How do you rate Spotify?

Marketing surveys ftw!

I love Spotify and I pay for Unlimited (I used to pay for Premium, but I found I didn't use it on my phone enough to justify the added $5/mo).

i like spotify and pay for premium

Love it and pay for Premium. In fact, I've used it for more than a year, but only recently has it started to feel indispensable. I rarely download new albums anymore, since most of the time they're on Spotify. I don't even bother with advance leaks -- half the reason I used to grab them was because I wanted to hear them right away, but the other half was because I knew it would be more difficult to find download links later. If an album's on Spotify, I'm content to wait until the actual release date. In fact, it's kind of restored that sense of anticipation every Tuesday as I check to see What's New.

The problem now is that I don't have a smartphone, and so when I'm away from a computer (on my commute to and from work, for instance), I'm still using my iPod to listen to music I've uploaded or downloaded to iTunes. And since I don't download much anymore, I mostly just listen to older stuff. That's not such a bad thing, but I feel like it'll be untenable in the long term. Strange to think that the Spotify app is what might finally persuade me to throw away my ancient phone.

oh yeah unlimited i forgot about that, just vote premium if you have it.

It has enough to keep me occupied and it's worth $5/month, but the gaps (and the shitty UI) are enough to vote glass-half-empty.

I used it sparingly at first before I got a Sonos & an iPhone and now find it essential and quite transformative to my music listening. I still buy an unhealthy amount of vinyl but I'm a lot more discriminatory in what I choose to buy than before. There are fewer bands I now whom I buy every album from blindly than before but I think I also pick up more a more varied selection of unknown sounds than I have before. In the house I use it regularly and sometimes lazily when I just want to listen to a few tracks from something and can't be bothered getting up for the record or CD. In that sense it's been a bit destructive and made me a much more impatient and trigger happy consumer of music and I find that end result quite conflicting. Outside I use the mobile app daily and aside of the odd missing band or album it's been one of the best moves I've made. It can be overwhelming on occasional and I'm not unprone to bouts of inertia where I can't think of what I want to listen to. I was definitely feeling constricted by the limits of capacity and mundanity of maintenance involved with an MP3 player before. For me, at £10 per month, it's exceptional value for money. Socially I think it's had a more complicated effect on listening at parties where it can either result in inventive and inspired 'pass the phone' curated playlists with friends or a collective sense of unease and a discomforting jarring schizo headache of disparate sounds.

love it, pay for premium. Streaming has been a game-changer for me

don't use it, sucks for dance music.

don't use it for a combination of reasons indicated above, but voted "i hate streaming" cuz I guess that is inclusive of "doesn't pay" and "doesn't have a lot of what I want"

seeing as how there has never been (and never will be) a streaming service that pays artists and has everything

Yeah I will never pay for this on principle but I will install blockify if I feel like listening to the entire catalogue of lou reed on a whim.

theres lots of great apps for spotify. the Bluenote , Classical and Soundrop (its rooms where you can add music from spotify and chat.) apps are essential.

Soundrop you can do it via app on Spotify or by web (sign in with twitter or fb)
http://play.soundrop.fm/

You can create rooms and yes theres an ilxor room - http://open.soundrop.fm/s/W16fTbbsgjzuGhsN )

I Love it and (used to) pay for premium! But it also doesn't have everything I want...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22064353

I love it and pay for unlimited. the idea that it not having everything I want is a problem is ridiculous to me -- nor does iTunes or the best physical record store in the world, or even any given filesharing network. there's no such thing as one stop shopping. and most of what Spotify doesn't have that i do want, new anyway, is on DatPiff or Bandcamp or somewhere else that streams.

i wish they charged more, though -- i'd gladly pay more for this service, especially if it meant a higher royalty rate for artists, but since they priced it so low to begin with (which is kinda stupid, imo, it would've caught on no matter what) now it'll never go up.

It only has about half the stuff I want but given that the half it does have includes Polish beat-pop, Spanish new-wave and a bunch of other amazing stuff it would be a major pain in the neck to track down by other means, I love it.

