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Comment by ducharmdev | Hacker News Reader

An obvious one, but Spotify. They've solved so many problems in the music-listening experience, it's amazing.

I remember having to manage so many folders of mp3s, manually syncing them to devices. And paying $.99 a song meant a very limited selection. I often relied on free iTunes playlists to find new music, because I couldn't afford to buy new music at the time.

They've eliminated all of these problems. Pay $10-15 a month, and you can listen to whatever you want, wherever and whenever.

I say this purely from the consumer's perspective, though - I'm not super familiar with what artists' experience is like. On one hand I'm sure Spotify broadens your audience quite a bit, but I wouldn't be surprised if artists run into issues similar to creators on other platforms (e.g. YouTube).

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My only frustration with Spotify is songs that I like disappearing from my library because a contract didn’t get renewed. Not Spotify’s fault, but still irritating. For that reason I still have a “offline” iTunes library.

(Well, that and that Spotify funds -and will not stop recommending to me- some podcasts that I find grating. I wish I wasn’t constantly reminded that I’m indirectly funding anti-science nonsense. Were it not that I’m paying for several other people’s Spotify accounts via family sharing I would have switched to Apple Music by now.)

I came here to say this. Spotify is incredible. My only real beef with it is the interface, especially with classical music. I look at my phone to see a list of movement titles, all exactly the same. And with both classical and jazz it’s impossible to see a list of the personnel within the program—if I want to know who’s on drums I need to paste the name of the album into Google or something.

But Spotify changed everything. I recently saw a series on Netflix and liked some of the music used in it, but had no idea what it was. I just entered the name of the show and “soundtrack” into Spotify, and there it was.

From the rumor mill, Apple is building a dedicated service just for classical music.

The only issue with Spotify is that they are missing quite a few major artists. e.g. Garth Brooks isn’t available on Spotify. One of the best sellers of all time - not on there. Kinda annoying.

Regarding Garth Brooks specifically, the lack of availability of his music on streaming services is entirely his own decision. He owns a streaming service called Ghosttunes that exist /solely/ for hosting and streaming his own music and refuses to make his catalog available on anything else.

Edit: actually looks like he sold it to Amazon a few years ago and it was absorbed into Amazon Music where his catalog is now available. Regardless, Garth owns the rights to all of his music except for his 2014 album "Man Against Machine", so the lack of availability is again entirely his own decision.

I'm just arguing against the "and you can listen to whatever you want, wherever and whenever." statement. It's just literally not true. Tool wasn't available until a couple years ago either. Sometimes I stumble upon major artists and am like, "Oh, wow. Why haven't I heard them in so long?" And then I see that they just signed a contract to stream.

It's annoying. I can't keep track of all the artists I like and listen to. There's hundreds/thousands.

Music not being available due to licensing stuff isn't really a Spotify issue, sometimes (like the Garth example above) rightsholders won't play ball no matter what. And the original comment was clearly generalizing, no one is expecting literally every piece of music ever to be available on Spotify.

So if we're going to be pedantic, you can add local files to Spotify on the desktop app and they will sync to your phone, so technically you still can listen whatever you want on Spotify.

> They've solved so many problems in the music-listening experience, it's amazing

And yet each of your comment’s 4 current replies describes a different “only” problem with Spotify that’s solved with folders of mp3s ;)

(Disclaimer: I listen to very little music, so I have no horse in this race except for loathing DRM, and I’m only guessing that the “missing quite a few major artists” problem is solvable by torrenting)

The key here is, how many mp3s are we talking about?

Even though I like music quite a bit, do I want to dedicate multiple terabytes and hours of my time building out and managing a personal catalogue of music I like? Because this is exactly what Spotify gives me for the majority of artists, with 0 effort.

The biggest problem I have with Spotify is everything is just a playlist. I would like curated random songs. But that seems impossible.

There's curators you can follow, sort of like "Spotify DJs"

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