. I usually use Spotify to listen to what I already know, not so much to find new stuff. Before, I used to dive in depth into an artist/band, starting from their greatest hits. Once I got the band vocabulary, I'd download the albums chronologically and listened to every track, sometimes more than once until I got familiar with it. Now I don't do it with as much scrutiny, which is interesting since Spotify has all albums very well organized and even the discovery playlist. It would be much easier and better. Is IKEA effect at play? Without Spotify, I would only start another artist when I finished the current one. So, with Spotify it becomes an information management problem due to the large amount of albums available at a click. Or it could just be that my life has changed and I don't have a time slot dedicated to music anymore.
- spaceandshit 9y ago
  Have you seen the 'Browse' page? You'll find a lot of new music.
- alex_duf 9y ago
  I'm facing a very similar problem. Same story as you, I would buy MP3 or pirate if they weren't easily made available. But the amount of research I would put in the music I was listening to was enormous, making me proud of my collection. I was able to recognise any song in my collection in less than 5 seconds, give you the artist, how I discovered it and potentially an anecdote about them. Now I have playlists full of stuff I know nothing about. It definitively solved the music distribution issue, but I have trouble to be emotionally attached to the music I discover on Spotify. I think your theory about the IKEA effect is probably spot(ify) on
- cja 9y ago
  IKEA effect?
  - Anthony-G 9y ago
    It's an interesting phenomenon that you'll no doubt recognise. I first came across while doing an online behavioural economics course. Wikipedia has a good article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
zouhair 9y ago
I never could get used to their awful client. Coming from Foobar2000, I just couldn't.
gcardone_ 9y ago
> Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar. My discover weekly playlist ALWAYS contains at least one song in Portoguese and at least two in German. I speak neither of those languages, and I've never willingly searched and played songs in those languages (except for "99 Luftballons" once). I also get some terrible variation of "Here comes the sun" at least once a month despite not listening to The Beatles at all. [0] is the one that I hate the most. Spotify, please sthap. I can't take any more Portoguese, German, and "Here comes the sun" cover songs. [0] https://open.spotify.com/track/5PWh3rG5zWv7hVvWHRMbsf https://open.spotify.com/track/5PWh3rG5zWv7hVvWHRMbsf
- jsmeaton 9y ago
  Do you use the Like/Dont Like feature of discover weekly? That's helped tune my weekly lists for the better.
  - mancerayder 9y ago
    On Android?? Why do I not have this feature?
    - jsmeaton 9y ago
      I mostly use the desktop app on Mac. I don't have like/dont like available on the iOS client, so presumably it's not supported on mobile. I think it's a newer feature so maybe it just hasn't made its way to mobile yet.
    - wungsten 9y ago
      I have this feature on my Android. The thumbs up and down appear to the left and right of the big Play button on the Now Playing screen, only while you're listening to Spotify playlist/album radio.
- paddlepop 9y ago
  You may have had an auth token compromised. I used a dodgy third party Spotify Connect for Raspberry Pi library and had the same issue. Changing my password and expiring all current auth tokens returned my Discover Weekly back to normal after a month
jakecopp 9y ago
Does paying for Spotify actually help any artists meaningfully though? I've been wondering whether paying for a Bandcamp album every so often to match the cost of Spotify, and pirating music otherwise would actually benefit artists more. I've read that Spotify pays fractions of a cent per play, where as Bandcamp pays out quite well, better than iTunes and Google Play.
- lindner 9y ago
  Bandcamp is good if you know what you want and they do pay out really, really well. If you want a streaming service more like Spotify you might also check out Resonate Cooperative https://resonate.is/ https://resonate.is/ which has a stream-to-own model. Discovering new music is low cost, repeated listens double until the ninth, upon which you own the track outright. You can then download or stream that track for free. Still ramping up but I'm excited about their prospects.
  - eitland 9y ago
    That's a brilliant idea and a reasonable way to stream and own music IMO. Already signed up.
  - jakecopp 9y ago
    Awesome idea - do they have more than a couple of artists though? Personally I like a distinction between looking for music and having it DRM-free offline on my hard drive.
    - lindner 9y ago
