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Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye
- killion 15y agoThe intro made me snort... "I’ve just canceled my membership with Spotify and my narccicism makes me want to tell you all why."
- ajslater 15y agoThe number of grandstanding blog posts where people publicly declare why they're not using a particular website is a metric of success.
- Smudge 15y agoIf Spotify had Grooveshark's interface I would buy a premium account in a heartbeat. When I first opened Spotify's desktop client I was baffled by how clunky it felt.
- nroach 15y agoI too really wanted to like Spotify. But the Spotify UI always felt like work rather than enjoyment and exploration. Unfortunately, until and unless Grooveshark can solve their legal issues and obtain solid licensing, they're going to remain largely locked out of the iOS market (except for an aging an increasingly incompatible legacy app).
- jinushaun 15y agoI agree. Seeing the screenshots all these years of the European Spotify, so pretty... When it finally came to the US and I played around with it, the user experience is so clunky and requires way too many clicks to get anything done.
- nicwest 15y agospotify is generally non hardware/os/file dependant. iTunes is not any of these things. this is why I'm staying. sure you have to compromise a little on selection, but to me at least the previous benefits greatly out weigh this deficiency.
- owlmusic 15y agoThe argument against the Desktop app seems unfounded, the author states: "I don’t usually like playlists and I’m the kind of guy who enjoys listening to whole albums, front to back". I'm of the same opinion, but when finding a new album to listen to I simply dray this into a new playlist and they become one and the same. This would also negate the argument against the mobile app as well.
- kenjackson 15y agoI'm using Spotify right now. I just pick the album, click the first song and it plays the album. Am I doing something wrong? Why do I need a playlist?
- timmaah 15y agoThis is the way I use it as well. What I would like is some way to tag or bookmark an album. I find I stumble upon a new artist or album I like, but then forget what it was later in the week.
- gunnerb 15y agoWhy not create a playlist called "bookmarked"?
- thisisblurry 15y agoThis is exactly what I did. Then it's as easy as dragging the song and/or album straight to it. That's it.
- kenjackson 15y agoJust star a song from the album. When you view your starred songs you can just click the album name in the Album column and you'll be taken to the full album that the song is from. I really like the fact that it's easy to go from a single song to an album. I have a lot of songs I bought in my library, and with Spotify its easy to now play these songs in the context of their full album.
- md224 15y agoI've been using Rhapsody for a while and the selection is pretty solid.
- ben1040 15y agoRhapsody has the advantage of not trying to leak your listening habits to Facebook, as well.
- ry0ohki 15y ago+50 to Rhapsody, it's frustrating that people keep acting like Rdio and Spotify are this fancy new concept when Rhapsody has been doing all of this for years. The catalog also can't be beat compared to the other two it's so much larger. The interface was really lacking for years, but all this competition has made them finally start adding features like social.
- ubercore 15y agoI'm sure it's better now, but Rhapsody lost me by having _the worst web player I've ever experienced_. It's hard to overstate how bad it was. I just can't bring myself to go back, even though I realize they've worked on it. It was so. bad.
- itsandrew 15y agoI was in the same boat. It made the platform unusable. That coupled with some of the worst and most apathetic customer support I have ever experienced, I swore to never go back.
- muhfuhkuh 15y agoSo, you cancelled spotify to replace it with 3 other competing or related products with their own unique interfaces and quirks. I think that somewhat complicates matters. Most, I think, will stick to spotify in that scenario.
- bomatson 15y agoGrooveshark 4 life
- grandalf 15y agoIs there a way to disable all "sharing" of what I'm listening to? I really don't want to share that info. It appears that one has to choose "private listening" whenever starting the app.
- parbo 15y agoThere is a checkbox in preferences that turns off posting to facebook persistently.
- Laurentvw 15y agoSo he's going to use iTunes, Grooveshark and Pandora. Now that seems, well, cumbersome to me. Too bad Spotify bothers him -- even though it may lack some songs and features, I don't see why you can't enjoy Spotify for most use cases.
