The streaming music service has been available in Europe for a while but only became available in US this week. The free version is by invite only but you can sign up to one of their paid tiers without an invite. I know we have at least a few users in this board so I’d like to hear your opinions before I give them my credit card number.
Also, what is the difference between Spotify and say Rhapsody or Slacker; which also allow you to listen to any track in their system when you want as many time as you want, entire albums too?
I signed up for the Premiums service. I’m going to give a month and see whether I get $10 use out of it. Pretty cool idea, this thing.
Better than GrooveShark?
GrooveShark is of questionable legality.
I tried Rhapsody a long time ago. Their software was clunky and annoying beyond measure.
There have been disputes in the past, but according to that Wiki they pay royalties to labels who have granted permission, take down music and ban users for uploading unlicensed content, and honor any DMCA requests.
Let me know if you can use multiple devices at the same time. I can get on board with 10/month but not if I have to get a subscription for each family member.
Thanks for the update. They were still bickering with the labels the last time I looked them up.
Have been using spotify for several years now. They have a rather large catalogue even tho theres a few really big artists missing. I mostly use it on my android phone instead of having to sync mp3s.
Well you can. But I hesitate to mention it because Im not sure how legal it is.
You can only be logged on with one device at a time. But the app supports an offline mode.
You go online with the device, sync your playlist (caching the music to the device
) then go offline again, and you can then listen to all the music you have synced.
Then you can go online with another app and sync the same (or another playlist).
You can have multiple playlists and sync some or all of them.
Signed up for premium today. I figure I’ll give it a month and see. So far I’ve found some rather obscure stuff which has made me happy (Black Tape for a Blue Girl. I was shocked).
Looks like you can only stream to one device at a time, but as others have said, it has an offline mode that can be used. No complaints so far.
FYI, there’s a way to get the free service in the US and not have to wait for an invite.
It worked for me.
I have a couple of invites. PM me and I will share.
I got an invite to the free service, but honestly I don’t know what it does. I gather that in order to stream music to my device I need the premium subscription. So what does the free version even do?
Streams to your PC. You can have it discover any music local on your machine and use it as a jukebox that plays both your local stuff and stream stuff in a playlist.
I’ve not been entirely pleased with the free service so far. I’m perfectly willing to accept the occasional, fairly unobtrusive ad, like one that I heard for Coca-Cola. But a lot of the ads seem to be for music, and aren’t terribly well-tailored to what might be gleaned about my tastes based on my listening habits–if I’m listening to “Who’s Next,” there’s a pretty good chance that I’m not going to be all that interested in Incubus or the latest, hottest pop hip-hop tune. :rolleyes: If the entire point is that I can listen to what I want to, having to listen to sizable chunks of rubbish that I don’t want to sort of ruins it. And you do have to listen to it–the software’s smart enough to notice when you turn the volume down, and it pauses playback until you turn it back up.
I’m not sure whether it’s worth going premium–depends on how deep the library is, and how well the more obscure/eccentric sort of thing that I tend to dig is represented. Based on that, Rhapsody might be the better choice.
I’ve been a premium subscriber for several months now. The reason why I cracked, after a good year or two, and paid was when I was listening to The Field Mice, a somewhat light and twee British indie band, and an advert about three times louder came flying in for some kind of Pop Idol/X-Factor style manufactured pop “hit”. It utterly ruined the atmosphere.
These days it is my most common method of listening to music. I listen to music i have already bought using the streaming service (so the artist should get paid, even if apparently it isn’t that much) and the mobile application is very handy, even if it does have its faults.
I came here to say pretty much the same thing amanset said.
I’ve been using the free service for about three days, now – just here and there. I’ve yet to hear a single ad, but sometimes the songs I choose won’t play at all, which I find to be even more annoying. If it shows up in the search results, I assume they have it.
Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?
I signed up for a free invite (which you can do here: Spotify - Web Player: Music for everyone) and it took me about three days to get one.
I totally, absolutely love it and have been pimping it to all my friends. It doesn’t have everything, but it has a lot of not-terribly-common stuff that I’m interested in listening to. I like classical music, and it has a bunch of Ian Bostridge, Gesualdo, a whole slew of opera, and even Anna Russell! The selection seems much, much better than Pandora, not even to mention the part about being able to listen to songs on demand. And once I get my sister and best friend from college signed up I have the feeling we’ll be swapping playlists a lot. I imagine that for people into pop music it’s even better.
Asimovian, I’ve had that same problem and I would also like to know what’s wrong. Sometimes I can “fix” it by closing the application and re-opening it. It also seems to be more of a problem for me at work than at home, so I’m wondering if it’s a firewall/bandwidth issue. But there are a couple of tracks that seem persistently not to work for me even controlling for these issues, which I don’t get because there isn’t any other indication they won’t play… they’re not greyed out or anything.
I just signed up for the Premium service, but haven’t played around with it much yet. The multiple devices thing might be a sticking point though. We will see how well creating playlists on my phone works out. If it does this could be great, if it doesn’t I will probably cancel my subscription.
Amusingly enough, I heard my first ad about five minutes after my last post.