

Spotify vs the US Competition - chrischen
http://blog.like.fm/top-5-music-streaming-services-reviewed

======
mmahemoff
Spotify's discovery is better than a 4. Since a playlist can be represented by
a URL, sites have emerged to share playlists, which is actually awesome, one
of those living in the future moments. Even better, these can be dynamic, like
a top 40 list, and also curated by everyone.

That said, Spotify could certainly do much more in this area (a lot of their
energies have been focused on getting the US launch, it seems).

~~~
nc
This.

See spotylist.com, discovery through non-friends playlists beats algorithms as
you can understand why songs are grouped together and get a feel for a persons
music tastes.

~~~
chrischen
I'm not sure if any "social" type of discovery can beat algorithmic in
quality. The added benefit of "social" is the socializing bit, not the
discovery bit. Algorithms can always match you up with similar people faster
and better.

But thanks for the link I'll re-consider the rating.

~~~
physcab
After testing out Turntable.fm for the past few weeks, I have to almost
disagree. And this is coming from someone who worked on Grooveshark Radio for
a year, which is almost all algorithmic.

~~~
chrischen
Turntable is fun with friends. But being a listener in a DJd room is no
different than listening to a curated playlist, a curated radio station, and
probably worse than personalized algorithmic radio in terms of efficacy of
discovery.

You'll discover music on Turntable, but for the same amount of time spent on
an algorithmic radio station you'll probably discover more.

~~~
physcab
You might "discover" more in the sense that you'll get far more
recommendations of songs you've never heard of, but those recommendations
might not be relevant to you. Why? Because your mood changes from song to song
and algorithms will never capture human emotion quite like, well, humans.

When I'm in a well-DJ'ed Turntable room, the "radio" feels so much more
natural. Songs flow. People are constantly editing their queues to best the
song before it and I find myself rarely having to vote on a song. Its already
better than Pandora, IMO. It also beats BMAT which has amazing algorithmic
recommendations (based on waveform analysis and musical feature
decomposition).

The only issue I see right now is that if your tastes are outside of
Electronica and Indie, theres not much else for you at the moment.

------
dgallagher
After two days with a free account, on a Mac, I noticed this:

\- If you mute your speakers via OS X while an advertisement is playing, it
pauses the ad until you unmute your speakers.

\- If you turn down your speaker volume via OS X too much while an
advertisement is playing, the same behavior occurs until you turn the volume
back up. This appears to be relative to the volume you were just listening to
music at.

Quick fix around this; use headphones. Just take them off to ignore an ad. Or
if you have a separate sound system, mute that. Annoying if you have a laptop
though. This behavior doesn't occur when music is playing.

~~~
Joakal
Does this happen on a PC?

~~~
jeltz
Yes, but I if I remember correctly it does not happen if you run the PC
version in wine on Linux.

------
socksy
Out of interest, does Spotify (the free version) for US have the 5 plays limit
on each song? Having limited numbers of hours I can deal with, but after they
introduced limited plays on Spotify, I practically never used it again after
my premium account ran out.

The 5 plays doesn't appear to renew at the end of the month like the number of
hours, and it just means that my playlists have more and more holes in them
(as often has happened when artists suddenly change their minds over
streaming). Spotify tried to explain that most of their users only use their
service to discover new music – maybe I'm too hipster for them, but the new
and interesting music I want to listen to isn't generally in their catalogue,
and last.fm's discovery features are much better.

When they provided everyone free access for unlimited plays (with ads,
granted), most of my friends used it and updated their playlists — which I
would subscribe to and we'd drop music on to each other's user icons and share
interesting music. Now, even if I were to re-upgrade to premium (which I
probably won't, especially when in the UK we appear to be getting a raw deal
in cost), it's like a ghost town.

~~~
dgallagher
They don't seem to mention it anywhere on the U.S. site. It appears in Europe
that they have a 5-plays-per-track limit for free accounts, but not paid
accounts.

~~~
berberich
It's mentioned on their terms and conditions page in the first paragraph:
<http://www.spotify.com/us/legal/end-user-agreement/>

------
zavulon
Where is Last.FM on this list? It's actually the best (in my opinion) service
out there. Their "discovery" feature is the best, and simplest to use - just
choose "Play artist/song/tag XXX radio", and it will play related songs for
you. Their catalog seems immense, and I listen to some of the most obscure
stuff out there (/hipster joke). And it's completely free.. the only thing it
doesn't do is play music "on demand", but nobody else got that right either
(for free).

~~~
xentronium
> And it's completely free

Am I missing something here? I've got 30 plays on my trial account and after
that it asks me to pay for subscription.

~~~
icebraining
You're missing living in (or proxying to) the UK, US or Germany, where it's
still free.

<http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement>

------
cyanbane
I have been a huge Rdio fan for awhile and after playing with Spotify I have
come to the conclusion that Spotify is great if you don't want to pay, if you
want to pay then Rdio is much better because of the method in which it
presents new music to you. I get the feeling in 6 months the front page of
Spotify will be new albums which compete for attention space on your monitor
by how much money is put behind them - pushing them into your view, where as
Rdio (because it is paid for) will continue to be a screen full of albums
liked by your friends or people you follow. I much prefer the later, however
the former isn't a bad option if you don't want to pay for anything.

------
joeguilmette
I signed up for Spotify and was pretty disappointed. I have years and years of
Data in iTunes, and the only thing Spotify does is pull out tracks. It won't
even sync my SmartPlaylists. So it's kind of like starting over. Not something
I'm willing to do.

~~~
parbo
I'm a Spotify dev. What sort of data would you find most useful to have
extracted from iTunes?

