Spotify - anyone heard of it?

New support page if anyones having problems
http://spoti.fi/Wa8zIy

Anyone tried new look updated and improved Soundrop app yet?

Just noticed that Zeppelin isn't on there anymore. The whole Zep catalogue used to be on Spotify, and now NOTHING. I'm sad. ;_;

I don't remember the Zeppelin catalog ever being there.

Oh shit, you might be right. I was probably thinking of the Stones.

still no Hounds of Love which saddens me since they have every other kate bush record - was that one on a different label than the rest?

Nope, same label as everything else prior to The Sensual World.

Weird one-album gaps like that baffle me. Why no Pretenders debut album, when the rest of their stuff is there?

I've never seen any Zeppelin on Spotify.

Signed,
An American

No, you're right. I was thinking I'd listened to a ton of Zep on Spotify during the artist poll, but I was confusing that poll with the Stones poll and the Stones listening binge.

Where are you guys as I can see HoL http://open.spotify.com/album/5BWl0bB1q0TqyFmkBEupZy and 1st Pretenders http://open.spotify.com/album/4oDYsMBe7KtOu12VNMO75k

I did figure out that you can find The Beatles on grooveshark by looking for "escarabajos."

they need to consolidate their entries and separate others, e.g. there are artist pages for Windy & Carl, Windy and Carl and "Carl, Windy" — and not all of those pages contain the same content. Also the LFO artist page has both the techno duo and the Lyte Funky Ones. The Scott Walker page has some albums from some amateur autotune-using nobody by the same name. Their classical indexing is horrifying. They could pay me $13/hr and I could sort it out for them.

"This album is not available in the United States" for both the K.Bush and Pretenders links.

spotify doesn't have any sort of crowdsourcing where users can suggest records for them to re-evaluate the license status of in their region, does it? because i have a feeling a lot of these gaps in discographies are just some quirk from the past that they never went back to later to fix

The issue is that they really don't give a fuck.

where is the new rihanna album i am upset

Destroyer's artist page is hilarious, there are records by at least three bands on there, maybe more

Anyone know if you can search within a users profile/playlists?

Try ctrl-F/whatever the Apple equivalent is; that should bring up a filter search for whatever screen you have open.

Actually I think it's ctrl-F on Apples, too

Tried it, but didn't work. Works ok looking at a single artist, but not a user afaik.

I see spotify has a web app now

I sometimes refer to it as "Snotify". Just letting you know.

I see spotify has a web app now

Oh yeah, I recently was told about MOG, which is pretty much the same thing as Spotify but browser-based (I think?) and has a slightly different set-up . I really don't have the time or attention to try and be on two different "social music platforms" and Spotify has pretty much replaced iTunes and downloading mp3s for me...

Anyone know if MOG is worth switching to? I kinda prefer a stand-alone application like spotify is, and it has built in audioscrobbling... But from what I hear the "cool kids" use MOG.

I used MOG for a bit a year ago. MOG didn't have the social/sharing side worked out as well as spotify at the time. perhaps it's changed.

MOG's ipad app was also hilariously bad. don't know if that's changed.

friend of mine swears by it. I don't know how their catalog or pricing compares to Spotify.

I use Spotify pretty heavily. Especially after I accidentally upgraded to iTunes 11.

No Kompakt and no Drag City are still the biggest holes as far as records I search for and then remember "d'oh, they still don't have that"

The biggest hole with Spotify for me is that every single track from a UMG label has some weird defective codec thing where it sounds like it's being heard through a table fan (kind of a rapid-rate whooshing that's especially audible on elements such as cymbals, chorus, reverb decay, and strings at a moderate dynamic level. Motown, Deutsche Grammophon, ECM, Decca, it's just a giant swath of classic records fucked up.

It's not specific to Spotify either, I first noticed it on UMG tracks from eMusic and Amazon MP3. Seems like when Universal went through the humungous task, several years ago, of converting all their holdings to MP3 in order to enter the digital sales realm, someone had something set to 'fastest conversion/lowest quality' or something.

aka the mistake was so huge that there's so question of UMG reconverting their entire library.

Computing power is pretty cheap these days. I can't imagine it would be that difficult to reconvert their entire catalog to MP3, assuming they were halfway smart about archiving everything in a lossless format the first time through.

Lewis OTM, noticed similar issues.