It doesn't have everything I want, but nothing would. I pay for premium.

the idea that it not having everything I want is a problem is ridiculous to me

I don't care about it having ~everything~ it's just that there's ~not enough~ of the crap I listen to.

yeah I don't need some OTHER thing to try and find music with. especially when it's not stuff I will own in perpetuity, just stuff that will happen to be available at the moment. when spotify goes under (as it inevitably will) all you subscribers will be left with nothing/have to find some other stupid service etc (altho granted this is a complaint about streaming services not just spotify)

love it, pay for premium, would pay more. agree that it definitely has gaps - huge catalogue acts and dance music in general the most obv - and it makes even more annoyed and befuddled that at this point labels don't bother to keep almost everything in print digitally at least. at the same time for impulse listens of albums it's fantastic. i've heard four foghat albums now, i couldn't have done that w/o spotify.

agree w/ shakey that anyone who burns all their records upon subscribing to spotify might regret it some day

lol @ the idea that music streaming is a fad. Even if Spotify goes down one day, a bajillion other choices will be available.

pay for premium, love it, the ability to "download" tracks onto my iphone for offline listening in the subway was a gamechanger

yeah, streaming isn't going away. if Spotify isn't sustainable in the long run, something else will come along. it's cool if you want to own everything in perpetuity (or lol as long as your surely immortal hard drive will last) but not everybody wants that.

some dude otm. i also love the social aspects of it (sharing playlists etc) & i would pay more if they asked for it. it's not perfect but has positively changed my listening habits & made me realise what a streaming music service could potentially be. if something like spotify really had ~everything~ then i would pay whatever i could afford to have access to it.

if something like spotify really had ~everything~ then i would pay whatever i could afford to have access to it.

For real. I'd pay as much as I currently pay for my cable bill, and it would be a much better value.

It has most of what I want. There are some small DJ stuff and remixes it doesn't have, which I can do without.

For now, it suits my needs, but I find myself always downloading or buying the stuff I really like anyway.

I think the price is more than enough considering I use it to 'test out' music, and if I like it, I'll buy their record or Flac/MP3s.

I don't think that streaming is a fad, I just don't want to become beholden to some stupid/new/different corporate model every 5 years for my music

frankly i'm hoping that mp3s go out of style as the dominant medium and that something better eventually becomes the default for downloading/storing digital music, and that streaming may better usher along that transition

would be interested to see a poll of how much people would willing to pay per month for an ideal streaming service that truly had all of recorded music

I don't care about it having ~everything~ it's just that there's ~not enough~ of the crap I listen to.

― brimstead, Tuesday, April 16, 2013 4:12 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is the weirdest attitude to me. like, it's free, it takes up relatively little space on your computer, but you make a point of not using it just because, like, you're gonna use a million times that much memory for all your mp3s? even if i only used it a couple hours a month, i'd still keep it on my computer. it'd be like making a point of not having your browser up to date enough to use YouTube now and again.

Casual or even intent listening is a perfect use for streaming services, but I imagine I'll always want to make mixtapes/cds. Throwing things in a playlist just isn't as much fun.

i'm done with cds, and i'm sure i'll still grab digital albums here, but for now it's spotify

here and there, rather

and really even if i didn't want to consume whole albums on Spotify, i'd keep it around just as a stray 'check out random songs i'm curious about' service instead of YouTube, which has just gotten slower and more clogged with ads lately. (xp)

i guess i just don't care about owning music anymore. which is nice in a way

i still dl and buy albums but the days of dling things (often huge things) i might not only listen to once or never even get around to listening to at all are gone.

xpost huge ditto to social aspects and playlists in general (i'd guess maybe half my interest in ilm polls is the generated spotify playlist). good catch by ag putting youtube on there, i know an astounding number of ppl for whom youtube is their primary way of listening to music. considering they do have alot of dance music that spotify doesn't have i've often wondered about making a youtube playlist to listen to at the gym, etc on yr phone but it feels both weird to me and likely to blow up yr data cap.

