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Spotify vs the US Competition

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Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#31

Post by earbitscom »

physcab wrote: post #21
earbitscom wrote: post #2

Can we subtract 1-2 points from Grooveshark for their questionable legal tactics? Awesome comparison, Chris. This should be the go to page used to respond to any question about these services.

How are our (I'm a grooveshark employee) legal tactics questionable? We sign deals with new labels all the time and our #1 company-wide goal is to help an artist make over $1M through our service. Here is a list of all our label agreements: http://www.grooveshark.com/labelslist . I don't think its updated though since we have a deal with EMI and I can't find it on the list. Yes, a few of the other majors are missing,…

Grooveshark has been playing a lot of copyrighted material without licenses for a very long time. It takes it down; the content reappears. I understand that you're somewhat protected by DMCA, but the entire business was built on the backs of mostly mainstream content. It wasn't until you already had a big audience that you started securing the majority of your most important licenses, and plenty of the music there is still not properly licensed. EMI is a perfect example. Only recently did you get a license from them, and yet their artists have been playing on Grooveshark for ages.

If you really did a good job of making sure the music that was uploaded wasn't copyrighted, you wouldn't have a business because nobody would be looking for that music. The period between illegal mainstream content going up, and that content coming down, is just long enough for Grooveshark to have a competitive cost advantage over companies who properly license their material from day one.

If the tactics aren't at least "questionable", then why has Universal declared "legal jihad" on Grooveshark?

P.S. My band's music is on your site. I didn't put it there and neither did anybody else with proper authority to do so.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#32

Post by jonknee »

chrischen wrote: post #13
shinratdr wrote: post #11

I'm in Canada and was disappointed that we were cut out of the stateside Spotify launch, so I went looking and heard a number of recommendations for Rdio. Out of 18,384 tracks it matched 3,142. Considering my tastes are pretty mainstream and my files have very clean tags, it's hardly impressive.

With most of these services you're bound to not be able to find a few songs. What's important is whether or not it fails gracefully into letting you manage those missing music files yourself and Spotify, Rhapsody, and Grooveshark are the only ones that let you do that to some extent.

A few songs? It matched 17% of his library.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#33

Post by earbitscom »

makmanalp wrote: post #29
physcab wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are our (I'm a grooveshark employee) legal tactics questionable? We sign deals with new labels all the time and our #1 company-wide goal is to help an artist make over $1M through our service. Here is a list of all our label agreements: http://www.grooveshark.com/labelslist . I don't think its updated though since we have a deal with EMI and I can't find it on the list. Yes, a few of the other majors are missing,…

Hi, I'm a longtime grooveshark fan and user but I've also had similar questions to the grandparent. You let users upload music arbitrarily. You also add that music to your index and use it globally on the site (or I presume so, since some of your music has irregular tags or tags that say things like "radio rip"). How is this legal? I don't think you're allowed to upload music and keep it there as long as you don't ge…

It's legal because the person uploading it agrees to their terms and says it's not copyrighted, or that they have the right to upload it. In most cases, these people do not. Grooveshark relies on DMCA and says that they prohibit this behavior but they know full well that tons of the content being uploaded is copyrighted.

The simple fact is, they should know what content they have licenses for, and what content they don't. Maintaining a list of the top 1,000,000 bands in the world and not letting anybody upload tracks with metadata that included those bands and song names in it would not be that difficult. The data is there, because otherwise users could not search for those band names and find what they're looking for.

Simply put, if Grooveshark did everything they could to fight copyrighted material being added to their site, they wouldn't have a business. Maybe now that they have some licenses and an audience they could survive, but they would have never gotten to where they were without significant illegal content being uploaded and accessed by their users.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#34

Post by estel »

chrischen wrote: post #22
nc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. See spotylist.com, discovery through non-friends playlists beats algorithms as you can understand why songs are grouped together and get a feel for a persons music tastes.

I'm not sure if any "social" type of discovery can beat algorithmic in quality. The added benefit of "social" is the socializing bit, not the discovery bit. Algorithms can always match you up with similar people faster and better. But thanks for the link I'll re-consider the rating.

The radio feature, incidentally, was disabled (temporarily ?) for the US launch. It's not been removed from the client internationally.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#35

Post by jonknee »

I was very unimpressed with Spotify when it launched in the US this week. The app (at least on a Mac) seemed very non-native and used a lot of resources when it was inactive. It apparently uses Flash, so that may be it. It can't connect to my speakers, though that's Apple's fault more than Spotify's (AirPlay). I saw some top music lists, but not much else. My iTunes Playlists sort of came over, but not the Smart Playlists which are the only ones I use. Didn't see any recommendations.

tl;dr I closed the app and haven't listened to any music with it.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#37

Post by pedrolll »

zavulon wrote: post #30

Where is Last.FM on this list? It's actually the best (in my opinion) service out there. Their "discovery" feature is the best, and simplest to use - just choose "Play artist/song/tag XXX radio", and it will play related songs for you. Their catalog seems immense, and I listen to some of the most obscure stuff out there (/hipster joke). And it's completely free.. the only thing it doesn't do is play music "on demand"…

"This article compares services that provide access to interactive, on-demand, and complete music playback, whether paid or free. So services like Pandora, Last.fm's radio, iTunes music store, etc, are not considered because they technically do not satisfy the criteria."

While I agree that last.fm is pretty great, there's a reason it was not included in this list.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#39

Post by cyanbane »

I have been a huge Rdio fan for awhile and after playing with Spotify I have come to the conclusion that Spotify is great if you don't want to pay, if you want to pay then Rdio is much better because of the method in which it presents new music to you. I get the feeling in 6 months the front page of Spotify will be new albums which compete for attention space on your monitor by how much money is put behind them - pushing them into your view, where as Rdio (because it is paid for) will continue to be a screen full of albums liked by your friends or people you follow. I much prefer the later, however the former isn't a bad option if you don't want to pay for anything.
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