No more time limits on Spotify | Hacker News Reader

No more time limits on Spotify

news.spotify.com

95 pointsmrhicks96 comments

I’m a regular subscriber but I’m getting more and more confused about what I’m actually paying for. Is it really 'just' about shuffle vs. selective play at this point?

As said in another comment, you get a better audio quality and the avaibility to store music offline (I found it quite useful on my mobile phone). Of course, the quality will only matter to some people.

I'm currently on their $10/month plan but I'm skeptical of the audio quality argument. Firstly, I don't think all songs have a high quality option, just more popular songs. Second is that its hard to argue that the improvement is worthwhile when the you've got the loudness war to compete with (just try listening to Snow Patrol - Run without feeling at least a bit annoyed)

Its hard to analyse this quantitatively without bias since there are no indicators of quality in the Spotify App while a song is playing.

>> "As said in another comment, you get a better audio quality and the avaibility to store music offline (I found it quite useful on my mobile phone). Of course, the quality will only matter to some people."

As you say the quality thing will only matter to some people. The ability to store music offline is also becoming a less important feature as mobile networks improve. I have to admit I still use it quite often but looking ahead a few years Spotify really needs to differentiate their premium product more.

> The ability to store music offline is also becoming a less important feature as mobile networks improve.

I only need it when I don't have wifi, but I think I'm going to start using mp3 players again because managing the whole download/undownload thing in Android Spotify is tedious and the overall useability of the app is crap.

I have LTE in my area so I may be an exception, but I was listening to Spotify in my car for over an hour yesterday without any WiFi connectivity.

The app itself is sometimes a pain (particularly via the controls on my car steering wheel...), like the inability to change whether I've liked or disliked a song.

> I have LTE in my area so I may be an exception, but I was listening to Spotify in my car for over an hour yesterday without any WiFi connectivity.

I have a 50MB limit. And the stupid app doesn't let me differentiate between playing offline and playing only when I have wifi, so if wifi is turned on on my mobile and also the 3G (which I might have on because I want to browse some websites when I'm outside my home or going somewhere), and the wifi doesn't work for some reason, Spotify will happily leech off my data plan with me being none the wiser.

Good point. I did forget to mention better sound quality.

I stopped paying for Spotify back in August even though there was a clear benefit. The only clear added benefit you're going to receive is no ads. I think Google Music is putting pressure on them and they need something to compete.

And offline playlists. Apart from the US there aren't many countries that offer unlimited mobile data plans for a reasonable price. So for me, offline playing is a very big deal, since that's how I listen to most of my music when I'm away from home.

Include the Uk in cheap unlimited data.

£15 a month, sim only, on 3. Also a £12.90 option, but with less inclusive texts and minutes.

I have the 3 unlimited plan but also Spotify premium because it's just easier having offline synced playlists, especially for train journeys when signal is always spotty.

Wait. We have unlimited mobile data in the US at reasonable prices? From whom? My "unlimited" T-Mobile plan throttles down to 2G speeds after 500MB.

To be fair, T-Mobile doesn't advertise their plans as "unlimited", they advertise them as 500mb/2.5gb/5gb at 4G speed. It's only $10/month more to bump up to 2.5GB.

And $10 more after that to go to full blown unlimited.

And if you paid the extra $20 a month, you would have the Unlimited LTE plan instead of the Unlimited 2G plan with 500mB of LTE. $70 is still reasonable in my eyes.

I have unlimited data on Virgin Mobile for $35/$45/$55 a month (based on # of minutes you want), though I had to pay full price for my phone.

I don't know which TMobile plan you're on. I have "unlimited" which throttles to 2G after 5GB, for only $30.

Finland: unlimited 3G for 12,90€/month.

Ads are completely unacceptable for me so I've always used it with a subscription. To be honest I hadn't realised the free version had other restrictions.

Totally agree on the ads piece. I've subscribed pretty much since it was possible to do so in the US and think it's worth it for the no ads thing alone.

