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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately some companies are in bed with Facebook and it seems it gives them more than the additional users.

For example Spotify - still allows only Facebook signups. The first quote on signup page is of course <<"Spotify is so good" - Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook>>. I'm definitely one who spent additional time to look for an alternative.

Edit: As parbo noticed, they actually do allow email+password signups again. I completely missed the link when checking.

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Actually, it is now possible to sign up with only email. Not sure if it applies to all markets, but in the US you can.

Wow, they don't want people to spot that, do they :) I went to the signup page to verify before I posted my comment and completely missed the link, even though I was looking for it. I really appreciate them doing that - will check out their library today.

Edit: Or not. They seem to know my city better than me since my postcode is both required and invalid...

What's your city and postcode? I can forward it to the devs responsible for the signup page.

Any postcode with letters fails apparently. This doesn't work for UK where letters are in all postcodes. "1" got accepted though.

Sweet. Thanks for pointing this out. I refused to try Spotify because of the FB requirement.

At the top of the page:

"You need a Facebook account to register for Spotify"

At the bottom of the page:

"or

Create an account using my e-mail address"

Awesome design there!

Awesome design there!

I think you meant that sarcastically, but it actually is good design from Spotify's point of view. They really want people to link their accounts to Facebook, but don't want to lose the potential users who steadfastly refuse to do so. Tailoring the language and design to encourage the desired choice is smart, even if it might not be quite right grammatically.

Grammatically? Being delibetately misleading is not quite right ethically.

Weird, I'm in the US and I don't see the email option anywhere on the signup page. Too bad.

I've been using Rdio for a while now and really like it. I think Spotify's library is a bit larger but, like you, I hate being forced to sign up via Facebook.

I chose Deezer some time ago... but Rdio sure changed lately - maybe I should give them another look. The last time I tried they had a poor choice in non-mainstream things, but it seems to have changed. (number of von zamla albums is my usual benchmark for the variety of available tracks) They still have weird listing issues though - having both Goran Bregovic and Bregovic, Goran for example.

Using any single artist as a barometer for library completeness is probably not a great metric.

I'm not saying it's something to rely on, but if the artist is: not American, not singing in English, not from the top hit lists, not from popular genre and published albums years ago... yet they get included in the library, that means the choice goes far beyond what you usually get to hear. And that's just a great thing, whether you like specific artist or not.

My point is just that both Rdio, Spotify, and all their competitors contain many bands that fit your criteria. And they also don't contain many of those. I'm simply saying you should do a wider survey of their libraries to get a better comparison.

Rdio really hasn't changed lately. Their interface got refreshed, but their catalogue is about the same as always.

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