Is there a playlist or app or something that actually lists everything new added to Spotify? I subscribe to someone's weekly releases playlist but he misses a lot of stuff and the What's New doesn't have nearly everything that's new...

There really should be something that plugs into your Last.fm or w/e and tells you about new-on-Spotify releases. There's this I guess, trying it out now: http://spofm.net/

anyone having issues with the browsing function today ?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/business/media/streaming-shakes-up-music-industrys-model-for-royalties.html?hp&_r=1&

Even for an under-the-radar artist like Ms. Keating, who describes her style as “avant cello,” the numbers painted a stark picture of what it is like to be a working musician these days. After her songs had been played more than 1.5 million times on Pandora over six months, she earned $1,652.74. On Spotify, 131,000 plays last year netted just $547.71, or an average of 0.42 cent a play

...

Complicating the issue, each type of service pays different rates. Pandora’s are set by law. Spotify declined to comment on its rates, but according to a number of music executives who have negotiated with the company, it generally pays 0.5 to 0.7 cent a stream (or $5,000 to $8,000 per million plays) for its paid tier, and as much as 90 percent less for its free tier.

The companies behind streaming are ballooning quickly. Pandora, with 67 million regular users, is publicly traded, with a market capitalization of nearly $2 billion, and Spotify’s investors have reportedly valued the company at $3 billion. Yet so far they have contributed relatively little to the American recording industry’s $7 billion bottom line.

In its last four reported quarters, Pandora paid $202 million in “content acquisition costs,” including licensing fees, and Spotify recently announced that it has paid $500 million in royalties since its inception. Downloads, by comparison, had $2.6 billion in sales in 2011, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

For those whose income depends on royalties, the biggest concern has been whether streaming cannibalizes CD and download sales by offering a cheap or free alternative.

Cliff Burnstein, whose company, Q Prime, manages Metallica and other major acts, said that even if streaming hurts sales, all is not lost as long as the number of paying subscribers continues to climb rapidly.

“There is a point at which there could be 100 percent cannibalization, and we would make more money through subscriptions services,” Mr. Burnstein said. “We calculate that point at approximately 20 million worldwide subscribers.”

Metallica recently announced an exclusive deal with Spotify.

I've bought more records (many of which were used, I'll admit) since I started using spotify. I bought several new Blue Note reissues last month solely because of the ILM Jazz poll and my ability to quickly listen to the placing albums on spotify. If they find a way to make spotify sustainable for artists and I end up paying more for the service, that's great. I won't complain. But if some quiet car riding contingent finds a way to ruin this model, I will never forgive them. fuck your downloads.

(I will disclose that my future career will benefit from a sustainable increase in bandwidth demands on data centers. But streaming video will make that happen anyway.)

spotify is horrible for artists and lacks any form of curatorial instinct or interest in remedying either of these issues; i'm inclined to think something better will come along but i'm absolutely an addict

The curatorial part comes from the sharing/subscribing. I think that i prefer it that way. Mog had better guest lists and suggestions, but the lack of sharing/collaboration was a bummer. The spotify apps are also better.

i think he means how a lot of artists' old records are randomly missing even when they're on the same label as the available ones and thus clearly licensed

spotify et al aren't going to ever be 'sustainable for the artist' - or at least the avant cello player types - because people just don't value music the same way they did before it became just another form of 0s and 1s. remember the prison riots whe netflix raised prices a few bucks?

but does spotify hurt an avant cello player so much?

I guess your argument is that spotify has devalued music, and all artists that cannot generate an income outside of their recorded work (such as avant cellists) are hurt.

nah music was already devalued, spotify's just offering it at the going rate

which is nothing

Leftsetz is convinced one of these services will eventually have enough subsribers to pay some musicians some money

Make a record that sticks, you'll get paid by streaming services for the rest of your life.

Which one?

Could be Spotify, MOG/Daisy or Deezer

the other thing that doesn't really get addressed enough is the supply side of this. there is a lot of music out there, there are a lot of musicians out there. there are only so many hours in the day to listen to music and so once everyone who values music enough to pay $10 a month for it is on spotify etc it becomes something of a zero sum game. like, when spotify adds the beatles that's going to hurt every musician on spotify who isn't paul mccartney or ringo starr.

Is the $ per stream linear with respect to streams from the same user? If you get 0.5 cents per stream, artists should get a spotify account, play one of their 2 minute tracks continuously for 24 hrs of every day, and collect $1,300 per year. open 25 accounts on 25 cheap computers.