      Still early days -- only 2300 artists on 296 labels so far; but growing. It fits somewhere between Soundcloud, Bandcamp and Spotify. https://resonate.is/in-the-details/status/ https://resonate.is/in-the-details/status/
- atupis 9y ago
  At Sweden 80% all revenue are now from streaming http://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-music-streaming-statistics-2015-2?r=UK&IR=T&IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-music-streaming-statis...
deboboy 9y ago
"Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar." Disagree. Give them credit for trying but they have yet to recommend a new artist that I've liked; continued listening to.
mancerayder 9y ago
also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar. Love Spotify, disagree strongly with this. My experience is terrible music that doesn't seem to have anything to do with any of the hundreds of songs I have on my playlist. I get this curious Millennial mix of soft rock music with long, boring instrumental guitar strumming, a disco beat and a sleepy, sarcastic-voiced gal (sometimes guy). It might be because I live in Brooklyn. And there's no Like or Dislike button like (beloved) Pandora. edit: Don't think anyone compromised my account.
- RandallBrown 9y ago
  Discover Weekly has a like and dislike button in the desktop app. I couldn't figure out how to do it on mobile though.
  - mancerayder 9y ago
    Ahhh. That's it. I only use it on Android. Maybe I should use that feature on the PC, and thumbs down everything for a few weeks!
    - geraltofrivia 9y ago
      You can actually like/dislike stuff from the app. Expand the playback notification and you'll find the buttons there. Of course this only works for currently playing songs. No idea why they hid it there, and there only.
  - braderhart 9y ago
    Spotify app is so terrible, once you like something, it doesn't give you an option to unlike it.
    - peteretep 9y ago
      Like Tinder, I really don't understand how these services -- where the magic isn't in the app so much as in the service -- who have big piles of money don't have much much better apps. It really feels like something you should be able to throw money at.
lukejduncan 9y ago
I have to say, Spotify recommendations is one of their biggest weaknesses. Discover weekly was just bad and most of the discover page seems to be podcasts and non music content. Just may single data point, but after 2 years as a subscriber I paused my subscription and realized I didn’t miss it. Pandora + Amazon music turned out to be more than enough for me.
melq 9y ago
I also think their discovery is far and away the best I've used. And their streaming platform / Spotify Connect is a really well engineered platforms IMO. My only issue with discover weekly is how heavily it weights the music you've listened to most recently. I guess thats part of the whole weekly aspect, but I wish they would give you recommendations based on your whole listening history.
simplyluke 9y ago
Same story with pirating. I had gigs upon gigs of original rips uploaded to what.cd back before it shut down and a dedicated (in-house!) seedbox with a couple of terabytes of music on it. Even before the shutdown I'd gone pretty inactive due to Spotify. I miss the forums, IRC rooms, and insane collection of obscure music though. Not sure that will ever be totally recreated. > My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - thanks jjgod) and go native. A music player is a frequently enough used piece of software to optimize for performance. I agree, but I also think it's probably the main reason we have a semi-official Spotify client on linux.
prawn 9y ago
Yep - I think their Discover Weekly is excellent. It's introduced me to dozens and dozens of artists and tracks which I've very happily incorporated into my full playlist(s). I'm routinely impressed by what it finds. I also like the artist and song radio options which work well for office background music.
abalone 9y ago
Agree services like this defeated music piracy. However since we're talking about the IPO, Spotify faces major competition from Apple Music. Unlike Spotify, Apple does not need to turn a profit on the service. (They've even implemented a solid weekly "new music mix" discovery service... and the apps are native.)
drunkkcunt 9y ago
Microsoft proved that you can use Electron to make great and optimized applications that perform very well in Visual Studio Code. I have no big issues with the desktop Spotify app. I find it better than iTunes. It's the Android app that Spotify need to fix.
- nojvek 9y ago
  iTunes takes Gigabytes of memory and takes seconds to spin up. I have no idea why a native music app developed for their own platform can be such a piece of stinking garbage. Get your shit together Apple!
sethgecko 9y ago