- kin 15y agoI think the library is probably the biggest thing for OP. I mean, when I first tried using Spotify and found out they only had a single track from Blink-182, I immediately stopped using it. They have their entire catalog now, but, I'd imagine still not some songs for OP which, if a service doesn't have an artist/song you want to listen to, why use it?
- barkingtoad 15y agoIf you own the music, you can add it, and it is then available to you inside Spotify.
- ericdykstra 15y agoFor me, it seems ridiculous to pay for a subscription music service that has a paltry catalog with less than half of the albums I want to listen to. That, and I can't be guaranteed of the quality of the file, if it's transcoded, etc. I have decent headphones and prefer to use them to their full potential. For people who just want to listen to albums, buying albums still seems like the way to go (whether you use iTunes or Amazon, buy CDs or records).
- scelerat 15y agoWhat are the artists that you're not finding on Spotify? Are they available digitally at all?
- frou_dh 15y agoI just wish Spotify could serve up a stream of recommended tracks, based on your listening history, like Last.fm can. Spotify's "Radio" feature compounds my dislike of "genres" as a means of navigating and discovering music. Radio, play me a stream of "Rock / Alternative / Pop / 70s" What the ---- does that even mean? Guaranteed you'll be skipping 9 out of 10 tracks it serves up. I hate genres. Every file in my local music collection has that tag blanked.
- 2arrs2ells 15y agoNot only is "Radio" iffy - it doesn't even exist in the iPhone app. On mobile, there's essentially no way to discover new music.
- alexmuller 15y agoI can't agree with this strongly enough. Why doesn't Spotify have any kind of recommendations? I'd also love to see iTunes Genius implemented in Spotify, but instead of just using my library for similar songs (like iTunes does) they could pull from the whole catalog.
- rhizome 15y agoI don't know the details here, but I do know that Pandora has some patents in this area.
- socillion 15y agoHave you tried Pandora? It is an absolutely amazing service that has an uncanny ability to find very similar music, occasionally finding gems from a different genre. They also have tons of small, high quality bands. The biggest con is that a specific "channel" can start to repeat the same 50 or so songs, but that is easily solved by making a new one. It is well worth the $36/year for the paid ad-free version, and the adobe air desktop app is lightweight and responsive. Nice bonus: you can have up to 2 or 3 computers streaming music on the same account simultaneously. Seriously, I cannot emphasize enough how awesome Pandora is. Windows 7 in the US; YMMV elsewhere.
- jnfr 15y agoSpotify, Rdio and all these other sites need to open up their catalog to local and independent artists. That's one of the reasons iTunes was so popular -- they allowed Youtube singers and other aspiring artists to post their songs and allow people to purchase them. They tapped into this long tail and both Apple and these indie artists made money from it. These companies can't compete with the big players by offering less. No one cares about the piracy thing, they just want their music, and they want the music they are looking for. 'Social discovery' can be great and all but if I'm looking for a very specific, hard-to-find song, chances are I'm going to find it on Youtube instead and forget about Spotify/Rdio, etc. I think Grooveshark let users upload their own content, but failed in that aspect because their catalog ended up being way too messy. Difficult problem to solve, wonder who will prevail. /edit typo
- tsellon 15y agoI've only used Spotify, but it actually has better coverage (from what I've seen) of independent acts. It's very easy to get your music on there. CDBaby will register an album on Spotify, iTunes, etc for $30.
- WiseWeasel 15y ago$30 AND a large chunk of your sales profits.
- tsellon 15y agoGenuinely curious: Do you have a citation on the percentage CDBaby takes? I didn't notice one on their site, but I've not used them either.
- WiseWeasel 15y agoActually, it turns out to be only a 9% cut on top of a $39 fee for them on digital distribution; I thought it was more: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:us356v0X9hoJ:members.cdbaby.com/faq.aspx+cdbaby+percentage&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:us356v0...
