Comment by jsherry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsherry | Hacker News Reader

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I have been using Spotify in the US in closed beta as well for over a month, so just wanted to give my two cents on these points. I will respond in order:

1.The ads on the free plan are obtrusive, but it's free. I didn't find them any more obtrusive than Pandora's ads. That said, I love the service and wanted to take it mobile, so I upgraded to premium, so I'm no longer hearing ads.

2.I didn't experience disappearing playlists. I'm sure this happened to you, just pointing out that it's not a super common occurrence b/c I'm on Spotify hours per day with plenty of playlists and haven't seen the issue.

3. Agreed. I miss my Beatles and Pink Floyd. However, the Stones' library is on there.

4. Again, I'm sure you're seeing this issue, but I use both Skype and Spotify on my PC fairly often and haven't had any issues.

5. In fairness, I'm just interested in a streaming music platform - not starting a movement. There are plenty of inefficiencies in the record label industry, but I'm. Just a startup guy, not an artist so it's not my fight ;-)

One issue I will add is that Spotify stopped streaming on my Droid about two weeks into my premium subscription. However, customer service couldn't have been more responsive and helped me fix the issue pronto.

The "disappearing playlist" the parent refers to is a licensing issue, not a technical one, as far as I could tell. When I was in the UK (now in the US), whole artists catalogs would go missing all at once. I eventually stopped paying for the service because of this (it wiped out about 10% of the content from my playlists).

Correct, this was probably the biggest "disappearing playlist" event: http://www.spotify.com/us/blog/archives/2009/01/28/some-impo...

Agreed. As I recall small labels started removing themselves as they weren't making any money from it.

Hmm. I wonder if they were making money from it indirectly, though. I use Spotify mainly as a try-before-you-buy service, and I wouldn't be suprised if others did too.

From their POV it's only marginally more profitable than piracy. Thus I expect the attitudes to be similar (and varying between artists).

True. I have on a number of occasions tried on Spotify and bought on iTunes.

This is great insight: something I haven't experienced and therefore didn't address in my original response to the parent. Thanks.

Sorry, I wasn't clear that that I have a UK account so the disappearances happened over a long period over a year ago.

My bad about The Stones. Maybe they were there that xmas.

I suspect that the issue the small independents have with Spotify is exactly linked to Artists' fees. Selling small amounts of CDs is actually worthwhile for a small artist - being on Spotify isn't.

Queen is also there.

2. Probably a month may not be enough to experience the disappearing playlists (actually, that should be called disappearing tracks, as playlists are still there, just tracks are greyed out and you cannot play them anymore). I've got whole disks greyed out from my playlists and created a ticket on getsatisfaction about a year ago. Their answer was that this is not their fault, but the industry's… copyright, etc.

I don't blame them, we know what the industry is like.

3. Beatles not so much for me (I've got their discography on cassette, cd, mp3… so I sync it with spotify), but Metallica… sad but true.

4. Never had a problem with Spotify + Skype, but I would suspect it's Spotify's fault. Why? Because on OSX I use BetterTouchTool and I get this message everytime I resume from sleep: http://cl.ly/1Z1u2n0R3H3o0w27243d ← I believe it could be related.

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