There's actually loads of good, new dance music on Spotify, but there are quite a few labels that basically refuse to have anything to do with it, and if your taste clusters around some of those labels then you won't get much use out of it. Then again, that's partly your fault for having narrow taste.

it's free, it takes up relatively little space on your computer, but you make a point of not using it just because,

it requires a facebook account etc

fuck that shit

Likewise...except, again, for mixes. When I want to give someone a mix, I don't want it to be a hotlink.

it requires a facebook account etc

not anymore

also for classical, which was always hell to dl and daunting to buy, it's been beyond a godsend for me

I know soundrop allows twitter accounts so I assume spotify does

balls do you use the classify app?

my "it doesn't have everything" beef isn't really about expecting spotify to rectify an oversight - i get why it's impossible - but it's just the key reason it's not a service i need in my life. it's not just a few records here and there that it's missing - a good half of whatever i'm jamming in any given week isn't on it. i don't want to have to constantly switch between programmes to listen to music. it's also why i don't want to rely on spotify 100%, to only listen through it, as i see a lot of people doing.

also when i really like a song or album i do want the mp3, not because of any sense of ownership but because i need it for my ipod to play when on the move. this also applies to giving new songs the chance the repeat listening affords rather than just one cursory stream.

obv i realise my music listening is skewed because of my job, both in that it necessitates me listening to pre-release stuff and having access to promos (most of which are digital mp3s, CDs that i convert into mp3s, or streaming through the label's own terrible programmes). totally get why it's a revolution for most listeners. it just has no place in my life though.

(and that's before you get into how awful it is for artists, and how it doesn't seem like a particularly sustainable long-term model...)

Classify/Blue note/soundrop apps are essential for me. Really cant recommend them enough

I know soundrop allows twitter accounts so I assume spotify does

facebook or spotify, no twitter

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Mordy i meant that it will decide that I'm not getting any reception or some ish, based on a little blip, like losing 3G for a second, then 3G comes back, full bars, but "Spotify is Offline" for a good minute or so afterwards, at which point I've bumped into 5 people and have arrived at my destination anyway.

Number one hit for Jonathan Richman songs is "The New Teller" which I put down to ILX.

The Nutella

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Shucks. I'd been hoping this thread was bumped again by somebody whose service went offline again.

Wont use it on principle because artists get paid little so I pirate the music for free instead. 2

lol

indeed lol. think I can guess who the 2 votes were by!

friend of mine noted on facebook that if you use the spotify web app and have adblock installed it blocks the spotify adverts...?

kinda wanna comment on his post with "yeah, fuck you, musicians!" but i'm not a commenty kinda guy

except on here?

so apparently the new spotify update (not got it yet myself) will tell you the top 10 most played songs by each artist AND give you the numbers.
The top Skrillex song has 64 million plays. Gangnam style has 84 million plays.

Wonder how many plays New Order gets from ilxors?

22 per week

What, on Spotify?

Watch out, it'll be recommending you 'check out' Joy Division!

http://i.imgur.com/wnCgR2o.png

some of those numbers/order dont look right do they?

lol @ people actually listening to Blue Monday '88

http://i.imgur.com/7m2dazf.png

http://i.imgur.com/wgwxMJt.png

http://i.imgur.com/SgDbpEs.png

http://i.imgur.com/YBH4AKZ.png

Yo P-FUNK boy have you heard the Daft Punk album yet?

It seems its a top 10 of the past week and the figure is an overall figure (not sure when the start point is for that) which is why some placing/figures appear out of place.

LBI I haven't yet. Loved the 1st 2 but cared little for what came after it. Is it worth a go? Didn't like the single at all.

I can't find anyone with more plays than Skrillex yet but I'm about to look up gangnam style

Of course it is worth a go! It's a bloody brilliant album. And, perhaps more to your liking, it is teh funk.

(I am under no illusions, I don't think you will like it, but think you should give it a try regardless)

http://i.imgur.com/sty7GAr.png

coldplay,U2 etc dont top skrillex but Psy does as does...

http://i.imgur.com/Gb4Fe8m.png

OK I shall get round to it eventually. Maybe having low expectations for it is a good thing.

Have you listened to it yet AG? It's pretty good! Even better if you expect it to be totally crap.