- lukin0110 15y agoLike all products, spotify is a constantly improving product. The desktop app is not that great, but the fact that i can access a lot of music within a few clicks without doing anything illegal makes me happy . If you have an exotic special taste you'll have difficulties with every service i guess. I used to listen a lot to last.fm ... but i prefer "on demand" music like spotify offers. The service still needs to improve a lot, but they will get there in the end ... its the new way of listening to music. It doesn't make sence to me to "buy" a song on itunes, since everything is moving to the cloud, "owning" a song really doesnt make sence.
- juliano_q 15y agoUntil this moment no service convinced me to change my 10-year-old habit of buy/download the music, organize the tags and put it on my mobile device. Since I bought my first iPod until today with my Nexus S I am still doing this and it is very practical to me.
- nosequel 15y agoMy thoughts exactly. I can buy a cd, rip to flac / mp3, listen to the mp3's everywhere mobile, and flac in my home theater or on my nice headphones. All of the cd's I buy still costs me less than some subscription service.
- ChrisLTD 15y agoYes, but you could listen to more music for the same price. Even if there are only 2 new albums I want to listen to a month, it's break-even to get an rdio/mog/spotify subscription vs. buying the albums.
- juliano_q 15y agoAnother difference is that by buying music the albuns are yours forever, and with a service like this when you stop paying you got nothing left.
- ticks 15y agoOne service I liked a lot was eMusic. I'm not sure what they are like now, but I got a lot of high quality MP3s for relatively little cost, due to the subscription pricing. It's not like Spotify in terms of listening as much as you want, but once you get tired of the service, you at least have a collection of music rather than nothing.
- psychotik 15y agoTry Audiogalaxy - it might be what you've been looking for. It's still your music, just available everywhere without uploading to any server and without ads. http://www.audiogalaxy.com http://www.audiogalaxy.com (Discl: I work on it)
- ethank 15y agoNo one ever said there was one music service to serve all manners of music consumption. There are many to serve many. It is a fallacy to assume that everyone consumes or enjoys music the same way, or that music has the same role in every listeners life. In fact, music could have many roles depending on artist, genre, song, album, mood, etc. You can't as a music service do a user experience and interface, business model, etc that will serve all modalities and particularities of consumption, fanaticism and enjoyment. It isn't possible. It wasn't possible with physical media either. I have the luxury of affording many options, and so I have many options: RDIO, Spotify and iTunes. All have different uses for me, all fill different roles in my life as a music listener and consumer. This is no different than 20 years ago, when vinyl, CD, radio and cassette tapes all had their place in my life depending on what it was I was doing.
- phzbOx 15y agoI've tried lots of services and apps, and Spotify is my favorite. Of course, it's not perfect but it's way better than what the author suggests in this article. About the "Playlist a whole album is too complicated"; I'm not sure what he mean by that as you click on a song in the album and it plays all the album.. this could hardly get more intuitive than this. Of course, there's not all songs but at least they let you upload your own local music (Unlike grooveshark for instance). Unlike the author, I really like the concept of playlist in Spotify. Basically, it's simply a list of pointers to the real song. So, basically, if you want to save the album, just create a playlist with the name of the album.. in fact, it does that for you automatically if you want. On the negative side, as someone else pointed out, I wish they had a better "Suggesting new music". Yes, there's a radio but I feel it's not really good. They always show the same songs and most often than not they're not in my taste. I mean, I've got 1000+ songs in my playlists, I'm sure they could use those datas to guess a little better what I like. A missing feature that I loved from grooveshark was: "Show me a playlist who contains that song". It was a nice way for me to discover new artists/songs. I'm not sure why it's not in Spotify as, unlike guessing a good songs, this is fairly straightforward to implement. Another thing that is annoying is how the sync mode works in the desktop app. Basically, if you're in "online mode", it syncs it.. while offline don't use internet. The problem with that is sometime I want to "be online" to listen to the radio or something, but I don't want it to download all songs that need to be synced. (Say when tethering from my iPhone). Also, in the desktop app, if spotify starts when I'm not connected to internet, and then get connected, it will stay in offline mode forever.. there's no way to "turn on online mode". I have to restart the app and then it notices that I'm on internet. And yeah, same problem, since I'm on internet it will automatically start to sync everything. And, finally, I wish it had a web interface. Yeah, we get it, with the desktop app you have more freedom to implement whatever you want. But still, a materialistic web version to listen the radio or your song might be useful.. So, in summary, it's not perfect, but it's the best solution I've found. And, it's legal :-) (Even though I had to hack the system to get it working in Canada as Spotify is illegal here.)
