Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

I just wish Spotify could serve up a stream of recommended tracks, based on your listening history, like Last.fm can.

Spotify's "Radio" feature compounds my dislike of "genres" as a means of navigating and discovering music.

Radio, play me a stream of "Rock / Alternative / Pop / 70s"

What the ---- does that even mean? Guaranteed you'll be skipping 9 out of 10 tracks it serves up.

I hate genres. Every file in my local music collection has that tag blanked.

I signed up for premium the day they launched in the US. I cancelled the day they required a Facebook account.

It may well be that Facebook virality is the only way to grow a music startup. I can't really critique their strategy. But I'll tell you this: I am willing to pay for music services that focus on the music and music-playing experience. I could give fuck all about what track 37 of my friends are listening to, and it's not like they were just tacking this stuff on, they have made this a core business strategy, and that will come at the expense of improving the core experience, which frankly could use a lot of improvement.

No one ever said there was one music service to serve all manners of music consumption. There are many to serve many.

It is a fallacy to assume that everyone consumes or enjoys music the same way, or that music has the same role in every listeners life. In fact, music could have many roles depending on artist, genre, song, album, mood, etc.

You can't as a music service do a user experience and interface, business model, etc that will serve all modalities and particularities of consumption, fanaticism and enjoyment. It isn't possible. It wasn't possible with physical media either.

I have the luxury of affording many options, and so I have many options: RDIO, Spotify and iTunes. All have different uses for me, all fill different roles in my life as a music listener and consumer.

This is no different than 20 years ago, when vinyl, CD, radio and cassette tapes all had their place in my life depending on what it was I was doing.

Since you plan to buy music, and seem to have an extensive catalog, give Audiogalaxy (http://www.audiogalaxy.com) to have free access to your music from everywhere. It's my startup, so don't let me bias you - check out reviews on iTunes/Android and the web. I'm pretty sure you'll like it. :)

Spotify, Rdio and all these other sites need to open up their catalog to local and independent artists. That's one of the reasons iTunes was so popular -- they allowed Youtube singers and other aspiring artists to post their songs and allow people to purchase them. They tapped into this long tail and both Apple and these indie artists made money from it.

These companies can't compete with the big players by offering less. No one cares about the piracy thing, they just want their music, and they want the music they are looking for. 'Social discovery' can be great and all but if I'm looking for a very specific, hard-to-find song, chances are I'm going to find it on Youtube instead and forget about Spotify/Rdio, etc. I think Grooveshark let users upload their own content, but failed in that aspect because their catalog ended up being way too messy.

Difficult problem to solve, wonder who will prevail.

/edit typo

If Spotify had Grooveshark's interface I would buy a premium account in a heartbeat. When I first opened Spotify's desktop client I was baffled by how clunky it felt.

For me, it seems ridiculous to pay for a subscription music service that has a paltry catalog with less than half of the albums I want to listen to. That, and I can't be guaranteed of the quality of the file, if it's transcoded, etc. I have decent headphones and prefer to use them to their full potential.

For people who just want to listen to albums, buying albums still seems like the way to go (whether you use iTunes or Amazon, buy CDs or records).

Until this moment no service convinced me to change my 10-year-old habit of buy/download the music, organize the tags and put it on my mobile device. Since I bought my first iPod until today with my Nexus S I am still doing this and it is very practical to me.

I've been using Rhapsody for a while and the selection is pretty solid.

The argument against the Desktop app seems unfounded, the author states: "I don’t usually like playlists and I’m the kind of guy who enjoys listening to whole albums, front to back". I'm of the same opinion, but when finding a new album to listen to I simply dray this into a new playlist and they become one and the same. This would also negate the argument against the mobile app as well.

The intro made me snort...

"I’ve just canceled my membership with Spotify and my narccicism makes me want to tell you all why."

I've tried lots of services and apps, and Spotify is my favorite. Of course, it's not perfect but it's way better than what the author suggests in this article.

About the "Playlist a whole album is too complicated"; I'm not sure what he mean by that as you click on a song in the album and it plays all the album.. this could hardly get more intuitive than this.

Of course, there's not all songs but at least they let you upload your own local music (Unlike grooveshark for instance).

Unlike the author, I really like the concept of playlist in Spotify. Basically, it's simply a list of pointers to the real song. So, basically, if you want to save the album, just create a playlist with the name of the album.. in fact, it does that for you automatically if you want.

On the negative side, as someone else pointed out, I wish they had a better "Suggesting new music". Yes, there's a radio but I feel it's not really good. They always show the same songs and most often than not they're not in my taste. I mean, I've got 1000+ songs in my playlists, I'm sure they could use those datas to guess a little better what I like.

A missing feature that I loved from grooveshark was: "Show me a playlist who contains that song". It was a nice way for me to discover new artists/songs. I'm not sure why it's not in Spotify as, unlike guessing a good songs, this is fairly straightforward to implement.

