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Spotify vs the US Competition

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Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#41

Post by physcab »

earbitscom wrote: post #31
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,…

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…

Its not a black or white issue. Licensing is incredibly complex with ownership sometimes changing between territories, products, people and having the technology in place to enforce specific terms so all parties are happy. I'm not completely knowledgeable about the subject so I won't comment on that further, but its not something we turn a blind eye to. Our content ID system is getting better and better. Ultimately its a question of resources, and when you're a cash-starved startup, you're spread super thin.

My point is that we genuinely do our best to help artists. We're good people. If you want your band's presence taken down, you're entitled to have that done for you. You can also leave your music up so millions of users can discover it and find out more about who you are. We have tens of thousands of individual artists managing their own music and we get tons of fan mail from artists who say that our platform has not only decreased piracy but has actually encouraged fans to buy more of their music and see their shows.

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/040811grooveshark

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#43

Post by jdjohnson »

"…suffers from one same key issue as Rdio: the inability to manage non-catalogue music makes it incapable of being an exclusive music player."

This is simply not true. I am an exclusive Rdio user and despite the opinions of the author, their management system does not render it useless as an exclusive music player.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#44

Post by DrJokepu »

jonknee wrote: post #35

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 Play…

I strongly encourage you to give it another try. Spotify is not iTunes or Pandora, it has very different strengths. At least here in the UK, it streams insanely quickly, streaming starts immediately and the size of their catalogue is simply incredible. You might still find that you don't like it in the end but I wouldn't give up on it after five minutes, really.

Also, just to clarify a few things: it's not based on Flash. It's written in C++. It uses Ogg Vorbis. The user interface closely resembles iTunes so if you're familiar with that (many people are) Spotify shouldn't be too confusing.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#45

Post by jmtame »

cmelbye wrote: post #8
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.

Yeah, I definitely wouldn't rate Grooveshark 9/10. It's great, and I've happily used it for months, but it's no Spotify. Aside from the legal issues, the sound quality is generally pretty bad, the crowd-sourced music catalogue with incorrect song/artist/album names is maddening, and 9/10 for Mobile seems a high when you have to jailbreak before you can use it on one of the largest phone platforms.

seems a high when you have to jailbreak

it's not difficult to jailbreak your phone. go to jailbreakme.com, and you're done.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#46

Post by rednaught »

earbitscom wrote: post #40
rednaught wrote: post #23

Is there a reason Slacker is not reviewed?

They are a radio service. This is a review of on-demand services where you can access songs whenever you want and build your own playlists.

Their premium service is on-demand.

https://store.slacker.com/store/Subscriptions.do

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#47

Post by physcab »

earbitscom wrote: post #33
makmanalp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> 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.

I addressed this in my other comment, but as it turns out, this aspect of the problem is incredibly difficult. Metadata can be wrong and we can't always depend on it. So we use waveform analysis. But thats difficult too due to the indexing and storage requirements and the accuracy of the algorithm performing the search. Also this list is not finite. It changes constantly and parties are always bickering over rights to content and that takes time to sort out. We actually have a team of people who handle takedown requests, and we have another team of people who put in the necessary restrictions to keep content from getting played or uploaded.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#48

Post by chrischen »

jdjohnson wrote: post #43

"…suffers from one same key issue as Rdio: the inability to manage non-catalogue music makes it incapable of being an exclusive music player." This is simply not true. I am an exclusive Rdio user and despite the opinions of the author, their management system does not render it useless as an exclusive music player.

There are many songs not in Rdio's catalog and I have to pull up iTunes to play them. I cannot mix and match non-catalog music with Rdio. I did not say it's useless, just that it cannot be my exclusive music player. Furthermore this becomes even more of a hassle on the go as I would have to pull into a different app on the phone to play non-Rdio music. New releases will not show up instantly in Rdio and there's no way to get them into Rdio's interface. MOG suffers from the same issue.

Of course this has been my experience. I reason it's possible for someone to be completely satisfied by Rdio's catalog but for most people there will be missing music.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#49

Post by alexophile »

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.

I imagine the difference is in how you listen to music. Having been a staunch evangelist for Rdio, I've found that the people that really fall in love with it are usually album listeners. If you prefer to listen in more of a radio type setting, Spotify would probably be better due to the improved playlist functionality.

So I guess it comes down to whether you're trying to discover in the sense of finding new artists, or just finding new music to listen to in the moment.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#50

Post by chopsueyar »

earbitscom wrote: post #33
makmanalp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

It may not be legal. There is a "red flag" provision in the DMCA which could potentially make Grooveshark liable.

I remember Napster attempting to create a system to block subsequent "sharing" of known copyrighted works.

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