That aside, the app looks really polished and I'm glad it has Linux support backed in.
Yup I'm at the point again where maintaining my own library is more convinient again. It's exactly the DRM shit I won't put up with. Also spotify, rdio etc. Are exactly the same price with the same restrictions per plan (in .ch at least). Price cartel, oligopoly?
But that is not an excuse. The music industry in trying to provide alternative ways, and I extremely appreciate it and think that we need to be supportive. Only by supporting this changes we will ever see any improvements, we need to find a middleground that can satisfy both parties. Spotify offers a great service on a great platform. It can have his hippicus but that can happen with everything. What would happen if the player app you are using to play your offline library breaks and you have no data?
So no, I don't support them. I use Steam though, I think they got DRM right for the most part. I'd prefer no DRM, really. But with Steam I don't notice any DRM. That's good enough for me. I only use it in online mode though.
A traditional media player breaking almost never touches its "offline library".
WMP, Clementine, Foobar2000, Amarok, MPD, Audacious, so on and so forth. Hell you can use VLC as a music player if you wanted to. What happens to your songs if any of these crashes? What happens to the data if you delete the entire application from your computer? Nothing. The data is still there. The application is separate from the data it plays.
Now if the OS has issues, or the hard drive, or a few other things: Your data might be lost, but that is almost never the fault of the "player app".
While we'd all like a situation where those who've added most value get the lions share of the reward, this solution takes us from them getting a small percentage to them getting nothing. That seems to me to be worse rather than better.
I'd rather outright buy the songs somewhere else and have them backed up on another computer as well with btsync just in case these DRM apps try to pull some crap.
The above scenario worked perfectly for me. I could access all my music anytime and from any device but unfortunately looks it didn't work out for the vendors :)
I think saavn pro might be an option.
From a quick research it seemed that Amazon MP3 was DRM-free.. not that I trust them too much or would want to support Amazon, but it seemed the only option with a good catalogue.
I guess HipHop isn't.
However I'm certain my country of birth is still not covered by these services so in that case this is a good alternative.
False. Spotify is available in 45 countries. Deezer is available in over 180!
Sadly most of these are only available in the US – and there are ~500 million people in the EU without access to most of these services.
Luckily it gets better nowadays, Spotify exists in most countries here, iTunes in contrast to Google Play actually sells everywhere (GPlay only in some countries here) and with Netflix coming to Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France and some other countries from 2015 on movie piracy will also go down.
This duplicates PT's main selling point.