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jasonkester

Spotify did a great job of alienating me as a potential user. Here was my experience:

- heard of Spotify

- went to Spotify.com, read something like "Download our thing and play all this Free Music!"

- downloaded their thing

- opened their thing to find an iTunes clone. With no Free Music anywhere to be found.

I spent the better part of 10 minutes trying to figure out how to get it to find and play some of this Free Music before giving up.

I can only assume that most of their potential users are going through the same thing. If so, it's not surprising that they're bleeding money so fast.

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I had a completely different experience. I loved Spotify when living in the EU (ok, except for their ad shenanigans) because they had a huge catalog of music and almost everything I wanted to hear and everything my friends wanted to introduce me to. Their similar artists tool led to me spending hours in the app, and we would use Spotify for parties (using an paid account) to save the monotony of listening to someone's iPod collection.

Now I use GrooveShark, but it's lacking the artist recommendations. Aside from that it's perfect, and even more portable being browser-based. If I listened to music more often I'd have no problem paying for a Spotify account (which I believe allows you to stream outside of the EU).

Genuinely confused about what you're doing to get this experience. It's almost all free; you just click and... it plays?

I don't know. It's been uninstalled for months.

I think they used to market it as "we'll find you all sorts of cool music", so the expectation I had was that I'd be able to type in an artist or song and it would run an iTunes-esque "Genius" on it to give you a playlist.

Instead, I'd type in an artist or song and it would come back with no results.

It was happy to play music that I already had on my machine, but seemingly had no capability to go out and find new music from the internet. Given that that was its stated purpose, I was annoyed and uninstalled it.

Then I'm afraid you must have missed something. If, for example (as it was the first net screenshot I found) you enter "bella" into the top left search box, you get back this: http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/files/2009/08/spotify_deskto...

Double click any of those and it will instantly start streaming the song.

Indeed, that's what I was expecting to see. Now imagine you'd typed "bella" and you saw an empty list. That was Spotify when I gave them a shot.

I might have to try again at some point.

It's probably worth giving it a go but unless you have very mainstream musical tastes, expect to be at least somewhat disappointed.

Their catalogue isn't too bad for a free service (probably around 40% of what I search for comes up with useful results) although having to listen to adverts every four songs seems a bit much, and it's certainly not worth paying to get rid of them.

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