Yeah, the experience without ads is a lot better. I've actually moved to Google Music, because a lot of the music I like and listen to isn't mainstream and Google Music allows me to upload 20k songs of my own.

Also the ability to play whichever songs or albums you want which is more like owning the albums (or maybe more like being able to listen to whatever you want in a record store that you live and work in) rather than hoping songs/artists you like come up on shuffle.

On-demand is a must for me. I would have never payed for a streaming service if it was only radio-like.

The ads on the free version are fairly frequent and rather annoying so avoiding that is a big plus.

Still, it's better than public radio stations.

So no-ads, no-shuffle, offline, high-qual it is. Still reason enough to pay then.

Looks like they removed the mid tier plan, and it is now the same as the top tier, did spotify just get twice as expensive?

I think the mid-tier features are mostly free now (mobile use was the big one I think).

I think the mid-tier features are mostly free now

What the mid-tier plan gave us was ad-free listening. It sucks that you know have to pay twice as much for that.

Spotify doesn't have shuffle in the free version, you might be thinking of Pandora. Spotify makes you pay to get rid of annoying ads that come on every 10-20 minutes. They also offer higher quality music and an offine mode when you pay.

I think he/she is talking about the shuffle feature available for free users on Mobile.

no ad.

Also, offline use.

That used to cost 50% less.

strange... I still pay 4,99 €.

I think they grandfathered the mid tier plan?

I really cannot stand the UI in Spotify. Also, making albums "playlists" just to listen to them is incredibly annoying. Maybe that is gone now but I have been a very happy Rdio subscriber for over a year now. I am really excited for Beatsmusic.com to launch on the 21st as well.

I agree with the album playlists issue. My account has a ton of playlists for exactly this reason. That said, the browse and discovery screens have found quite a bit of interesting music for me so I'd call it a wash at this point.

Yeah, I either have to make playlists or search for the things I want each time. So I end up with a ton of playlists, with no way of searching or filtering them.

I don't mind having playlists for albums but the biggest problem is that enough playlists impact performance and slow the client to a crawl, especially on Windows.

You may want to give Grooveshark a try as well to be able to control you queue.

As someone who wants Spotify to succeed I don't know if the recent changes are a good sign or not as to how the company is doing.

It seems to me that they're following a very similar trajectory to [Pandora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_radio) (which, to me, indicates that it's probably a good thing).

I feel good: I don't think they'd be able to make certain actions without some bargaining power.

I don't think they had to bargain with labels for this. They previously had unlimited free streaming - I think they chose to limit it to see if it would increase subscriptions. It's possible they were forced to do it by the labels but personally I don't think that was the case (although I have no evidence).

They probably just observered listening habits. I'd fire up Spotify, listen to it for a day or two, then hit the limit (that I always seem to forget exists). And just switch it off for another month or so. Limits or adverts would suit me. I hate, hate, hate the ads, and soon tire of the free service. My laptop's sound is pretty horrid that it's not worth me buying the subscription, but Spotify is still useful as a sampler.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something you're actually an example for why this would be a bad business decision for them. Even though you use the service a lot (max your limit in two days) and hate the ads, you're still not willing to pay it. Now with limits removed you will be using more of their resources for nothing in return.

I will listen more now, but that's probably a good thing. I barely used it in the past because of the limit (no idea what it was, but I'd hit it). As I said if I had a higher quality audio device to listen to songs on, that could handle Spotify, I'd most likely buy a subscription.

I don't know why they don't just randomly make tracks unavailable for free accounts. Or they could remove two or more songs from each album. I didn't even mind the 5 plays of a song limit. The adverts are pretty annoying, but I take them on the chin in exchange for the music.

I just noticed that there is a huge variation on the premium price depending on where you live:

  US: USD 9.99
  UK: GBP 9.99, that's about USD 16.30
  FR: EUR 9.99, that's about USD 13.60
  HK: HKD 48,   that's about USD  6.20

I'm in Hong Kong and I recently subscribed to premium. I can see that some songs are not available (about 5% seem greyed out but most of what I want to listen to is accessible), but I can't believe that I'm paying nearly 3x less than the UK!