I noticed recently that the new discover weekly songs tend to sync perfectly with my walking speed. I wonder if I subconsciously leaked some bias into my training sample. BPM has to be one of the factors they are matching against. Here is a blog post that describes one of their machine learning models using neural networks. http://benanne.github.io/2014/08/05/spotify-cnns.html http://benanne.github.io/2014/08/05/spotify-cnns.html
manish_gill 9y ago
Am I literally the only person on the planet for whom Discover Weekly is broken? I once listened to some Spanish and Japanese music, but don't listen on the regular, and ever since then, all my Discover Weekly reccs have Japanese and Spanish in them, along with some generic techno. I've reached out to Spotify's support over Twitter and they were like keep listening to more music and it will correct itself, but so far it hasn't. :(
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  It would be a great feature to have your whole listening history visible, so you can go through and clean out some tracks here and there, and force a refresh of your listening profile. I think it would be a good suggestion on their Community Ideas board, I would certainly vote for it.
KozmoNau7 9y ago
Same here. I wasn't in the scene, but I torrented a hell of a lot of music, I used to DDC a lot of stuff in the good old days of IRC and I built up a huge collection at LAN parties in the 90s and early 2000s. Spotify provided an extremely convenient and inexpensive alternative, with the added bonus of curated playlists and automatic recommendations.
amelius 9y ago
Yeah, Spotify is great, the only downside is that sometimes they pull my favorite albums :(
yomly 9y ago
Not only has Spotify stopped me pirating music, it has led to me spending thousands of pounds (previously zero) on live music to see artists I had never heard of prior to Spotify, to listen to music I never would have known existed. Short-sighted publishers be damned.
bayindirh 9y ago
It's also same with me. I downloaded many albums because either the prices were prohibitive to buy, or the albums weren't available here. Spotify allowed me to listen what I want, where I want. I don't like their chromium based application, but if it's the only way that they continue developing their Linux client, I'll not whine about it. However, nothing beats owning the albums. So if the album passes a certain value in my mind, I buy it either on CD or from iTunes for archival and listening on my proper audio system, because all the snake oil and hype aside, nothing beats warmth of a good old amplifier, a decent DAC, and some big, good speakers.
fro0116 9y ago
I really want to start using a streaming service, but I listen to a lot of Japanese artists and composers (lots of anime/game soundtracks). So far I have not found any streaming service with a decent selection when it comes to the latest releases from from Japan. I would love to hear some recommendations for streaming services that can accommodate my tastes. I'm a fairly fluent in Japanese so Japanese-native services are fine too, but I'm not aware if any exists.
samfriedman 9y ago
While I find the Discovery Weekly (and other editorial features like Genre collections) fantastic personally, I think the thing that keeps me from making Spotify my end-all-be-all music solution is licensing. There are plenty of songs which I've added to playlists, only to find a year or two later are no longer available due to expired licenses. Some of my favorite artists and labels - Drag City is a big one - aren't available on Spotify at all (usually due to objections to the royalty structure). Many live albums, and more obscure and vintage releases are often nigh-impossible to find, or only have one or two songs from the album: likely those that have been licensed previously for use on TV etc. Spotify is great, but it will forever be fighting the friction of music licensing and fair monetization.
iforgotpassword 9y ago
The client was native (qt) a few years back. I used a very old celeron laptop back then as a dedicated Spotify station, and after they switched to this chromium bs the machine just couldn't handle it anymore.
nojvek 9y ago
I get the Electron hate but it seems it's a two part problem. 1) Electron needs to be good about sharing memory between multiple electron processes. If I have Slack, VSCode and spotify open, then memory shouldn't be tripled. 2) Better app development. It is quite possible to make performant electron apps. Apart from the memory hit of spinning up blink, if you manage your views and JS well, both memory and CPU usage can be quite reasonable. 3) I really do like Electron apps because it's a very consistent experience, no matter the platform. Developing for Mac or Linux is not an after-thought. It's always in Parity. I can see how that is both a great user experience and makes great business sense. There is a reason why React Native is gaining so much popularity: Consistent experience, write once, deploy everywhere, much smaller and maintainable codebase.

