131–140 of 232 posts
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Surprise surprise, employees lose out again. But I guess they were already in danger of getting nothing if this is the deal management struck.
Ya - sucks. I said this in a comment below, but also relevant here: capital > labor
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The modern desktop app is at a point where it's pretty solid, but I still miss that old 0.80.x branch or whatever the final non-chromium verison was. But you know what? Google doesn't have a desktop app for Google Music. Amazon doesn't have a desktop app for Amazon Prime. Apple doesn't have a desktop version... so yeah, despite the fact that Spotify's only-one-in-the-business desktop app isn't perfect, it does exist.…
Amazon Music has a desktop client: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?ie=UTF8&docId=1001067...
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What do you miss?
I was an Rdio subscriber from 2010 until it shut down, and I've been a Spotify subscriber since. I can name a few things: 1) Discovery. Rdio would inform me when new albums are out by artists I listen to. Spotify doesn't. Rdio's "Artist Stations" were also much better – not only did they not repeat (like Spotify's do), they also let you choose whether you wanted to hear "more" or "less" of the artist themselves while…
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The modern desktop app is at a point where it's pretty solid, but I still miss that old 0.80.x branch or whatever the final non-chromium verison was. But you know what? Google doesn't have a desktop app for Google Music. Amazon doesn't have a desktop app for Amazon Prime. Apple doesn't have a desktop version... so yeah, despite the fact that Spotify's only-one-in-the-business desktop app isn't perfect, it does exist.…
Pretty solid is a bit of an exaggeration in my case. About once a day, my MacBook's fans start spinning like crazy. By now I know... oh, it's "Spotify Helper" stuck in a loop again, lemme force quit it. Before I reinstalled, instead Spotify would show me "there's a new version!" every single day, seemingly without upgrading anything. These serious quality issues, plus the horrifying visual ads (for playlists and new…
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>Spotify also has to pay 5% annual interest on the debt, and 1% more every six months up to a total of 10%. Fwiw I'm parsing this as the interest to service the debt topping out at 10% rather than 15% (which imo is a pretty big difference)
They can probably pay in kind and screw the investors more. Better than paying cash.
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Pretty solid is a bit of an exaggeration in my case. About once a day, my MacBook's fans start spinning like crazy. By now I know... oh, it's "Spotify Helper" stuck in a loop again, lemme force quit it. Before I reinstalled, instead Spotify would show me "there's a new version!" every single day, seemingly without upgrading anything. These serious quality issues, plus the horrifying visual ads (for playlists and new…
God i hate Spotify Helper
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All out war for streaming customers with apple and google. Someone is going to collect $10 (plus $1 or $2 increase every couple years) per month for a huge segment of the music listening population for basically the rest of our lives. Spotify want it to be them.
Is there any reason to think that this market is a winner take all? The labels will do anything to prevent another Apple arising including backing any upstart that wants to challenge the big players. When you are just a middle man it is hard to create a monopoly.
What we really need are a change to copyright laws that requires a mandatory uniform-fee-only streaming license for all music, tv and movies.
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Well I agree, ideally this should be automatic and inherent to a business, but when a company gets to a certain size you need people to be really thoughtful and consciously focused about this stuff, otherwise it can slip. So sometimes growth necessitates a dedicated person thinking about these issues.
More often, the person is just a token hire who functions more to ensure legal deniability on the company's part for anything that might pop up related to a diversity issue. I hope more companies hire diversity officers for the sake of thinking hard about how to ensure that policies and company behaviors aren't harmful. But for me it's a "I'll believe it when I see it" sort of thing. The default belief has to be that…
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Is this because their product offering is not as good as their competitors? I switched to Spotify over services like streaming radio (Pandora) and cloud music storage (Amazon Music) a couple of years ago. Haven't looked at the competition much since. I heard that Apple Music, the one potential competitor I was considering switching to, was buggy. I've been frustrated with Spotify bugs in the past but have found that…
I discontinued my Spotify service about 18 months ago because I went through the process of deleting my Facebook account, and the backend Spotify account was linked to it. It turned into a pretty unexpected ordeal, I had to call Spotify customer service, they asked me if I could reactivate my Facebook account just for this, have them "fix" it, then deactivate again, etc. At the time Spotify Linux support wasn't very…
They are probably the best still in the business, but the only company that had everything, including the really obscure indie artists, were Grooveshark. Though expecting Spotify to have obscure Filk songs about 40 year old scify is probably asking too much.
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Both Spotify and Pandora are losing money on a consistent basis. IMO streaming music is a losing business, and the only way a provider is going to stay in the market is because they have other services that complement the music. I love Spotify and am a daily user but honestly it's going to take a lot of work to turn things around for them. Content acquisition costs are killer and are not something that can go away.
I thought the exact same thing about Netflix. What I missed was actually quite obvious: there are already companies making a lot of money in content delivery (e.g. Comcast). I don't know whether that will carry over to music quite as well though.
Video is different. Most content companies have bid out their back catalogues to one exclusive provider, or creating additional premium content (think House of Cards). In video it's all about premium exclusive content. In music there is some of that, but it's mostly all the same.