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Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

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Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#41

Post by socillion »

frou_dh wrote: post #17

I 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…

Have 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.

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#42

Post by frankdenbow »

frou_dh wrote: post #17

I 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…

This is the main reason why I am using Rdio now. Their radio functionality is awesome and they now have a free version with no ads. Finding lots of new music through them.

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#43

Post by eridius »

phzbOx wrote: post #26

I'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 yo…

If 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.

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#44

Post by dasil003 »

I 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.

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#45

Post by phlyingpenguin »

dasil003 wrote: post #44

I 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,…

Facebook 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.

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#46

Post by kin »

Laurentvw wrote: post #14

So 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.

I 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?

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#47

Post by randallsquared »

socillion wrote: post #41
frou_dh wrote: post #17

I 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…

Have 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…

On Linux and the Mac, the command line Pandora client "pianobar" works really well, and while API updates break it, it's always been mere hours before it was fixed, in my experience.

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#48

Post by forza »

eridius wrote: post #43
phzbOx wrote: post #26

I'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 yo…

If 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.

Just click on the album title first...

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#49

Post by nvarsj »

The 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.
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