After a hiatus I fired up Spotify here in the UK today. It's awful.
The software works just fine and the number of songs is commendable, but there are audio ads every couple of songs, intrusive display ads and free users only get 10 hours a month of listening.
Sure, you get what you pay for, but it's certainly a much, much worse experience than I had remembered it.
Spotify got its traction in Europe though because of the free service.
Whether or not the paid version good value, the free service is essentially just a free trial now - which is fine, but there's a heck of a lot of competition in the paid area.
One of the major reasons that it's been hard for spotify to be released in America is because the big music publishers have been worried about if spotify could be profitable being supporeted only by ads. I've read, I don't have the source anymore, that they might phase out free spotify in the future and that's why they've increased the amount of ads.
I pay 10 euro/mnoth for premium now which let's me stream as much 320 kb/s music as I want and save any song I want on my smartphone or PC. It's absolutely worth if you listen to a lot of music.
The software works just fine and the number of songs is commendable, but there are audio ads every couple of songs, intrusive display ads and free users only get 10 hours a month of listening.
Sure, you get what you pay for, but it's certainly a much, much worse experience than I had remembered it.