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Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

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Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#91

Post by socillion »

ryanhuff wrote: post #84
pnathan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are other people seeing this? I use the web interface all the time, and deliberately avoid services that force Facebook sharing/integration.

It certainly isn't forced, but it is probably enabled by default if there is a facebook account with the same email.

http://help.pandora.com/customer/portal/articles/24775-disco...

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#92

Post by k-mcgrady »

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,…

If you already had an account there was no requirement to add Facebook. Seems you just cancelled 'on principle'. And all the social integration within the app can be easily disabled in preferences.

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#93

Post by k-mcgrady »

jarin wrote: post #87

Spotify seems to have fixed the problem where the desktop app sucks up ALL of your outgoing bandwidth (although it is still bad enough to lag YouTube and other streaming video), so I started using it again. However, would it kill any of these streaming music apps to add an equalizer? Edit: Also, I highly recommend EarBits for music discovery.

I never suffered those bandwidth issues, even on poor connections. Could it have been a problem on your network?

And why would you be listening to Spotify and streaming video? :)

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#95

Post by pbreit »

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…

Spotify's "artist radio" is a bit better but it still has a ways to go to displace Pandora. Once it does so (if ever) I'll be upgrading.

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#96

Post by ticks »

nosequel wrote: post #30
juliano_q wrote: post #22

Until this moment no service convinced me to change my 10-year-old habit of buy/download the music, organize the tags and put it on my mobile device. Since I bought my first iPod until today with my Nexus S I am still doing this and it is very practical to me.

My thoughts exactly. I can buy a cd, rip to flac / mp3, listen to the mp3's everywhere mobile, and flac in my home theater or on my nice headphones. All of the cd's I buy still costs me less than some subscription service.

One service I liked a lot was eMusic. I'm not sure what they are like now, but I got a lot of high quality MP3s for relatively little cost, due to the subscription pricing.

It's not like Spotify in terms of listening as much as you want, but once you get tired of the service, you at least have a collection of music rather than nothing.

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#97

Post by zavulon »

dagw wrote: post #51
JonAtkinson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audiogalaxy is a startup ? Haven't you guys been going for, well, surely more than a decade?

Old Audiogalaxy shut down a few years ago. This is an entirely new thing, but with some of the same people and (re)using the same name.

Back in the day, I absolutely loved AudioGalaxy. It was much better than Napster. You would go on artist page, and see the songs in order of most popular - so you'd instantly see which songs you should check out from new artists.

Ah, the good old days of free mp3s just laying around on the web...

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#98

Post by muyuu »

psychotik wrote: post #67
juliano_q wrote: post #22

Until this moment no service convinced me to change my 10-year-old habit of buy/download the music, organize the tags and put it on my mobile device. Since I bought my first iPod until today with my Nexus S I am still doing this and it is very practical to me.

Try Audiogalaxy - it might be what you've been looking for. It's still your music, just available everywhere without uploading to any server and without ads. http://www.audiogalaxy.com (Discl: I work on it)

Wow. This takes me back.

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#99

Post by ticks »

I like to keep an eye on bands in the metal genre... one issue I noticed is during (and after) the US launch, quite a few metal bands pulled their music off Spotify. Perhaps the US launch was a big enough milestone for these niche labels to decide whether or not to continue using the service?

Re: Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

#100

Post by larsberg »

randallsquared wrote: post #47
socillion wrote: post #41

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…

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.

If you're on a mac and want something in the menubar (or whatever they call the thing on the top), try PandaBar. Very nice, has keybindings, and the dev adds features requested as quickly as Apple will turn around updates through the App Store.
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