Another thing that is annoying is how the sync mode works in the desktop app. Basically, if you're in "online mode", it syncs it.. while offline don't use internet. The problem with that is sometime I want to "be online" to listen to the radio or something, but I don't want it to download all songs that need to be synced. (Say when tethering from my iPhone). Also, in the desktop app, if spotify starts when I'm not connected to internet, and then get connected, it will stay in offline mode forever.. there's no way to "turn on online mode". I have to restart the app and then it notices that I'm on internet. And yeah, same problem, since I'm on internet it will automatically start to sync everything.

And, finally, I wish it had a web interface. Yeah, we get it, with the desktop app you have more freedom to implement whatever you want. But still, a materialistic web version to listen the radio or your song might be useful..

So, in summary, it's not perfect, but it's the best solution I've found. And, it's legal :-) (Even though I had to hack the system to get it working in Canada as Spotify is illegal here.)

I've been using Spotify since it first launched in the UK a couple of years ago and have been a premium subscriber for over a year. Spotify's cat log is excellent. I have an eclectic taste and most things are available. I do find the odd thing missing but it tends to be classic rock bands which didn't even allow iTunes to sell their music until recently.

I find the desktop app to be great. It's very lightweight and simple to use. To add tracks to your library you star them. Simple. You can also star albums to add those to your library.

The mobile app is the weakest link but not too bad. It has full library access (starred tracks), integration with the iPod library, full search, and offline capabilities. The UI isn't great but it has all the features needed.

The reason why I switched back to Rdio? They use your computer as a P2P network.

http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/how_exactly_does_s...

Like all products, spotify is a constantly improving product. The desktop app is not that great, but the fact that i can access a lot of music within a few clicks without doing anything illegal makes me happy . If you have an exotic special taste you'll have difficulties with every service i guess. I used to listen a lot to last.fm ... but i prefer "on demand" music like spotify offers. The service still needs to improve a lot, but they will get there in the end ... its the new way of listening to music. It doesn't make sence to me to "buy" a song on itunes, since everything is moving to the cloud, "owning" a song really doesnt make sence.

spotify is generally non hardware/os/file dependant. iTunes is not any of these things. this is why I'm staying. sure you have to compromise a little on selection, but to me at least the previous benefits greatly out weigh this deficiency.

Is there a way to disable all "sharing" of what I'm listening to? I really don't want to share that info. It appears that one has to choose "private listening" whenever starting the app.

I'm using Rdio and I've been pretty happy with it.

Before I plopped down my money, I did a comparison with Spotify on the artists/genres I cared about, and Rdio pretty much matched Spotify blow for blow.

Grooveshark 4 life

I know that these are fundamentally different services, but if you have a decent home internet connection and a digital music collection you can easily set up a streaming server to listen to your tunes anywhere. I personally use Sockso, which made my mind up to not purchase spotify. I heard Subsonic is good as well. I only pay for the most basic cable internet package and I have no issue streaming my tunes anywhere I may happen to be.

I wish I could favorite an artist somehow. Am I missing this option some place? It seems so obvious to me. I like listening to albums, not a random mix of tracks usually and want to be able to keep tabs on my go to artists.

Right now I have resorted to adding full albums to a new playlist so I can see artists names as there are times I can't recall every artist I've liked listening to in the past.

I'm pretty happy with my account, the one downside is that with iTunes my wife and I could share an account. With Spotify only one account can be playing at a time. I realize they do this so people don't share accounts with multiple people, but it would be much better if you had five registered devices like iTunes allows.

Spotify seems to have fixed the problem where the desktop app sucks up ALL of your outgoing bandwidth (although it is still bad enough to lag YouTube and other streaming video), so I started using it again.

However, would it kill any of these streaming music apps to add an equalizer?

Edit: Also, I highly recommend EarBits for music discovery.

I like to keep an eye on bands in the metal genre... one issue I noticed is during (and after) the US launch, quite a few metal bands pulled their music off Spotify. Perhaps the US launch was a big enough milestone for these niche labels to decide whether or not to continue using the service?

He mentions selection. One of the problems I have with Spotify is region lock out. I'm American, but listen to a wide selection of music from different countries and genres. It's frustrating to see music available in one country not be available in another country.

The convenience of being able to instantly search and listen to the universe of music cannot be understated. It is a killer feature. iTunes Match is a step backwards compared to this - anyone that thinks otherwise is kidding themselves.

So he's going to use iTunes, Grooveshark and Pandora. Now that seems, well, cumbersome to me.

Too bad Spotify bothers him -- even though it may lack some songs and features, I don't see why you can't enjoy Spotify for most use cases.

So, you cancelled spotify to replace it with 3 other competing or related products with their own unique interfaces and quirks. I think that somewhat complicates matters.

Most, I think, will stick to spotify in that scenario.

Try rdio again. The selection is much improved and the interface is better than spotify. Plus, they don't shove Facebook down your throat.

For 9 bucks/month, I'm saving more than enough money to justify the service. When I want to find new music, I use Turntable.fm or Pandora.

I don't buy music, don't ever pay for it either. But Spotify has very much upped the "scam" factor recently, by first cutting from 20 to 10 free hours per month, and now not even showing how many hours are remaining till you run out. Also, not until you find and read the long terms and conditions do you find out the first "6 months" (which already seem to be up for me) are a trial of premium, after that you get 10 hours a month free, but they won't tell you till you have 0 minutes left.