Norway pays around $16.09 monthly and still has around the same amount of songs that are unavailable as well. It's getting better -- a year or so ago around 7-8% of the top 100 everywhere were unavailable to us. Still cost the same.

Same story with Netflix. Costs more here than in the US, but the content is waaay worse. It's often 2-3 years behind the original airing of the episodes in US, so it's not in any way useful to stay current.

Same story with Netflix. Costs more here than in the US, but the content is waaay worse.

Use the US version of Netflix instead. Try https://unlocator.com (currently free because it's in beta - works like a charm) or http://unotelly.com/.

Here in Denmark it's completely legal to use the US Netflix. I don't know about Norwegian laws, though.

I love how on their "Channels unblocked page" it claims to support "all the major streaming services."

What's not on the list? Youtube.

The Netflix bit is not completely true; the number of films/episodes available is lower but you get quite a few high-profile movies unavailable stateside eg. Argo, Batman + The Matrix trilogies, The Departed etc (http://www.moreflicks.com/home/movies?utf8=%E2%9C%93&provide...). Blame licensing arrangements.

Netflix is pretty VPN-friendly from my experience, so if you have a US or Canadian one you can still watch what you'd like.

Wait, that website lest me search for a title and find out where it's available on Netflix?

Oooooh - combined with my proxy service's ability to pick what country I'm from, I think I've got some movie catch-up to do.

Malaysia is MYR 14.90, about USD 4.5.

Or with a data bundle with a mobile carrier, MYR 10, about USD 3.

Then again, many songs are unavailable due to licensing.

yeah Poland: 4 quid

This is starting to feel a bit like a race to the bottom. There's not a lot left to charge for - offline storage, higher quality and ad-free playback. Offline storage is becoming redundant with an increasing WiFi presence, and audio quality isn't a huge draw (I hear enough people playing music through their phone speakers).

Rdio already offers ad-free playback on the web (6 months) - it's going to put these services in a tricky situation if one of them starts offering ad-free everywhere.

I think they are mainly charging for ad free playback. I've been putting up with the ads and they tend to be very annoying. There was one for a while where they would outright yell "Trojan Man" and talk about how thin and pleasureable it was while making gasping noises. Another would yell "Ad-vanced Auto Parts" at you. They are also smart enough that they pause when you mute the volume in an attempt to force you to listen to them (I have headphones so I just put the headphones down).

I'm guessing they make most of their money from the ads - and appreciate the extra they get from paying subscribers enough that it's worth giving them a few extra benefits over the ad removal.

I don't pay for much online. But, Rdio has my money and I probably won't switch to Spotify. When I first joined spotify they scanned and left my entire itunes library corrupt -- it was a pain to say the least.

I see this as a swan song and it's simply unsustainable in real products, and is probably just a ploy to get me lulled into accepting their experience -- until it's too late.

The killer feature of Spotify over Rdio is the ability to sync and integrate your personal music collection. With Spotify, I can make playlists that combine their material with my own MP3s, and it all syncs seamlessly to my phone. Rdio locks you into their collection, while Spotify letse combine their collection with mine.

I guess that's great. With Rdio I've just stopped collecting music. I'll check out the occasional independen" artist once in a while, but usually they'll be up on Rdio in no time.

I think Rdio was a game changer for me. It's the first time I've spent real money on a subscription for anything.

WoW, I'm an avid soundcloud user, and this may be the right time to make an account on Spotify (since it also has beautiful smartphone apps, unlike soundcloud)

Free for everyone, everywhere, except in my country. Deezer seems happy with my money.

Do you realize that Spotify would be happy with your money if they had the licenses from the Majors? It's not up to them. Same for Deezer by the way, it's not available either in tons of countries such as Peru where I used to live.

How about no country limits? Eh?

I think we can all agree that Country music should always be subject to the strictest of limits.

I paid for mobile ($12) instead of standard ($5) now that mobile is available to everyone not sure why I am not just paying $5, but they removed that plan now.

