Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The clock is ticking for Spotify

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 116 posts

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#61

Post by hluska »

pimeys wrote: post #44
patrick_haply wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I often find is that artists will have have everything on Spotify except their latest album, at least for a few months. Fair enough, they want people to buy their albums; it's just one area where I find Spotify consistently incomplete.

There are other big areas where it's seriously lacking content: 1) Modern contemporary electronic music, which is usually available vinyl only. 2) Classic albums in their original form. When there's a remaster, Spotify typically only has the remaster, original was either never there or will be removed when remaster is out. Now, when you start to invest to your sound system even a bit (not talking about 100k wires her…

Honestly, if this is how you evaluate music, the current generation of streaming is not for you. Do yourself a favour, buy a good quality turntable and start collecting vinyl!!

PS - I've been collecting vinyl for over twenty years and consider it my one serious vice. This comment is the equivalent of a drug addict suggesting that you "just try it once." You've been warned...:)

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#62

Post by rak00n »

Micoloth wrote: post #58
Eridrus wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Spotify's saving grace is that it's not owned by a big tech company. I think the music industry would prefer to negotiate with Spotify than with YouTube.

Isn't it a big tech company itself? Well at least they want to be one. It's not like they want to be the good guys there. This is what disappoints me a little bit

At least it's focused on Music industry. At least I'm comfortable as a patron that some egoist exec won't just shut it down out of nowhere.

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#63

Post by zpr »

ivraatiems wrote: post #53
iamben wrote: post #3

I can't be the only one that has almost zero faith the music industry won't ruin Spotify? I'm sure it won't be deliberate, just a combination of stubbornness, greed and living in the past. Spotify and music is like a library and books. It's fantastic and accessible for listening and discovery. I'm hard pushed to find a friend that didn't use napster or limewire that's moved to Spotify - it's just easy, there and the…

The music industry doesn't need to ruin Spotify. It's ruining itself. Its support is abysmal, its apps are bug-riddled and get worse with every update, and it's consistently doing boneheaded "pivot" moves (like mandatory Facebook login a couple years back, "version 1.0" of the desktop app more recently), and so on. It's squandering the good faith and great library it has.

I agree. Never cared much for the UI, and always found it too buggy to keep using. At my old job, we used it for office tunes, and it was often showing the wrong song that was playing, (so you never knew what you were listening to unless you used something like SoundHound), and going to previous or next tracks was inconsistent, so you might not get back to the last song ever again.

Pardon my ignorance but why is Google Play Music not worth mention here?

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#64

Post by ldev »

rak00n wrote: post #59
ivraatiems wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The music industry doesn't need to ruin Spotify. It's ruining itself. Its support is abysmal, its apps are bug-riddled and get worse with every update, and it's consistently doing boneheaded "pivot" moves (like mandatory Facebook login a couple years back, "version 1.0" of the desktop app more recently), and so on. It's squandering the good faith and great library it has.

Still it's arguably better than the alternatives out there. When I cast music to my TV Spotify has a nice interface. When I cast Google Music there is this icon dancing around all over the TV. I think their web interface is superior as well.

I like Apple Music more - more songs and it uploads your mp3s that are not matched and make them available everywhere.

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#65

Post by piotrkubisa »

ProblemFactory wrote: post #52
patrick_haply wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I often find is that artists will have have everything on Spotify except their latest album, at least for a few months. Fair enough, they want people to buy their albums; it's just one area where I find Spotify consistently incomplete.

> it's just one area where I find Spotify consistently incomplete. At first (especially some years ago when the catalogue was much smaller) this used to annoy me. But Spotify has made a lot of progress in side-stepping the issue. The Discover Weekly playlist of recommended music in particular was a great invention. It doesn't matter that much if artist X's latest album is not on Spotify, as long as they can find some…

Personally, I fell in love in their Discover Weekly algorithm. If you in previous week listened music from artists which tracks haven't been listed in any user-made playlist nor played magical 10,000 times and there is a problem with getting a vinyl / CD you wouldn't expect any songs from such artists but in Discover Weekly you may found similar tracks - they match same genre, they are also from the same decade, they are not covers and they are unique - not only per week, but I haven't heard them in my whole life. If Spotify is going to close, please share access to it, because it is amazing.

