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Spotify next generation explained

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69 pointstonyskn50 comments

It's a shame that it isn't available legally in the US of A. I have to VPN into Sweden every couple of weeks to keep my account active. I'd be more than willing to pay a premium fee... but even that won't work, your address has to be in the country of your account.

Reasons I enjoy Spotify so much...

* Their client is super quick and simple

* Songs load essentially instantly, it's like they're local.

* They have an Android/iPhone client.

* You can create playlists and sync them for offline play.

Unfortunately, for those last two items, you need a premium account. I want to give them my money, why won't they take it! =(

I suspect that it is the record companies that wont take it.

You can buy something like iTunes gift cards for premium access here in Sweden. If you know someone here you could get them to buy it for you and get a premium account maybe?

If you don't know anyone you could drop me an email (it's in my profile) and I could check the store next time I'm out.

Can you not "borrow" a friends address in one of those countries?

They (appear to) check the address on your credit card.

Totally agree. I used spotify for 2-3 months, but after a bit it got annoying when my tor proxy would suddenly stop working, and I'd have to find a new one that had enough bandwidth and was actually reliable enough. It is totally doable, it's just annoying. That said, I would be more than happy to pay their fee.

(If anyone has a solution to this...either a good proxy, or something else. I am all ears. Also, when the eff are they coming to the US? I know they had some plans...)

I now use Grooveshark, it's good, don't get me wrong, but spotify is much better in terms of interface, but mainly they have a better catalog for the music I listen to (mostly ambient/downtempo/trip hop). If I search for a group Grooveshark will likely have 70% of the songs from each album...maybe. Whereas in Spotify, I can just view 100% of all the albums. Also, while I have not used the Spotify mobile app, I can tell you the Grooveshark mobile app kind of sucks.

Cheers

Solution: Pay for a european-based proxy?

Spotify doesn't seem to work where I live, so I use Grooveshark instead.

Grooveshark has a gigantic library of music and instant streaming. Recommendation engine works well, and you can explore the playlists of other users to discover new music. I'm not sure how Grooveshark can stream music to everybody for free (or almost free for pro users), but as long as it exists I'll be a happy user.

I wasn't familiar with Grooveshark, and I'm having trouble figuring out their licensing arrangement.

For example, they have quite a few tunes by Pink Floyd, who have instructed EMI to keep their music off of iTunes, Spotify, and all other sites which would allow "per-song" downloading or streaming-- they want to keep the integrity of the albums intact.

This, coupled with the bits of the Grooveshark FAQ like "All of the music on Grooveshark is uploaded by the users!" makes me think that Grooveshark is not long for this world, once the RIAA discovers them.

Relevant link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooveshark#Legal_issues

Once you've tried Spotify, you won't call Grooveshark instant any more. I swear, it starts streaming faster than Rhythmbox starts playing a local file..

I love Spotify and think it's an amazing service, but have recently started wondering if it's just as bad for artists as AllOfMp3. After reading about Lady Gaga earning close to nothing for 1 million plays, I'm not sure if it's a service that we should continue to support that much. If 1 million plays don't earn you any money, what's the incentive for less well-known artists?

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/s...

Spotify responded that these figures were way out (without giving the true numbers). If I remember correctly, the low figure was for a short period & related only to the Swedish market AND for only the Swedish co-writer's royalty - i.e. it was half of the Swedish royalties for a few months, not the full worldwide royalties for a calender year. Here's one report:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7590782/Spotify-reject...

Wow, thanks for the link, damned shame that their decent response didn't get the same press coverage.

So, phew, back to enjoying Spotify :-D

I think you'll find that an artist's income from 1 million Spotify plays far exceeds the equivalent income from ten plays at a radio station with 100,000 listeners.

I think you'll find that's an entirely subjective comment you've just made ;)

For example, there are plenty of radio stations who set up deals to play a new artist often for few royalties, because it's a cheap(er) way of promoting new and unknown artists.

Actually, no, you tell me precisely how much less artists earn from radio stations with few listeners. I think it might be the opposite to what you're trying to argue.

Not that I doubt you, but this really needs a citation.

Sorry, I haven't been paying attention to my threads page.

The only data that I have available is for the Swedish market. The Swedish Performing Rights Society, STIM, collect fees from everyone who plays music. This quote is from their annual report (source at the bottom):

"A 3-minute song played on one of Sweden's national radio channels produces around SEK 100 for authors and music publishers to share."

"A 3-minute song that is played on one of the commercial radio stations produces around SEK 3 for authors and music publishers to share."

Of course, listener numbers differ, there are radio programs on national radio that have 1 million listeners. A conservative estimate for an average listener number on national radio would be 50,000.

100 SEK is $13.46 according to Google, let's call it $15 to be conservative.

So 100 SEK for 50,000 plays equals $0.0003 per play on Swedish national radio. As you can see from the above the national radio pay a lot more per play than commercial stations.

1 million plays on national radio would in the best of cases give $300 for all the rights holders to share.

In the case of Lady Gaga's Poker Face, as explained in another article linked in this thread, the income would be split 50/50 between Lady Gaga and her Swedish songwriter (don't know the exact roles here but it's not important).

This means that the total payout for 1M plays of Poker Face from Spotify would be $167 * 2 = $334.

So even in this case the income for 1M plays on Spotify exceeds the equivalent income from 1M plays on Swedish national radio. Now, the Spotify payout numbers reported here are from the absolute first beginnings of Spotify and don't necessarily reflect the payout rates that are in place now when the service is more mature, as was explained in the other article further up in the thread.