- eridius 15y agoIf you start playing an album by simply playing a song in it, then Spotify won't stop when it reaches the end of the album. Instead it moves on to whatever song is listed after the last album song. I'm an album listener too, and that _really_ bugged me when I was testing out Spotify.
- Legion 15y agoI'm using Rdio and I've been pretty happy with it. Before I plopped down my money, I did a comparison with Spotify on the artists/genres I cared about, and Rdio pretty much matched Spotify blow for blow.
- ChrisLTD 15y agoRdio was definitely lean at first (they didn't even have the Pixies!) but now they have a pretty solid US catalogue. Plus their mobile apps and music discovery features are superior to Spotify.
- antidaily 15y agoLove Rdio, hate that I cant shuffle more than one album at a time in my queue.
- yesimahuman 15y agoI gave Rdio a try, but I couldn't get used to the interface. I really prefer the compact display of Spotify.
- psychotik 15y agoSince you plan to buy music, and seem to have an extensive catalog, give Audiogalaxy (http://www.audiogalaxy.com http://www.audiogalaxy.com) to have free access to your music from everywhere. It's my startup, so don't let me bias you - check out reviews on iTunes/Android and the web. I'm pretty sure you'll like it. :)
- JonAtkinson 15y agoAudiogalaxy is a startup? Haven't you guys been going for, well, surely more than a decade?
- dagw 15y agoOld Audiogalaxy shut down a few years ago. This is an entirely new thing, but with some of the same people and (re)using the same name.
- zavulon 15y agoBack in the day, I absolutely loved AudioGalaxy. It was much better than Napster. You would go on artist page, and see the songs in order of most popular - so you'd instantly see which songs you should check out from new artists. Ah, the good old days of free mp3s just laying around on the web...
- otisfunkmeyer 15y agoWow audio galaxy looks amazing! I love the pin feature and easy publish to Facebook. Just downloaded. Also like that it doesn't force me (a la iTunes match) to fill up my phone with 256kbps files--I think apple wants to sell larger GB devices. Good reviews too. Lol I haven't thought about audio galaxy since 1999. Congrats!
- chris_j 15y agoWhat is the relationship between your Audiogalaxy and the Audiogalaxy that existed back in 2000?
- dasil003 15y agoI signed up for premium the day they launched in the US. I cancelled the day they required a Facebook account. It may well be that Facebook virality is the only way to grow a music startup. I can't really critique their strategy. But I'll tell you this: I am willing to pay for music services that focus on the music and music-playing experience. I could give fuck all about what track 37 of my friends are listening to, and it's not like they were just tacking this stuff on, they have made this a core business strategy, and that will come at the expense of improving the core experience, which frankly could use a lot of improvement.
- phlyingpenguin 15y agoFacebook is required? I have the demo of pro and as far as I can tell, I don't have Facebook linked up to it, not that they haven't suggested I could hook it up.
- tommi 15y agoFacebook is required for new accounts. See http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/can_you_sign_up_for_spotify_without_facebook http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/can_you_sign_up_fo...
- k-mcgrady 15y agoIf you already had an account there was no requirement to add Facebook. Seems you just cancelled 'on principle'. And all the social integration within the app can be easily disabled in preferences.
- dasil003 15y agoYes, I did cancel on principle. I cancelled immediately in the hopes that there would be a large number of cancellations that very day and it would have some impact on management.
- nvarsj 15y agoThe convenience of being able to instantly search and listen to the universe of music cannot be understated. It is a killer feature. iTunes Match is a step backwards compared to this - anyone that thinks otherwise is kidding themselves.
- kin 15y agoI wouldn't compare the two. I'd use both. You can't possibly dismiss iTunes Match as a killer feature itself could you?
