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Spotify vs the US Competition

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Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#91

Post by icebraining »

xentronium wrote: post #85
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"…

> And it's completely free Am I missing something here? I've got 30 plays on my trial account and after that it asks me to pay for subscription.

You're missing living in (or proxying to) the UK, US or Germany, where it's still free.

http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#92

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

nikcub wrote: post #74

does anybody know what these apps, such as spotify, are written in, and any hints on resources used? itunes is good at not spiking CPU usage, which means listening to music while running servers, doing dev work etc. is possible, while some fat clients (especially thinking of Adobe AIR here) are just terrible

Spotify is C++ using the Qt4 toolkit. At least on the Linux client (still in "preview"), it also uses DBus to allow external applications to send command signals and receive current song information from the client. I actually wrote a wrapper for Spotify to translate Gnome media key signals to the MPRIS standard that Spotify listens for.

http://noswap.com/projects/spotify-gnome http://github.com/jreese/spotify-gnome

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#93

Post by SkyMarshal »

parbo wrote: post #82
joeguilmette wrote: post #26

I signed up for Spotify and was pretty disappointed. I have years and years of Data in iTunes, and the only thing Spotify does is pull out tracks. It won't even sync my SmartPlaylists. So it's kind of like starting over. Not something I'm willing to do.

I'm a Spotify dev. What sort of data would you find most useful to have extracted from iTunes? The reason we don't do the smart playlists is that we just take a snapshot (the lists aren't kept in sync) and the very nature of smart playlists is that they are dynamic.

Even a snapshot of smart and dumb playlists would be better than nothing. The use case is, users who want to migrate to Spotify from whatever they've been using for years, intend to copy over their playlists to Spotify, and permanently switch to Spotify as their main playlist organizer/generator. But having to recreate all their playlists by hand in Spotify is enough to stymie even the most enthusiastic US/NA Spotify fan.

Same problem on the Android app I just discovered yesterday, all my local playlists are made with a third party app called Playlist Builder, and both PowerAMP and Google Music can use them, but apparently not Spotify. I only have Premium, but it seems Premium is intended to enable local music and playlists just not sharing and streaming...

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#94

Post by jeltz »

Joakal wrote: post #59
dgallagher wrote: post #57

After two days with a free account, on a Mac, I noticed this: - If you mute your speakers via OS X while an advertisement is playing, it pauses the ad until you unmute your speakers. - If you turn down your speaker volume via OS X too much while an advertisement is playing, the same behavior occurs until you turn the volume back up. This appears to be relative to the volume you were just listening to music at. Quick…

Does this happen on a PC?

Yes, but I if I remember correctly it does not happen if you run the PC version in wine on Linux.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#95

Post by sjs »

chrischen wrote: post #76
sjs wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use and like Grooveshark but it's radio recommendations are pretty bad and people who have used both say Spotify's is better. I would take these scores with a grain of salt. As much as I like Grooveshark I wouldn't give it a 9 overall.

Grooveshark's radio is not the best, but it's probably better than Spotify's Radio, especially in terms of customizability.

Interesting. Are you saying that Spotify's radio is more like actual radio? Where you just listen and what's on is on?

If so then Grooveshark definitely deserves a higher rating than Spotify for radio. Recommendations can be improved but not being able to skip a track is a big design flaw (for me, I can see how some want a set-it-and-forget-it radio).

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#96

Post by physcab »

chrischen wrote: post #69
physcab wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After testing out Turntable.fm for the past few weeks, I have to almost disagree. And this is coming from someone who worked on Grooveshark Radio for a year, which is almost all algorithmic.

Turntable is fun with friends. But being a listener in a DJd room is no different than listening to a curated playlist, a curated radio station, and probably worse than personalized algorithmic radio in terms of efficacy of discovery. You'll discover music on Turntable, but for the same amount of time spent on an algorithmic radio station you'll probably discover more.

You might "discover" more in the sense that you'll get far more recommendations of songs you've never heard of, but those recommendations might not be relevant to you. Why? Because your mood changes from song to song and algorithms will never capture human emotion quite like, well, humans.

When I'm in a well-DJ'ed Turntable room, the "radio" feels so much more natural. Songs flow. People are constantly editing their queues to best the song before it and I find myself rarely having to vote on a song. Its already better than Pandora, IMO. It also beats BMAT which has amazing algorithmic recommendations (based on waveform analysis and musical feature decomposition).

The only issue I see right now is that if your tastes are outside of Electronica and Indie, theres not much else for you at the moment.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#97

Post by physcab »

earbitscom wrote: post #64
physcab wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I'm not going to lie, we're competitors, and I have plenty of people tell me they're happy with Grooveshark, and that you provide a lot of value. I also hear the other side, and I hope that Grooveshark gets what it deserves from Universal. The fact still remains that Grooveshark as it is wouldn't exist if not for the many years it's had to benefit from free use of mainstream content. That's not what DMCA was created…

Whichever way you look at it, building a business in the music space is difficult. We're all probably competing with piracy more so than each other. There is no good road. You make it sound like we've had it easy, which is not the case. Every employee has at some time gone without pay for an extended period of time. Mine was 10 months. That's the sort of dedication it takes to bring a product from a thousand users to millions when you're underfunded. And our relationships didn't form suddenly when we had millions of users. They were the result of years of work in the trenches when our userbase was small- going to concerts, promoting artists, branding our site...basically everything we could do to get their songs heard.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#98

Post by physcab »

earbitscom wrote: post #66
physcab wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The simple fact is, without mainstream content, Grooveshark would be a joke. Putting in a requirement - Do not play songs with the word Primus in the metadata - would probably "accidentally" keep out some cover bands' songs that are legally uploaded, but it would do a very good job of keeping out most Primus music. Even if that music showed up, but without the metadata, nobody would be finding it in searches, which a…

If Primus sees their content on our site and they don't want it there, all they have to do is tell us. And we'll do exactly what you say by filtering any mention of the word Primus, take it down promptly and do everything we can to make it never happen again.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#99

Post by earbitscom »

physcab wrote: post #97
earbitscom wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to lie, we're competitors, and I have plenty of people tell me they're happy with Grooveshark, and that you provide a lot of value. I also hear the other side, and I hope that Grooveshark gets what it deserves from Universal. The fact still remains that Grooveshark as it is wouldn't exist if not for the many years it's had to benefit from free use of mainstream content. That's not what DMCA was created…

Whichever way you look at it, building a business in the music space is difficult. We're all probably competing with piracy more so than each other. There is no good road. You make it sound like we've had it easy, which is not the case. Every employee has at some time gone without pay for an extended period of time. Mine was 10 months. That's the sort of dedication it takes to bring a product from a thousand users to…

I think you're straying a little from the topic. Yes, company building is hard. No, that does not make it okay that Grooveshark built it's business by streaming a lot of mainstream music that it didn't, and in many cases still doesn't, have licenses for.

I didn't say you've had it easy. I said you built your company on the backs of artists' content without paying them. So, each employee went a few months without pay. Most of the artists playing on Grooveshark went (and are still going) much longer.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#100

Post by sleepyhead »

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…

Disagree. Been using Spotify for 1,5 years. It is a native app on OSX, feels native and does not use a lot of resources (have you tried this app called iTunes??). They do use flash for ad's though so maybe that is the problem, I pay for the premium account which does not have advertising. For connecting to my speakers through airport express I use the excellent AirFoil app.
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