Comment by 27182818284 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 27182818284 | Hacker News Reader

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    As part of the settlement agreement with the major record companies, 
    we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe
    clean all of the record companies’ copyrighted works and
    hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and
    intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.

Yeah Grooveshark was really getting in the way of me paying for that album ($10) and song ($1.something) I paid for in the last couple of days.

Oh and that $1 song? I bought it because I heard it on one of those videos-that-is-really-just-a-still-frame-so-they-can-share-the-music for the song. Also, what is Grooveshark again? I've heard of it, but I don't think I've ever used it.

My experiences can't be atypical, can they? Was it really a threat worth shutting down and all of the legal expenses? This just hurts me because literally in the last couple of days I watched an unlicensed copy of a song, liked it, and then bought it because I could and I wanted better quality sound. The (different) album was a similar pipeline--A link on Reddit directed me to the song (in the form of a YouTube video) and I then ended up buying the album.

I can't be the only one.

I definitely think you're in the minority.

I don't remember the last time I bought an album or song, but I use streaming music services all the time. Same goes for anyone I know. Admittedly anecdotal but then again so is your assertion.

An album on Tuesday, and before that on Saturday.

(But then I'm one of the people who grew up buying music, I've got ~1,200 albums on vinyl and ~5000 on CD as a testament to my music purchasing past...)

Yeah but your kind are going extinct.

Yeah - tell me about it...

I find that interesting because I mostly use streaming services to find music I buy. Largely because I've yet to use a streaming service that handles intermittent connectivity well enough (you'd think that my commute from a densely populated London suburb, along one of the highest density commuter routes in Europe, in to Central London would have decent mobile data coverage, wouldn't you... But you'd be sadly mistaken) to be worth using most of the time. Also because most of them are really quite horrible at picking tracks I want to listen to at any given time overall....

I couldn't imagine relying on those services for most of my listening.

Largely because I've yet to use a streaming service that handles intermittent connectivity well enough

If you have an Android phone: Google Play All Access.

You can offline content to your phone as if you own the music, but you get full access to their complete library. It's pretty brilliant, IMO.

Edit: though that doesn't help you if you're looking for a radio-like service... I tend to listen to albums at a time, and discover artists through third party services (e.g., Rate Your Music) that then drive me to sample stuff on Play. So it works well for me.

Google Play's radio feature has been amazing in my experience, and way better than Spotify's. Especially for stuff which is a little bit out of the mainstream, the selection-quality is so high that I wouldn't be surprised if they were using some of their Google suggestion-fu to generate it from what tracks users have played together in the past.

Oh yeah, my only point is offlining/intermittent connectivity and the radio features are kind of at odds with one another... but that's not unique to Google in any way.

Once I've decided I like something, I tend to want to actually own it.. Play's opaqueness when it comes to telling me what's DRMd and what isn't (may very well have changed - I haven't bothered checking in a very long time, and to be honest I don't know whether they've ever had DRMd music at all, because their lack of transparency with respect to video content and ebooks mean I never bothered even looking at their music section) has kept me away from using it at all for content.

It's the discovery I find annoyingly troublesome.

Actually, I take it back, All Access lets you download radio stations, too! I'll have to try that some time...

How do you buy an album or song without it being DRM-chained to a particular service? That's my problem with music. I've settled on Spotify for this reason, but I was extremely disappointed to read that I'm probably not contributing in any meaningful way to the less-than-popular artists I listen to.

Nothing I've bought on iTunes in the last...five years?...has been DRMed. It's all M4A.

Beatport is a great source of DRM-free (320kbps MP3 or WAV) music: https://www.beatport.com/

I get them all from Amazon music; it's all non-DRMed MP3. Like most online music has been for a while, tbh.

Use a legit service like spotify and discover new music. I've started listening to dozens of new artists because of it.

It had the exact opposite effect for me. I used Spotify for a couple of years and basically only listened to the same playlists over and over again. Only when they forced people to use Facebook to log in I stopped paying and using their service and suddenly a whole new world oppened for me. I started using SoundCloud, Jammendo and YouTube to find new music from outside of the mainstream and never looked back.

This was four years ago, in the meantime i built up my private music library mostly with Vinyl + MP3 download codes and went all the way to mimic Spotifies technical solutions and can stream my library from a Raspberry Pi at home https://jeena.net/private-music-streaming

I just want to point out that they don't force you to use Facebook. I use Spotify without a Facebook account without any issues.

I listen to BBC Radio 6 for new music (mainly Lauren Laverne) and the blogged 50 radio on Google Play. When I hear something I like I just add it in google Play.

Spotify didn't stop you from finding new music, your own habits/place you were in in life did that. I went through a phase of only listening to all my existing mp3s for a few years, but the last year has been an orgy of new stuff.

I wouldn't attribute it to listening/not listening to a streaming service.

Google Play slightly annoys me at times, the app is pretty horribly designed and slow at times, but spotify was blocked on a network I regularly used and I'm used to its quirks now.

I don't buy music any more. At the moment there's simply no point with a Google Play subscription. The only band I've noticed missing is Placebo's old albums.

Spotify is very bad for music discovery.

It has no random feature, the channels they offer are either hand crafted or based on popularity. The music selection excludes many smaller, and indie, labels. The search functionalities are very limited (the metadata is too low quality).

I wanted to love Spotify, and I really gave it a try. I just couldn't keep using it, all it did for me was to make me angry. In the end it's mostly good for listening to what the major labels think you should listen.

I have personally found Spotify's Browse>Discover feature to be be useful and worthy, I've found a lot of interesting music in there.

My use case though is that I most often go on Spotify to listen to a specific album I had in mind, either I knew already or heard of it from a friend, blog, local gig, etc. But those times (20% maybe?) I feel like trying something new, I always find something good on Discover.

I wish their UI was better though. The desktop app spawns 7 SpotifyHelper processes that each eat 40mb of RAM and the whole thing feels way slow on my 10ish year laptop. The web app uses flash, and while it consumes less ram, the playback is choppy on my pc. At least the desktop app plays fine once it's started.

I craft a playlist of new tracks that I like and then hit 'start playlist radio' to let Spotify find me other emerging bands that sound like this.

This is a pretty solid way to discover new music, but you do need that jumping off point to enable you to say to it 'find me stuff like this'.

Do you ever select an artist or song and make a "Radio Station" from it? I find that to be a great way of finding new artists to enjoy.

You can do the same for playlists too. Makes the seeding even broader.

You used to be able to use apps like Last.fm which would add random functionality, but they discontinued apps, which made me ditch Spotify.

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