- nvarsj 15y agoWith iTunes Match, you have a tiny subset of all possible music to select from. Why limit yourself?
- kin 15y agoWell, not that my iTunes library is larger than my online streaming library, but it has a larger library of songs I listen to than my online streaming library if that makes any sense to you. Also, my iTunes library is available offline cross-platform. I'm not limiting myself, which is why I'd say I'd use both. I'm expanding myself. + my offline library is more organized. Am I alone in this viewpoint?
- kreek 15y agoI'm pretty happy with my account, the one downside is that with iTunes my wife and I could share an account. With Spotify only one account can be playing at a time. I realize they do this so people don't share accounts with multiple people, but it would be much better if you had five registered devices like iTunes allows.
- nhangen 15y agoFor 9 bucks/month, I'm saving more than enough money to justify the service. When I want to find new music, I use Turntable.fm or Pandora.
- glenstansberry 15y agoThe reason why I switched back to Rdio? They use your computer as a P2P network. http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/how_exactly_does_spotify_utilise_my_internet_connection http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/how_exactly_does_s...
- prg318 15y agoI know that these are fundamentally different services, but if you have a decent home internet connection and a digital music collection you can easily set up a streaming server to listen to your tunes anywhere. I personally use Sockso, which made my mind up to not purchase spotify. I heard Subsonic is good as well. I only pay for the most basic cable internet package and I have no issue streaming my tunes anywhere I may happen to be.
- joelhaasnoot 15y agoI don't buy music, don't ever pay for it either. But Spotify has very much upped the "scam" factor recently, by first cutting from 20 to 10 free hours per month, and now not even showing how many hours are remaining till you run out. Also, not until you find and read the long terms and conditions do you find out the first "6 months" (which already seem to be up for me) are a trial of premium, after that you get 10 hours a month free, but they won't tell you till you have 0 minutes left.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- b3b0p 15y agoI wish I could favorite an artist somehow. Am I missing this option some place? It seems so obvious to me. I like listening to albums, not a random mix of tracks usually and want to be able to keep tabs on my go to artists. Right now I have resorted to adding full albums to a new playlist so I can see artists names as there are times I can't recall every artist I've liked listening to in the past.
- jarin 15y agoSpotify seems to have fixed the problem where the desktop app sucks up ALL of your outgoing bandwidth (although it is still bad enough to lag YouTube and other streaming video), so I started using it again. However, would it kill any of these streaming music apps to add an equalizer? Edit: Also, I highly recommend EarBits for music discovery.
- k-mcgrady 15y agoI never suffered those bandwidth issues, even on poor connections. Could it have been a problem on your network? And why would you be listening to Spotify and streaming video? :)
- jarin 15y agoPause Spotify, watch a streaming video. Spotify continues to serve P2P connections even if it's not actively playing music.
- k-mcgrady 15y agoI've been using Spotify since it first launched in the UK a couple of years ago and have been a premium subscriber for over a year. Spotify's cat log is excellent. I have an eclectic taste and most things are available. I do find the odd thing missing but it tends to be classic rock bands which didn't even allow iTunes to sell their music until recently. I find the desktop app to be great. It's very lightweight and simple to use. To add tracks to your library you star them. Simple. You can also star albums to add those to your library. The mobile app is the weakest link but not too bad. It has full library access (starred tracks), integration with the iPod library, full search, and offline capabilities. The UI isn't great but it has all the features needed.
- cageface 15y agoTry rdio again. The selection is much improved and the interface is better than spotify. Plus, they don't shove Facebook down your throat.
- ticks 15y agoI like to keep an eye on bands in the metal genre... one issue I noticed is during (and after) the US launch, quite a few metal bands pulled their music off Spotify. Perhaps the US launch was a big enough milestone for these niche labels to decide whether or not to continue using the service?
- jinushaun 15y agoHe mentions selection. One of the problems I have with Spotify is region lock out. I'm American, but listen to a wide selection of music from different countries and genres. It's frustrating to see music available in one country not be available in another country.