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Comment by Toddward | Hacker News Reader

I kind of wonder about the relevance of Spotify in the current market - with locker offerings from Google and Amazon (and forthcoming from Apple), it seems like the need for services like Spotify (for me, at least) is dwindling.

Spotify was a great idea before the emergence of music lockers - if I wanted access to music on the go, I could use a streaming service. But now that I can use a locker service to stream my own music library, I'm far less likely to pay for a Spotify subscription.

Case in point - I would have instantly sprung for a Spotify subscription two or three years ago had it been available in the States, but now that I'm using Google Music (albeit for free for now), there is no incentive for me to switch to Spotify as anything more than a semi-casual user.

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I'm a heavy Spotify user because it is so much more convenient than the alternatives. I love not having to care about buying, downloading, uploading, sorting, tagging and generally messing about with files.

Most of the time, I don't even have to make my own playlists: I just find someone else's that looks interesting, mark it for "Available offline", and listen to that for a while.

I'm not interested in "owning" music (whatever that means these days). I am interested in listening to it, and Spotify makes this very easy.

In comparison, the whole "locker" business seems very messy, and rather unnecessary. I can't for the life of me see what the advantage would be.

Lockers of your own music are completely orthogonal to what Spotify is great at: social music.

I have lots of shared playlists with friends, and when one adds a song to a playlist we all instantly get it. It's like live, endless mixtapes, and transforms discovering and sharing music.

Spotify may need to market this more, but cloud storage and iTunes match don't come close to its killer app.

That's a good point that I hadn't considered - in fact, after reading some of the responses here, I'm rethinking my original position on the issue. While I may prefer the music locker model, that certainly doesn't mean Spotify is any less relevant for everyone else.

You will need to subscribe to the Apple service if you want to use your existing collection there. So that's not so far from the Spotify solution.

I understand that subscriptions are required for the best features of these services - my point was merely that I would rather pay to have access to my own library from anywhere than a semi-complete library that I can't control.

I listen to a lot of music that isn't on iTunes or Rhapsody or <insert service here>. Having the ability to access a more complete library of what I actually want to listen to presents a huge value to me. Hence my willingness to pay for a locker over a streaming service.

But believe me, I know not everyone is as picky as I am.

Indeed. You seem to assume that the music library is somehow static which isn't the reality for a lot of users of Spotify and other streaming services. There are at least a dozen albums released and reissued every day, and some people (like me) enjoy checking out new music on a daily basis.

It is simply not viable to keep buying all those albums and store them in a library, particularly if you won't listen to them ever again after the first listen. While an edge case, the shades of gray in the middle still demand a constantly changing library. Thus, Spotify and Grooveshark, whose catalogue I personally like a lot more, are much better choices than the 'online library' services.

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