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#66

Post by ldev »

lokedhs wrote: post #30
binarymax wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with the OS integration annoyance. I use Spotify but it doesn't connect to Siri and the UX is abysmal on CarPlay.

That's mainly an Apple problem though. The integration with Android is very complete, and I don't think there are any features that Google Music gives you that Spotify doesn't. And that's a good thing given the fact that Google Music (like most Google services that are not free) is only available in the US and a handful of other countries.

>That's mainly an Apple problem though.

And Google's/Spotify's problem is that they do not have any good or even decent phones.

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#67

Post by majewsky »

ldev wrote: post #64
rak00n wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still it's arguably better than the alternatives out there. When I cast music to my TV Spotify has a nice interface. When I cast Google Music there is this icon dancing around all over the TV. I think their web interface is superior as well.

I like Apple Music more - more songs and it uploads your mp3s that are not matched and make them available everywhere.

Does it still replace your local music files with inferior copies from the cloud?

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#68

Post by pimeys »

hluska wrote: post #61
pimeys wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other big areas where it's seriously lacking content: 1) Modern contemporary electronic music, which is usually available vinyl only. 2) Classic albums in their original form. When there's a remaster, Spotify typically only has the remaster, original was either never there or will be removed when remaster is out. Now, when you start to invest to your sound system even a bit (not talking about 100k wires her…

Honestly, if this is how you evaluate music, the current generation of streaming is not for you. Do yourself a favour, buy a good quality turntable and start collecting vinyl!! PS - I've been collecting vinyl for over twenty years and consider it my one serious vice. This comment is the equivalent of a drug addict suggesting that you "just try it once." You've been warned...:)

I own plenty of vinyl, two Technics SL1200's and a mixer and I think it's a huge waste of resources. What I need is to just get lossless music effortlessly and with the right mastering. For new stuff it's pretty easy because you only have one option (or then some mega rare double vinyl versions, I'm looking at you Björk!). But for these old rock albums... In the 2000's their record labels wanted people to buy them again and so we got these super bad remastered versions, which are the ones you find from Spotify.

Yes, now I need to get CD's to have the best mastering, rip them to flac and opus and put the CD's to a box collecting dust. Or in some cases I need to buy the vinyl, record it to flac and opus and maybe play the vinyl a couple of times more when I do a house party.

Waste of resources...

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#69

Post by gdulli »

ivraatiems wrote: post #53
iamben wrote: post #3

I can't be the only one that has almost zero faith the music industry won't ruin Spotify? I'm sure it won't be deliberate, just a combination of stubbornness, greed and living in the past. Spotify and music is like a library and books. It's fantastic and accessible for listening and discovery. I'm hard pushed to find a friend that didn't use napster or limewire that's moved to Spotify - it's just easy, there and the…

The music industry doesn't need to ruin Spotify. It's ruining itself. Its support is abysmal, its apps are bug-riddled and get worse with every update, and it's consistently doing boneheaded "pivot" moves (like mandatory Facebook login a couple years back, "version 1.0" of the desktop app more recently), and so on. It's squandering the good faith and great library it has.

I loved the music discovery aspect of Spotify but bad software pushed me away.

Even to me it sounds counterintuitive. Finding new music I love should have been worth more to me than a player with a lot of features. But my instinct was to let foobar2000 pull me back. Something about sophisticated control of playback and playlists turns out to be really important too. But power users are the minority, I'm sure.

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#70

Post by majewsky »

pimeys wrote: post #44
patrick_haply wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I often find is that artists will have have everything on Spotify except their latest album, at least for a few months. Fair enough, they want people to buy their albums; it's just one area where I find Spotify consistently incomplete.

There are other big areas where it's seriously lacking content: 1) Modern contemporary electronic music, which is usually available vinyl only. 2) Classic albums in their original form. When there's a remaster, Spotify typically only has the remaster, original was either never there or will be removed when remaster is out. Now, when you start to invest to your sound system even a bit (not talking about 100k wires her…

> Modern contemporary electronic music, which is usually available vinyl only.

Oh, the irony.

Post reply on HN