kbouw 9y ago

What performance issues do you usually run into on the current iteration of the app? Just out of personal curiosity so I can take note next time I'm using the application.

dopeboy 9y ago
Mostly it's millisecond lag when changing songs or opening up new playlists. I get that everything is on the cloud but maybe more aggressive caching would be helpful. If it were any other application, I wouldn't care. But because this is the second most frequently piece of software I use (browser being first), I'd love for it to be as performant as possible.
- fascinated 9y ago
  I definitely miss the very old version of the app too. That one was written by the uTorrent creators - it was incredibly fast, felt great.
lambda_lover 9y ago
Not who you asked, but I notice a lot of lag when I'm searching/navigating/etc in Spotify. I understand that it's fetching a lot of this data from their servers, but the UI itself is also laggy when I'm browing local files, scrolling through playlists, etc, so it's not just serverside. Not to mention the SSD-destroying & CPU-hogging habits of the application. That being said, I still use Spotify because I really value the music discovery and algorithms... and nobody else offers a streaming service with a dark theme :)

jjgod 9y ago

Technically Spotify doesn't use Electron, they use a customized version of CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework): $ ls -lh /Applications/Spotify.app/Contents/Frameworks/ total 0 drwxr-xr-x 5 jjgod staff 160B Nov 7 2016 Chromium Embedded Framework.framework drwxr-xr-x 3 jjgod staff 96B Nov 7 2016 Spotify Helper EH.app drwxr-xr-x 3 jjgod staff 96B Nov 7 2016 Spotify Helper.app

AlphaWeaver 9y ago

Really? My only experience with Discover Weekly (and any other suggestion algorithms, i.e. radios, etc...) has been pretty terrible... It doesn't seem to suggest songs I like at all, and recently it seized upon one single song in one of my playlist and only plays covers of that song and the other songs in the album for my discover weekly for the past several weeks... I love Spotify, but I use Pandora sometimes _exclusively_ for music discovery, and then add to my Spotify.

KallDrexx 9y ago
This is my experience with Discover Weekly as well. Everyone seems to be really divided on how well their algorithms work, they either work really well or terribly. I think it's because the quality of signals their algorithm can key off of is so limited due to it being such a passive medium. There's no way to know if I listened to that track in full because I liked it or because I had it on in the background while doing other work and it wasn't distracting enough (usually the latter is the case for me). Furthermore if I skip a track they don't know if I skipped it because I didn't like it or I wasn't in the mood for that style of music, or I was just sick of that song cause I've heard it enough in the past X listens. There's no way to easily signal to spotify why I'm taking an action, and yet their algorithms are trying to make assumptions over every little action.
- pertsix 9y ago
  Add songs to your library. It's given more weight than simple up-thumb/down-thumb.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    That may be why my recommendations seem to work so well, unlike a lot of other commenters on this article. For posterity, I have a little under 1000 tracks saved from 200 or so artists (of which I am following around half), around 50 favorite album playlists and about as many "I should give this album a listen" playlists. So not really a huge collection in absolute terms. It is very much focused on hard rock and metal, though.

paulie_a 9y ago

Your reference to fxp just made me incredibly nostalgic

et-al 9y ago
Same here, but I didn't know what FXP was. Initially thought it was another release group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol
dopeboy 9y ago
It was my first internet community. Brought me into the world of IRC and VBB and programming. The 12/11/01 raids kinda ended it, atleast for me.

tomc1985 9y ago

Their coverage of indie labels and the dance music underground still sucks. Plus I don't think their streaming is lossless and you can easily spot the difference with something as simple as a pair of $100 wireless headphones (NOT beats) hooked up to a $100 USB headphone amp.

toomanybeersies 9y ago
Their streaming is not lossless. There are also two different quality levels for streaming that you can choose in settings, ensure you've selected high quality, I'm not sure what the default is. Upon saying that, even with my Sennheiser HD 202s and Macbook built-in audio I can tell the difference between Spotify and lossless FLAC. My Australian internet is so bad that I probably couldn't even stream FLAC anyway.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  Default is 160kbps Ogg Vorbis, high quality is 320kbps. For the mobile app, it's 96, 160 and 320 for normal, high and extreme, respectively. Chromecast and the browser-based player both use AAC, at a maximum of 256kbps.
kridsdale1 9y ago
How do you hook up wireless headphones to an amp?
- tomc1985 9y ago
  PC <- USB Amp <- Headphone Base station
dopeboy 9y ago
It's not lossless, you're right. I'm an audiophile too (E10K driving DT770s) and I've never done any A/B testing between a Spotify track and a FLAC equivalent. I'm curious how much the difference is.
- 9y ago

voltagex_ 9y ago

Me too, but I'm worried about what it will mean for my music listening when Spotify goes away. I think the last time I tried to price a single one of my playlists, it'd cost me thousands to buy the songs and that's without trying to track down FLACs.