Premium allows 320kbps streaming and offline storage.

I had to disable offline storage, spotify maxes out my 50mbps uploads link if i use it (p2p crap), with no option in the app to disable that.

Mobile clients don't do P2P, due to battery and bandwith concerns

The desktop client is what I am talking about, it will try and use as much upload bandwidth as you have if you put popular tracks in offline playlists.

AFAIK, the Spotify desktop app throttles the amount of upload so that it shouldn't disturb the user (or at least, it used to do that). If it used up all my upload bandwidth, I would consider that a bug and file a report.

I did, they dicked me around and suggested to disable offline playlists or reduce my cache size to fix it.

Seems like a reaction to the launch of Beats Music next week. Beats won't have a free service so Spotify seems to bolstering there's so that free customers have less of a reason to switch and they have more time to try to convert them to paying subscribers.

What does Beats have over Spotify? I just checked out the site and it seemed they're almost identical. Only interesting thing I found is:

>Exclusively with AT&T, you can get the Beats Music Family Plan with 5 accounts across 10 devices for $14.99/month.

Although I'm fine with paying $10/person using Spotify, that is a bargain...

Let's face it, all these services are pretty much the same. I've used Rdio, Spotify and Google Play All Access. They all have the same music and most of the same features - just with different UI's.

What Beats has over Spotify is marketing. This is the company that convinced a lot of people to spend a lot of $$$ on headphones. I've already read about Superbowl spots they have ready as well as promotion on major talk shows. If they can convince people to spend hundreds of $ on headphones surely they can convince them to spend $10 per month on music to listen to through those headphones. It's also a great opportunity for a tie-in (buy the headphones and get the music service half price for 12 months). They also have the backing of quite a few major artists some of whom (Trent Reznor for example) supposedly worked on the project.

The thing Spotify has over Beats is their free service. By making that even better they are improving their biggest differentiator over their new competitor.

They claim they'll be able to make better music recommendations (curated by humans rather than algorithms) and on-the-fly playlists than Spotify.

From http://blog.beatsmusic.com:

>We tried to remember a time a robot found us magic but all we could find were the times the robot made us laugh: “You like Pantera? Have you heard of Black Sabbath?” “You like Mumford and Sons? Here’s another song with banjos!”

>Just tell Beats Music where you are, what you feel like doing, who you’re with, and what kind of music you’re looking to hear and we’ll take care of the rest by delivering you an endless playlist for your context, be it real or imaginary.

Hm... I've been using Grooveshark because Spotify wasn't aviable on my country, however it seems to be now... why would I switch to Spotify?

Zero dollars flow to music license holders via Grooveshark. It operates in a legal grey area. Also the file metadata is set up by uploaders and is a lower quality than Spotify in most cases. I don't know what the Grooveshark Android/iPhone client is like, but Spotify's is decent.

Grooveshark isn't really legal, otherwise they wouldn't be being taken to court by just about any record companies. By using Spotify you're really rewarding the artists you listen to.

Try it and let us know :)

As a paying customer I am fed up to pay for the free leechers and their war for customers.

:(. And that's why we can't have nice things.

(also a paying customer, and I'm very happy if things improve for free users while not degrading the service I pay for)

In what way does it affect you?

I'm a bit annoyed at the fact that the free user's plays dictate where my subscription cash goes.

But I don't see how the free users actually detract from my experience of the service...

There wouldn't be a service without free users. Also, tell me you signed up for premium without trying it first.

Blame the service, not the users.

Interesting. Does anyone know whether this applies to Spotify on Sonos?

Doesn't using Spotify on Sonos require a premium account?

If not, I'm not sure why I'm paying any more.

That's really the only thing I wonder too now, else I will cancel directly too

As far as I know you can't listen to spotify using 3rd party clients (like the Sonos).

You can, but it does indeed look like you still need Spotify Premium. https://www.spotify.com/us/sonos/

From the article: "We have removed these caps completely across all platforms"

I'd still pay for Rdio before Spotify. Just my two cents.

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