81–90 of 110 posts
I don't buy music, don't ever pay for it either. But Spotify has very much upped the "scam" factor recently, by first cutting from 20 to 10 free hours per month, and now not even showing how many hours are remaining till you run out. Also, not until you find and read the long terms and conditions do you find out the first "6 months" (which already seem to be up for me) are a trial of premium, after that you get 10 ho…
Right now I have resorted to adding full albums to a new playlist so I can see artists names as there are times I can't recall every artist I've liked listening to in the past.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Pandora is nice, but I refuse to pay for a service where I have to vpn to the US in order to be able to use it. I'm also not overly impressed with the Android app. --It works, but it's not wonderful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Pandora contracted with Facebook and started showing what my friends were listening to (I had used the same emails in both). That same day I quit Pandora. At that point in time, they did not even have a mechanism to kill your account, so I had to email the company personally. I quit my Facebook account not long after. I refuse to willingly partake in a surveillance society.
For me, it seems ridiculous to pay for a subscription music service that has a paltry catalog with less than half of the albums I want to listen to. That, and I can't be guaranteed of the quality of the file, if it's transcoded, etc. I have decent headphones and prefer to use them to their full potential. For people who just want to listen to albums, buying albums still seems like the way to go (whether you use iTune…
Spotify, Rdio and all these other sites need to open up their catalog to local and independent artists. That's one of the reasons iTunes was so popular -- they allowed Youtube singers and other aspiring artists to post their songs and allow people to purchase them. They tapped into this long tail and both Apple and these indie artists made money from it. These companies can't compete with the big players by offering…
At Mog (where I work) we have a highly responsive catalog department. We can pretty much get anything that is already in digital format. This includes bands who are distributed solely through CDBaby or other non-label services. Labels push stuff to us on a weekly basis, but for smaller bands, it may be a matter of making a request. Then there's the flip side: bands who don't do digital distribution at all. Tapes and…
However, would it kill any of these streaming music apps to add an equalizer?
Edit: Also, I highly recommend EarBits for music discovery.
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…
Mog does this now. We recommend based on play history and, if you have Facebook connected, we offer you recommendations based on your Facebook likes, as well as a separate collection of recommendations based on your friend's likes. We also tell you which friend recommended which album, so you can immediately tell whose tastes are more in line with yours and whose are poo.
I'm using Rdio and I've been pretty happy with it. Before I plopped down my money, I did a comparison with Spotify on the artists/genres I cared about, and Rdio pretty much matched Spotify blow for blow.
I find the desktop app to be great. It's very lightweight and simple to use. To add tracks to your library you star them. Simple. You can also star albums to add those to your library.
The mobile app is the weakest link but not too bad. It has full library access (starred tracks), integration with the iPod library, full search, and offline capabilities. The UI isn't great but it has all the features needed.