sandos 9y ago
Literally everybody uses spotify atleast here in Europe. I dont think its going away to be honest? Not for a very long time anyway.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  Spotify is a major cash cow for the labels, so it's in their best interest to keep it going. It wouldn't surprise me if they end up killing their golden goose out of sheer incompetence, though.

longerthoughts 9y ago

>My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - thanks jjgod) and go native. IIRC they moved to Chromium to ensure decoupled releases and faster iteration (starting at ~9:35: https://vimeo.com/85490944 https://vimeo.com/85490944).

yamaneko 9y ago

I don't pirate music anymore for the same reason. However, I also don't listen to music as I used to. I usually use Spotify to listen to what I already know, not so much to find new stuff. Before, I used to dive in depth into an artist/band, starting from their greatest hits. Once I got the band vocabulary, I'd download the albums chronologically and listened to every track, sometimes more than once until I got familiar with it. Now I don't do it with as much scrutiny, which is interesting since Spotify has all albums very well organized and even the discovery playlist. It would be much easier and better. Is IKEA effect at play? Without Spotify, I would only start another artist when I finished the current one. So, with Spotify it becomes an information management problem due to the large amount of albums available at a click. Or it could just be that my life has changed and I don't have a time slot dedicated to music anymore.

spaceandshit 9y ago
Have you seen the 'Browse' page? You'll find a lot of new music.
alex_duf 9y ago
I'm facing a very similar problem. Same story as you, I would buy MP3 or pirate if they weren't easily made available. But the amount of research I would put in the music I was listening to was enormous, making me proud of my collection. I was able to recognise any song in my collection in less than 5 seconds, give you the artist, how I discovered it and potentially an anecdote about them. Now I have playlists full of stuff I know nothing about. It definitively solved the music distribution issue, but I have trouble to be emotionally attached to the music I discover on Spotify. I think your theory about the IKEA effect is probably spot(ify) on
cja 9y ago
IKEA effect?
- Anthony-G 9y ago
  It's an interesting phenomenon that you'll no doubt recognise. I first came across while doing an online behavioural economics course. Wikipedia has a good article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

zouhair 9y ago

I never could get used to their awful client. Coming from Foobar2000, I just couldn't.

gcardone_ 9y ago

> Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar. My discover weekly playlist ALWAYS contains at least one song in Portoguese and at least two in German. I speak neither of those languages, and I've never willingly searched and played songs in those languages (except for "99 Luftballons" once). I also get some terrible variation of "Here comes the sun" at least once a month despite not listening to The Beatles at all. [0] is the one that I hate the most. Spotify, please sthap. I can't take any more Portoguese, German, and "Here comes the sun" cover songs. [0] https://open.spotify.com/track/5PWh3rG5zWv7hVvWHRMbsf https://open.spotify.com/track/5PWh3rG5zWv7hVvWHRMbsf

jsmeaton 9y ago
Do you use the Like/Dont Like feature of discover weekly? That's helped tune my weekly lists for the better.
- mancerayder 9y ago
  On Android?? Why do I not have this feature?
  - jsmeaton 9y ago
    I mostly use the desktop app on Mac. I don't have like/dont like available on the iOS client, so presumably it's not supported on mobile. I think it's a newer feature so maybe it just hasn't made its way to mobile yet.
  - wungsten 9y ago
    I have this feature on my Android. The thumbs up and down appear to the left and right of the big Play button on the Now Playing screen, only while you're listening to Spotify playlist/album radio.
paddlepop 9y ago
You may have had an auth token compromised. I used a dodgy third party Spotify Connect for Raspberry Pi library and had the same issue. Changing my password and expiring all current auth tokens returned my Discover Weekly back to normal after a month

jakecopp 9y ago

Does paying for Spotify actually help any artists meaningfully though? I've been wondering whether paying for a Bandcamp album every so often to match the cost of Spotify, and pirating music otherwise would actually benefit artists more. I've read that Spotify pays fractions of a cent per play, where as Bandcamp pays out quite well, better than iTunes and Google Play.

