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Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

Google music. Who cares? Oh right, you guys don't have Spotify.

I don't know anyone that has it that bothers with iTunes or actually buying music anymore. Get the free version, and get any music anytime and the occasional ad. Pay a few bucks a month, and you get any music anytime with no ads.

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Spotify is great as long as you don't step out of the narrow scope of the music offered. Try finding anything released <6 months ago and report back. rdio and MOG are even worse in that respect. Grooveshark is the only service that has a decent though a Kazaa-like chaotic catalogue.

It isn't that bad, I would say I'm listening to pretty broad spectrum of music, most of it being not very popular, and Spotify has roughly 75% of what I need. OK, when something that was there disappears after a while then it's seriously irritating, but still, the true selling point of Spotify is the quality of the program itself: it's super slick, fast and has the best interface ever in the category of music players.

Personally, I ignored a bunch of artist just because they don't have their music in Spotify; "you want me to listen to your music? let me do that the way I want, otherwise go screw yourself" type of thing.

..except availability on Spotify of their catalogue is not artists' business but their label's, regardless of degree of indie-ness.

My attitude is the complete opposite: "I can listen to Madonna but not to Tallest Man on Earth, who is from Sweden? Kthxbye".

Well, the truth is in somewhere in the middle - I suppose it's not that Spotify doesn't want Tallest Man on Earth to be in its' catalog, nor that Tallest Man on Earth doesn't want to be in Spotify.

(Worth to note: Spotify actually has Tallest Man on Earth in its' catalog, I'm now listening to the guy)

I would say that the scope of music offered by Spotify is not so narrow. They have more than 10 million songs now, compared to about 2.5 when they launched late 2008 and 11 million in the iTunes store. AFAIK, music goes up more or less as soon as the labels deliver it.

One really scary thing I've heard though, is that the masters for a lot of older music is missing, so while the labels might have the rights and even the willingness to license the music, they just don't have it anymore.

Pandora has been quite nice. Especially since they added some classical music. They don't have a lot of, say, German music, yet, though.

Spotify is excellent, I love it but more and more I get tracks in playlists that are 'not playable in your country' or 'the record label has chosen to make this track unavailable'

'not playable in your country'

Reminds me of youtube. I'm in europe and about half of the time I click on a youtube link I get this friendly message about the content being property of UMG|Sony|Warner|whoever and I'm not worthy to see it...

Or even/sometimes worse - tracks which you were able to play previously, which this week are now not available.

This week I played a track only to find it had actually changed since last time I played it. The original was retracted and instead I got an alternative version.

Nonetheless I'm happy with Spotify, although the number of unavailable records is increasing

There's http://www.rdio.com -- The library isn't exactly mind-blowing, but they put up fresh music every week (Recently: Maximum Balloon, Engineers, Ice Cube's new independent album, Neil young, Lil Wayne, Clapton, Mark Ronson...) and seem to work with some decent independent labels (Ghostly comes to mind.)

Well, we do have Grooveshark. But it probably won't last. :(

If it's lasted this long it will probably keep going for some time yet. They have a pretty clear song takedown policy, so any music being shared on grooveshark is likely being done so with the full consent of the label.

Grooveshark is also paying the music owners royalty from a share of their ad revenue.

The clock has already been ticking... [1]

[1] Universal Music Group Now "Declaring Legal Jihad" Against Grooveshark... http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/090310groovesharkumg

Thanks for the link. I stand corrected.

IIRC, Grooveshark only pays EMI royalties, and UMG is taking them to court. Sony and Warner have no deals.

I'd be curious to see what Sony and Warner choose to do.

It doesn't matter. UMG is the elephant in the room, they'll do whatever UMG does.

While not free ($5/mo), mog.com has been awesome for me. The only time I buy on iTunes is if I have gift cards and need to burn a CD for my old car stereo.

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