STIM's latest annual report in English: http://bit.ly/9ZW85p

That would depend on whether or not you want to see the current music industry system saved or destroyed...

This is the picture you really want to see: "How much do music artists make online" http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music...

While stylish, there are so many issues with that infographic I don't know where to begin…

* If 1 million plays don't earn you any money, what's the incentive for less well-known artists?*

Very similar to CD sales -- the record companies take the profits and pay the artists very little. Exactly the opposite of what it should be.

I won't be using Spotify. Spotify is partly owned by the music industry, who acquired their shareholding not by stumping up money like the other investors, but by threatening them with lawsuits unless they were given free shares. (As an aside, wanna guess what percentage of profits the music industry make out of this will go to musicians? I suspect fuck all).

Iniquitous as that is, it's not my reason for boycotting Spotify. The reason is that the music industry want to destroy my freedom, and helping them in any way makes it easier for them to do this. They want to be judge, jury and executioner over anyone's right to have an internet connection, and they want all computing hardware to be locked down like the iPad.

Well I don't want that future. And if you don't want it too, I suggest you never buy anything from the RIAA/IFPI, and explain to all your friends why it's in their interests not to either.

If artists get 4.5million streams a month they earn minimum wage. Source: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music...

"Rates to not include publishing & performance rights for song writers" - even though that's where most of the income comes from.

The source for that figure is nothing more than a guess. It takes the approximate number of UK premium subscribers, multiplies by 12 months and £10. Then it arbitrarily doubles the amount to account for advertising income, and divides by the total number of streams in all countries.

I don't know how much an artist may get from Spotify, but my guess is that it is significantly more than from radio.

Not to mention artists can make money from other things besides streaming. They can sell merch, play shows, etc.

It seems like quite a lot of tracks has disappeared in this update as well. :/

The Spotify music database is normally updated independently of the application.

As for the actual content, about two weeks ago I could see around 7.2 million songs as a user in Sweden. Today I can see about 7.4 million songs. Is there anything in particular that you know was removed?

I'm seeing grayed out tracks on songs by Freddie Wadling, Eva Cassidy, Dione Taylor, Lee Hazlewood, Tupac Shakur, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, U96, Land Shark and Moby to name a few.

But you're right: all in all they're growing which is great.

The Dylan was pulled quite a few months ago, and in fact, some has been coming back-- they just added "Tell Tale Signs" not too long ago. Also, McCartney pulled most of his stuff a month or two back-- there seems to be a dispute with EMI.

been playing with the new features for the last 20 minutes. it's amazing. most importantly, you can stop using itunes except for podcasts

I used to subscribe (love the service but found GBP 10 a month too expensive). The library has always been great but music discovery (once you'd exhausted the similar artists feature) was letting things down. This sounds like a great value addition for users.

Very nice update, but local files don't work on linux/under wine: http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/spotify_under_wine... That's a bit of a letdown, especially since it's intentional.

From the link you provided, it's a bug with WINE's MP3 decoder. How is that intentional?

Wine's mp3 decoder doesn't work in some cases, including some mp3 files by Spotify's partners[1]. Because the decoder didn't work for some mp3 files, they are actively blocking wine's mp3 decoder for all mp3 files.

[1] I agree this is a pretty solid business reason to block it, but it's still intentional.

The workaround [1] seem to work pretty good so far. No crashes, but it does go into a (recoverable) loop if you pull the slider to the end of a track.

[1] http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/spotify_under_wine...

Something I noticed while running the new version the first time: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johanhalin/4556877903/

In other words, uncheck that if you don't want Spotify modifying your tags in your audio files.

Definitely uncheck that button :) I had some jpop tracks in my library that turned automatically into this http://twitpic.com/1iuk5k.

You can actually select all your local files than choose 'undo gracenote changes' from the right-click menu

One thing that I noticed in your inbox is the filter option, "Only show items from people I follow". Does that mean that you can send songs to other peoples inboxes that your are not friends with? Opportunity to spam music?

Well, it's really too bad they haven't introduced better playlist-management. That's the one thing their client is lacking the most.

The playlist manager does need some enhancement (as well as having a listening history that spans sessions). But there are some cool features in here. I'm definitely keen on the local libraries and the starred tracks.

I dislike Spotify for the following reasons:

* The music industry is a major shareholder. Spotify is great for them because they can continue as gatekeeper and make Spotify a worse proposition to artists not signed to any of the big four.

* Artists not signed to the big four does, in fact, get a lot less per play than the big four get when their music is being played. So if I am a premium subscriber, and only listening to "indie" artists, the big four will still get my money.

* Artists have to go through digital distribution channels such as RouteNote and DittoMusic to get their music onto Spotify. Why not let them upload their own music directly?

* The big four bought their share in the company (around 5% each) for chump change.

* It is a lot easier to censor music when it's all in the same streamlined interface.

With no Mac at hand, I'd like a native app for Linux, instead of wine stuff.

You can write one yourself using the libspotify: http://developer.spotify.com/en/libspotify/overview/

Yeah, but I prefer the beautiful UI, not just functionalities, or the wine stuff will do the work.

Great looking update. I'm very excited to try Spotify once it comes to the US (hopefully sometime this year?).

Great look at the new featureset. Thanks! Can’t wait to try it out

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