lindner 9y ago
Bandcamp is good if you know what you want and they do pay out really, really well. If you want a streaming service more like Spotify you might also check out Resonate Cooperative https://resonate.is/ https://resonate.is/ which has a stream-to-own model. Discovering new music is low cost, repeated listens double until the ninth, upon which you own the track outright. You can then download or stream that track for free. Still ramping up but I'm excited about their prospects.
- eitland 9y ago
  That's a brilliant idea and a reasonable way to stream and own music IMO. Already signed up.
- jakecopp 9y ago
  Awesome idea - do they have more than a couple of artists though? Personally I like a distinction between looking for music and having it DRM-free offline on my hard drive.
  - lindner 9y ago
    Still early days -- only 2300 artists on 296 labels so far; but growing. It fits somewhere between Soundcloud, Bandcamp and Spotify. https://resonate.is/in-the-details/status/ https://resonate.is/in-the-details/status/
atupis 9y ago
At Sweden 80% all revenue are now from streaming http://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-music-streaming-statistics-2015-2?r=UK&IR=T&IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-music-streaming-statis...

deboboy 9y ago

"Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar." Disagree. Give them credit for trying but they have yet to recommend a new artist that I've liked; continued listening to.

mancerayder 9y ago

also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar. Love Spotify, disagree strongly with this. My experience is terrible music that doesn't seem to have anything to do with any of the hundreds of songs I have on my playlist. I get this curious Millennial mix of soft rock music with long, boring instrumental guitar strumming, a disco beat and a sleepy, sarcastic-voiced gal (sometimes guy). It might be because I live in Brooklyn. And there's no Like or Dislike button like (beloved) Pandora. edit: Don't think anyone compromised my account.

RandallBrown 9y ago
Discover Weekly has a like and dislike button in the desktop app. I couldn't figure out how to do it on mobile though.
- mancerayder 9y ago
  Ahhh. That's it. I only use it on Android. Maybe I should use that feature on the PC, and thumbs down everything for a few weeks!
  - geraltofrivia 9y ago
    You can actually like/dislike stuff from the app. Expand the playback notification and you'll find the buttons there. Of course this only works for currently playing songs. No idea why they hid it there, and there only.
- braderhart 9y ago
  Spotify app is so terrible, once you like something, it doesn't give you an option to unlike it.
  - peteretep 9y ago
    Like Tinder, I really don't understand how these services -- where the magic isn't in the app so much as in the service -- who have big piles of money don't have much much better apps. It really feels like something you should be able to throw money at.

lukejduncan 9y ago

I have to say, Spotify recommendations is one of their biggest weaknesses. Discover weekly was just bad and most of the discover page seems to be podcasts and non music content. Just may single data point, but after 2 years as a subscriber I paused my subscription and realized I didn’t miss it. Pandora + Amazon music turned out to be more than enough for me.

melq 9y ago

I also think their discovery is far and away the best I've used. And their streaming platform / Spotify Connect is a really well engineered platforms IMO. My only issue with discover weekly is how heavily it weights the music you've listened to most recently. I guess thats part of the whole weekly aspect, but I wish they would give you recommendations based on your whole listening history.

simplyluke 9y ago

Same story with pirating. I had gigs upon gigs of original rips uploaded to what.cd back before it shut down and a dedicated (in-house!) seedbox with a couple of terabytes of music on it. Even before the shutdown I'd gone pretty inactive due to Spotify. I miss the forums, IRC rooms, and insane collection of obscure music though. Not sure that will ever be totally recreated. > My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - thanks jjgod) and go native. A music player is a frequently enough used piece of software to optimize for performance. I agree, but I also think it's probably the main reason we have a semi-official Spotify client on linux.

prawn 9y ago

Yep - I think their Discover Weekly is excellent. It's introduced me to dozens and dozens of artists and tracks which I've very happily incorporated into my full playlist(s). I'm routinely impressed by what it finds. I also like the artist and song radio options which work well for office background music.

abalone 9y ago

Agree services like this defeated music piracy. However since we're talking about the IPO, Spotify faces major competition from Apple Music. Unlike Spotify, Apple does not need to turn a profit on the service. (They've even implemented a solid weekly "new music mix" discovery service... and the apps are native.)

drunkkcunt 9y ago

Microsoft proved that you can use Electron to make great and optimized applications that perform very well in Visual Studio Code. I have no big issues with the desktop Spotify app. I find it better than iTunes. It's the Android app that Spotify need to fix.