Not yet

I really really wish the desktop app would let you browse new releases in some organized way, say, by genre. It really shouldn't be hard to implement.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/21/spotify-10m-subscribers-streaming-music

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/19/spotify-coldplay-ghost-stories-black-keys-turn-blue

are the black keys really that big?

Yes

oh dear

more yakuza and nachtmystium on this than there used to be

are the black keys really that big?

May 21, 2014 LA Times

The Black Keys' latest sold 164,000 copies in the week ending May 18, while "Xscape" moved 157,000, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

"Turn Blue" is the Black Keys' first album to reach No. 1 on Billboard's overall tally, though as the magazine's Keith Caulfield points out, the duo's previous record, "El Camino," actually had a bigger first week; that album debuted at No. 2 in 2011 with sales of 206,000 copies.

I wonder how big they are here

debuted at #2 in the uk

Seems obvious the way forward for artists and spotify, and the future, has to be a complete end to "rights holders" behemoth, as it was previous known.

At the moment, niche indie artists aren't making any money off spotify. For e.g, 14,000 plays of your song might make you about $90. A million plays of your song, unlikely for most artists, only makes about $6000. This money goes to your rights holder, not all to the artist. Same as buying a physical record. No non-superstar musician has ever got rich for life from record sales.

Music heritage and integrity has only got worse over time. Future of Spotify needs to be not having to pay millions to redundant record companies and all their minions for the rights to music.

Only way artists are going to be able to fund studio time and organise tours is if a more modern stripped back record company takes lead, and many have. Spotify can start offering far bigger slices of the subscription to artists.

This is all dependent on Spotify being a credible and non avaricious corporate pig however. 40 million subs paying $10 a month = $400 million coming in every month. That's nearly 5 billion a year. Make that $12 a month and it's near to 6 billion a year. Make that 100 million subs (Itunes has around 800 million users) that's $14 billion rolling through Spotify yearly.

If just half of itunes 800 million users were paying $10 a month, is 96 billion a year. There's plenty potential for even a niche indie act with only a few thousand plays of their songs to be self sustaining.

def agree that any artist embracing streaming as their primary mode of song distribution doesn't need a record label so much as a union

and any artist NOT embracing streaming as their primary mode of song distribution might want to reconsider how many of their songs are available to stream

The huge numbers going through Spotify are misleading though, as the number of artists on Spotify is orders of magnitude bigger than any record label ever had. Even if Spotify paid out nearly all of thpse $12 a month, it still means a paltry sum per song played. The difficulty for non-superstar artists is to get played by a thousand times more listeners than you needed in the CD era to get similar money.

Ten years ago, as a small artist, selling 1000 CD's would pay for your recording costs. In the Spotify era, even a million plays won't get you the same money. So, streaming isn't a viable revenue source.

http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/ if you want more actual details...

It takes a heck of alot of plays to get rich at 0.006335 cents a play. I think in the end ALL of these digital realities for musicians are bull shit. Only ones getting rich are the tech companies.

^^^^^yup. i agree with the sentiment that streaming could be a strong revenue stream for artists if implemented better/without greedy corps running the shots. however, i fear that the "world of music artists" is too diffuse and complex for a "union" type situtation to really take hold. i realize this sounds just like that lovely old canard "communism works in theory but not in practice"

<quote>but there are quite a few labels that basically refuse to have anything to do with it, and if your taste clusters around some of those labels then you won't get much use out of it.</quote>

<quote> it's not just a few records here and there that it's missing - a good half of whatever i'm jamming in any given week isn't on it.</quote>

Does anyone know WHICH label groups are withholding so much old/obscure music from Spotify? Most of what I listen to is not on there, and its the main reason I don't subscribe. It seems like only Majors and Major Indies catalogs are represented.

Ten years ago, as a small artist, selling 1000 CD's would pay for your recording costs. In the Spotify era, even a million plays won't get you the same money. So, streaming isn't a viable revenue source.

Read my post 2 above yours on why streaming absolutely is a viable revenue source in the future.

Long thread by Dave Lowery:

Try living on $0.0038 a stream and then get back to me. https://t.co/bUVtICBfQ1

— David C Lowery (@davidclowery) April 4, 2019