Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I'm still finding it strangely complicated to download tracks for offline use on the iPhone App. I wish they'd streamline it a little. And the app crashes when you try to save an album as a new playlist with the album name, though I can't believe they won't fix that soon.

Not sure if this has been discussed in this lengthy thread, but what do you all make of the preponderance of "re-recorded" hits from the days of yore? Is this a way for Spotify to pay less for the rights, comping the artists only and not the record companies? I know many artists (Squeeze, for example) are re-recording their old hits, faithfully, so as to exercise more control over them. Strikes me that we are entering into a Karaoke Age, in which you can get the original work for X, and a "faithful" simulacrum for X - whatever. I mean, listening to Walter Egan's re-recorded "Magnet And Steel", he still sounds fine, but the production is just a bit off, and when you lose Stevie Nicks on backing vocals, you lose everything.

Any way to divert money away from labels and to artists is ok by me.

Fair enough. But it does present an aesthetic problem. Whilst listening to the 50s poll playlist I tolerated/lived with the various rerecord versions of the old hits but really want to hear the original records- in rock and roll "the original is still the greatest" usually holds true.There's no way a live recording of The Coasters for a PBS special is going to sound as good as the recording made by Tom Dowd in the Atlantic studio with King Curtis on sax, Gary Chester on drums and Mike Stoller on piano.

Is this a way for Spotify to pay less for the rights

Oh, I really don't think so. There's a lot of this stuff on iTunes as well.

Spotify is owned by the majors so nothing they do is going to be even remotely "a way to divert money away from labels and to artists." The mechanical rate for a download of a cover is something like 9 cents. For streaming like this, it's probably much lower but I don't know the exact figure. So if anything, covers are a way to divert money away from the original artist, paying the songwriter a tiny pittance for the use of their IP.

Yeah iTunes does this too. I downloaded a Jim Croce song a while back only to realize it wasn't even Croce singing.

but really it's not iTunes or Spotify doing it. It's other artists doing it. anyone can record a cover without permission by simply paying the statutory rate for a compulsory license. This goes back at least to those '60s hit cover collection LPs but probably earlier as well.

this whole no songs >10 min is really starting to get to me

will probably kill the subscription because of it

is that a us thing only? i haven't noticed it.

I listened to the Hatchback album yesterday and that's got a couple of 10min plus tracks that played with no problem, so it's either a glitch or a US-only thing, but that would still just be bizarre - would take out a lot of classical music for one thing.

I'm pretty sure its a U.S. only thing. Was listening to some Allman Brothers yesterday (the urge hit me, what can I say?) but it wouldn't play anything over 10 minutes. Super annoying. I was hoping that it would go away with the paid subscription, but judging by what diamonddave85 is saying, that isn't the case. Sounds like I may keep my wallet in my pocket for a little while longer to see how this shakes out. I listen to way too much music where the 10-minute plus track is fairly common.

http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/long_songs_are_missing

Second post here blames UMG

Yeah, it's only UMG stuff over ten minutes.

^above from a few months ago and before US launch so might not be same issue. I've never had any issue playing long tracks.

Affects the UK too, The Orb's 'Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld' is about an hour shorter because of it.

from what I understand, when tracks aren't available it's because the label or rightsholder hasn't licensed the track for streaming. The Orb album is missing tracks on Rdio as well, although they aren't the same tracks and all of the tracks are available on Mog, so I'm not really sure how all of this works.

I'm in the us, "shatterhand" by nightblooms is (just) over ten minutes and plays fine. Premium.

Pretty sure Nightblooms weren't ever on UMG, that appears to be the common link here. That link omino posted makes a lot of sense, on iTunes a lot of those lengthy tunes are only available 'Album Only' (meaning you can't purchase them individuall) and somehow the metadata transferred over for Spotify in a way that makes them not allowed to be streamed either. Seems Spotify is looking into it though, so hopefully it will all be available soon.

uforb and adventures are on Big Life, a UMG subsidiary

UMG is such a huge conglomerate that even though it's an issue with only ONE content provider, it's a problem imo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Music_Group_labels

I've been kinda "whatever" about people complaining about things not being on here but now that something I've been listening to for a week is suddenly unavailable (Iceage "New Brigade") ... yeah it's annoying.

the interface really kinda sucks; there are a bunch of little navigational things that would make it so much easier to use

plus they really need to clean up their "artist" pages, figure out what to do about two artists with the same name, etc.

that said im using this as much as itunes atp

the interface really kinda sucks; there are a bunch of little navigational things that would make it so much easier to use

THIS. Starting with multiple tabs, so I can have one with the currently playing album while I go browsing and searching in others.

Appearance of ads in the free version is very haphazard, and seems to depend on time of day maybe? Last night it seemed like there were ads after every other song, but this morning I listened to a whole album without hearing any.

pretty shitty that you can't play it on two devices at the same time as i found out when i got kicked off this morning while my wife was using it.

Starting with multiple tabs, so I can have one with the currently playing album while I go browsing and searching in others.

You can search all day and click back to "play queue" any time you like.

Tabs would be nice though.

plus they really need to clean up their "artist" pages, figure out what to do about two artists with the same name, etc.

yeah, not just that but I've seen lots of cases of one artist with multiple slight variations of their name (capitalization or punctuation differences, with or without "The" etc) which is super annoying. And I've seen a bunch of cases where the "related artists" tab doesn't even include side projects or related solo acts.

But my biggest gripe is that they need to let you select multiple playlists so you can put them into a folder all at once. That, and it would be nice if they indented the folders a bit more like itunes does. Even if you organize everything into folders, the playlists still look like just one huge long list.

listening to incubus, counting ufos, signaling them w/ my ladder tbrr y'all!

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii wish u were here

Artist discographies are messy too

I think the best part is the playlist sharing for sure. Not terribly impressed by the rst so far

lol

spotify's one of the best services i've ever used imo

yeah playlist sharing is by far the best thing about it for me

definitely

but being that it's everyone's favorite feature, the fact that you can't search for public playlists except through a third-party website is ... weird

my favorite feature is being able to listen to such a big library of music

no need to worry about bitrate or metadata or blah blah whatever it's all just there

yeah playlist sharing is the only reason I haven't deleted this yet

I still worry about metadata and slowly die inside because I can't change it.

u ppl

it would actually be kind of cool if they let you add your own tags to stuff. and maybe you could browse or search by friends tags, etc.

basically one of these companies needs to buy lastfm and fully integrate it in with the actual music

I'd rather last.fm retooled Spotify than the other way around.

well lastfm already failed at the streaming thing and got rid of their radio feature didn't they?

They still have radio.

At least in the US.

i use this to listen to new albums that i don't necessarily want to download -- pretty convenient imo

i've starred over 2,500 tracks, many of which are things that i used to love to listen to at one time or another -- i can just put it on random & hit play and it's great

also, yeah, when i start listening to new music again with any frequency i'll obv use this for that too. but right now it's 4 creed

i've never been into playlists much myself -- i keep some for end of year listmaking purposes

i mostly don't have the patience -- actually did them some when i was in school for when ppl came over & shit but right now half of my playlists are shipley's decade lists \(o_O)/

and i play those from time to time

or my neptunes playlist