nojvek 9y ago
iTunes takes Gigabytes of memory and takes seconds to spin up. I have no idea why a native music app developed for their own platform can be such a piece of stinking garbage. Get your shit together Apple!

sethgecko 9y ago

I noticed recently that the new discover weekly songs tend to sync perfectly with my walking speed. I wonder if I subconsciously leaked some bias into my training sample. BPM has to be one of the factors they are matching against. Here is a blog post that describes one of their machine learning models using neural networks. http://benanne.github.io/2014/08/05/spotify-cnns.html http://benanne.github.io/2014/08/05/spotify-cnns.html

manish_gill 9y ago

Am I literally the only person on the planet for whom Discover Weekly is broken? I once listened to some Spanish and Japanese music, but don't listen on the regular, and ever since then, all my Discover Weekly reccs have Japanese and Spanish in them, along with some generic techno. I've reached out to Spotify's support over Twitter and they were like keep listening to more music and it will correct itself, but so far it hasn't. :(

KozmoNau7 9y ago
It would be a great feature to have your whole listening history visible, so you can go through and clean out some tracks here and there, and force a refresh of your listening profile. I think it would be a good suggestion on their Community Ideas board, I would certainly vote for it.

KozmoNau7 9y ago

Same here. I wasn't in the scene, but I torrented a hell of a lot of music, I used to DDC a lot of stuff in the good old days of IRC and I built up a huge collection at LAN parties in the 90s and early 2000s. Spotify provided an extremely convenient and inexpensive alternative, with the added bonus of curated playlists and automatic recommendations.

amelius 9y ago

Yeah, Spotify is great, the only downside is that sometimes they pull my favorite albums :(

yomly 9y ago

Not only has Spotify stopped me pirating music, it has led to me spending thousands of pounds (previously zero) on live music to see artists I had never heard of prior to Spotify, to listen to music I never would have known existed. Short-sighted publishers be damned.

bayindirh 9y ago

It's also same with me. I downloaded many albums because either the prices were prohibitive to buy, or the albums weren't available here. Spotify allowed me to listen what I want, where I want. I don't like their chromium based application, but if it's the only way that they continue developing their Linux client, I'll not whine about it. However, nothing beats owning the albums. So if the album passes a certain value in my mind, I buy it either on CD or from iTunes for archival and listening on my proper audio system, because all the snake oil and hype aside, nothing beats warmth of a good old amplifier, a decent DAC, and some big, good speakers.

fro0116 9y ago

I really want to start using a streaming service, but I listen to a lot of Japanese artists and composers (lots of anime/game soundtracks). So far I have not found any streaming service with a decent selection when it comes to the latest releases from from Japan. I would love to hear some recommendations for streaming services that can accommodate my tastes. I'm a fairly fluent in Japanese so Japanese-native services are fine too, but I'm not aware if any exists.

samfriedman 9y ago

While I find the Discovery Weekly (and other editorial features like Genre collections) fantastic personally, I think the thing that keeps me from making Spotify my end-all-be-all music solution is licensing. There are plenty of songs which I've added to playlists, only to find a year or two later are no longer available due to expired licenses. Some of my favorite artists and labels - Drag City is a big one - aren't available on Spotify at all (usually due to objections to the royalty structure). Many live albums, and more obscure and vintage releases are often nigh-impossible to find, or only have one or two songs from the album: likely those that have been licensed previously for use on TV etc. Spotify is great, but it will forever be fighting the friction of music licensing and fair monetization.

iforgotpassword 9y ago

The client was native (qt) a few years back. I used a very old celeron laptop back then as a dedicated Spotify station, and after they switched to this chromium bs the machine just couldn't handle it anymore.

nojvek 9y ago

I get the Electron hate but it seems it's a two part problem. 1) Electron needs to be good about sharing memory between multiple electron processes. If I have Slack, VSCode and spotify open, then memory shouldn't be tripled. 2) Better app development. It is quite possible to make performant electron apps. Apart from the memory hit of spinning up blink, if you manage your views and JS well, both memory and CPU usage can be quite reasonable. 3) I really do like Electron apps because it's a very consistent experience, no matter the platform. Developing for Mac or Linux is not an after-thought. It's always in Parity. I can see how that is both a great user experience and makes great business sense. There is a reason why React Native is gaining so much popularity: Consistent experience, write once, deploy everywhere, much smaller and maintainable codebase.