Spotify vs the US Competition • Hacker News Board

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#51

Post by socksy » Sat, Jul 16, 2011, 12:19 AM UTC

Out of interest, does Spotify (the free version) for US have the 5 plays limit on each song? Having limited numbers of hours I can deal with, but after they introduced limited plays on Spotify, I practically never used it again after my premium account ran out.

The 5 plays doesn't appear to renew at the end of the month like the number of hours, and it just means that my playlists have more and more holes in them (as often has happened when artists suddenly change their minds over streaming). Spotify tried to explain that most of their users only use their service to discover new music – maybe I'm too hipster for them, but the new and interesting music I want to listen to isn't generally in their catalogue, and last.fm's discovery features are much better.

When they provided everyone free access for unlimited plays (with ads, granted), most of my friends used it and updated their playlists — which I would subscribe to and we'd drop music on to each other's user icons and share interesting music. Now, even if I were to re-upgrade to premium (which I probably won't, especially when in the UK we appear to be getting a raw deal in cost), it's like a ghost town.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#52

Post by shinratdr » Sat, Jul 16, 2011, 12:23 AM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #13

shinratdr wrote: post #11

I'm in Canada and was disappointed that we were cut out of the stateside Spotify launch, so I went looking and heard a number of recommendations for Rdio. Out of 18,384 tracks it matched 3,142. Considering my tastes are pretty mainstream and my files have very clean tags, it's hardly impressive.

With most of these services you're bound to not be able to find a few songs. What's important is whether or not it fails gracefully into letting you manage those missing music files yourself and Spotify, Rhapsody, and Grooveshark are the only ones that let you do that to some extent.

True, but I expected them to have more deals in place. Most artists are missing key tracks, albums, or aren't represented at all. I also don't really think it's a few songs. Knowing my library and how mainstream it is, at least 8,000-10,000 tracks should have been matched. That's my library minus most independents and instrumentals.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#53

Post by potatolicious » Sat, Jul 16, 2011, 12:28 AM UTC

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…

> "then why has Universal declared "legal jihad" on Grooveshark?"

This isn't to excuse Grooveshark (honestly, not a user, so I have no horse in this race), but attracting the ire of the RIAA/MPAA in and of itself doesn't mean much except that you've gotten some big dogs pissed off at you.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#54

Post by chrischen » Sat, Jul 16, 2011, 12:57 AM UTC

bentlegen wrote: post #42

The "social" component of these services are worthless if your friends aren't there. Most of my friends and co-workers are on Rdio, so I plan to stick there for the foreseeable future.

Even if they are you'll find that it's mostly inconsequential towards your day to day music listening.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#55

Post by chrischen » Sat, Jul 16, 2011, 1:15 AM UTC

mmahemoff wrote: post #17

Spotify's discovery is better than a 4. Since a playlist can be represented by a URL, sites have emerged to share playlists, which is actually awesome, one of those living in the future moments. Even better, these can be dynamic, like a top 40 list, and also curated by everyone. That said, Spotify could certainly do much more in this area (a lot of their energies have been focused on getting the US launch, it seems).

These discovery services are not integrated into Spotify so I don't really consider them Spotify discovery features. Is a site that lists Spotify playlists really different from a site that just lists playlists? Most of these sites you can play the music. If I were to go to a website to do discovery, there are plenty of other options too like the Hype Machine and it does not require Spotify.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#56

Post by dgallagher » Sat, Jul 16, 2011, 1:35 AM UTC

socksy wrote: post #51

Out of interest, does Spotify (the free version) for US have the 5 plays limit on each song? Having limited numbers of hours I can deal with, but after they introduced limited plays on Spotify, I practically never used it again after my premium account ran out. The 5 plays doesn't appear to renew at the end of the month like the number of hours, and it just means that my playlists have more and more holes in them (as…

They don't seem to mention it anywhere on the U.S. site. It appears in Europe that they have a 5-plays-per-track limit for free accounts, but not paid accounts.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#57

Post by dgallagher » Sat, Jul 16, 2011, 1:41 AM UTC

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 fix around this; use headphones. Just take them off to ignore an ad. Or if you have a separate sound system, mute that. Annoying if you have a laptop though. This behavior doesn't occur when music is playing.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#58

Post by tedkalaw » Sat, Jul 16, 2011, 1:41 AM UTC

The killer feature in Spotify for me is that it aggregates the music on my HDD and their stuff. I have a library of 14000 songs, so it's nice to have all of this music side by side.

The higher quality MP3s in the premium version is a nice touch too.

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#59

Post by Joakal » Sat, Jul 16, 2011, 1:44 AM UTC

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?

Re: Spotify vs the US Competition

#60

Post by Joakal » Sat, Jul 16, 2011, 1:47 AM UTC

physcab wrote: post #47

earbitscom wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you tried to do a fingerprint of files?

Also, what's waveform analysis?