The reason we don't do the smart playlists is that we just take a snapshot
(the lists aren't kept in sync) and the very nature of smart playlists is that
they are dynamic.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Even a snapshot of smart and dumb playlists would be better than nothing. The
use case is, users who want to migrate to Spotify from whatever they've been
using for years, intend to copy over their playlists to Spotify, and
permanently switch to Spotify as their main playlist organizer/generator. But
having to recreate all their playlists by hand in Spotify is enough to stymie
even the most enthusiastic US/NA Spotify fan.

Same problem on the Android app I just discovered yesterday, all my local
playlists are made with a third party app called Playlist Builder, and both
PowerAMP and Google Music can use them, but apparently not Spotify. I only
have Premium, but it seems Premium is intended to enable local music and
playlists just not sharing and streaming...

~~~
parbo
What format is Playlist Builder using, m3u perhaps?

~~~
SkyMarshal
.m3u8, all stored in what appears to be /Playlists, though my phone isn't
rooted so I'm not sure if that's the highest level of the directory structure.

------
earbitscom
Can we subtract 1-2 points from Grooveshark for their questionable legal
tactics?

Awesome comparison, Chris. This should be the go to page used to respond to
any question about these services.

~~~
physcab
How are our (I'm a grooveshark employee) legal tactics questionable? We sign
deals with new labels all the time and our #1 company-wide goal is to help an
artist make over $1M through our service. Here is a list of all our label
agreements: <http://www.grooveshark.com/labelslist>. I don't think its updated
though since we have a deal with EMI and I can't find it on the list. Yes, a
few of the other majors are missing, but that is always an on-going
conversation. We also fully comply with the DMCA in the same way YouTube and
all other UGC sites work. Case in point: try searching for Beatles.

~~~
earbitscom
Grooveshark has been playing a lot of copyrighted material without licenses
for a very long time. It takes it down; the content reappears. I understand
that you're somewhat protected by DMCA, but the entire business was built on
the backs of mostly mainstream content. It wasn't until you already had a big
audience that you started securing the majority of your most important
licenses, and plenty of the music there is still not properly licensed. EMI is
a perfect example. Only recently did you get a license from them, and yet
their artists have been playing on Grooveshark for ages.

If you really did a good job of making sure the music that was uploaded wasn't
copyrighted, you wouldn't have a business because nobody would be looking for
that music. The period between illegal mainstream content going up, and that
content coming down, is just long enough for Grooveshark to have a competitive
cost advantage over companies who properly license their material from day
one.

If the tactics aren't at least "questionable", then why has Universal declared
"legal jihad" on Grooveshark?

P.S. My band's music is on your site. I didn't put it there and neither did
anybody else with proper authority to do so.

~~~
physcab
Its not a black or white issue. Licensing is incredibly complex with ownership
sometimes changing between territories, products, people and having the
technology in place to enforce specific terms so all parties are happy. I'm
not completely knowledgeable about the subject so I won't comment on that
further, but its not something we turn a blind eye to. Our content ID system
is getting better and better. Ultimately its a question of resources, and when
you're a cash-starved startup, you're spread super thin.

My point is that we genuinely do our best to help artists. We're good people.
If you want your band's presence taken down, you're entitled to have that done
for you. You can also leave your music up so millions of users can discover it
and find out more about who you are. We have tens of thousands of individual
artists managing their own music and we get tons of fan mail from artists who
say that our platform has not only decreased piracy but has actually
encouraged fans to buy more of their music and see their shows.

<http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/040811grooveshark>

~~~
earbitscom
I'm not going to lie, we're competitors, and I have plenty of people tell me
they're happy with Grooveshark, and that you provide a lot of value. I also
hear the other side, and I hope that Grooveshark gets what it deserves from
Universal.

The fact still remains that Grooveshark as it is wouldn't exist if not for the
many years it's had to benefit from free use of mainstream content. That's not
what DMCA was created for. It was created to protect people who mostly have
UGC and occasionally have their terms violated. If Grooveshark was one of
those companies, they would look more like Unsigned.com right now.

The music industry's legal system is complex. We all know that. Other
companies are navigating that complexity in much more difficult ways, being
much more honest to the spirit of the law. Grooveshark takes advantage of the
laws and operates a service that has only one foot in legality. Of course it
would be easy to build a business that way and then get the praises of those
companies you forge relationships with _after_ your audience and platform is
already valuable. But there is more to be said for a company that takes the
hard road and does the same. I think Pandora has had a miserable time of it,
but at least they did it right.

~~~
physcab
Whichever way you look at it, building a business in the music space is
difficult. We're all probably competing with piracy more so than each other.
There is no good road. You make it sound like we've had it easy, which is not
the case. Every employee has at some time gone without pay for an extended
period of time. Mine was 10 months. That's the sort of dedication it takes to
bring a product from a thousand users to millions when you're underfunded. And
our relationships didn't form suddenly when we had millions of users. They
were the result of years of work in the trenches when our userbase was small-
going to concerts, promoting artists, branding our site...basically everything
we could do to get their songs heard.

~~~
earbitscom
I think you're straying a little from the topic. Yes, company building is
hard. No, that does not make it okay that Grooveshark built it's business by
streaming a lot of mainstream music that it didn't, and in many cases still
doesn't, have licenses for.

I didn't say you've had it easy. I said you built your company on the backs of
artists' content without paying them. So, each employee went a few months
without pay. Most of the artists playing on Grooveshark went (and are still
going) much longer.

------
shinratdr
I'm in Canada and was disappointed that we were cut out of the stateside
Spotify launch, so I went looking and heard a number of recommendations for
Rdio.

Out of 18,384 tracks it matched 3,142. Considering my tastes are pretty
mainstream and my files have very clean tags, it's hardly impressive.

~~~
chrischen
With most of these services you're bound to not be able to find a few songs.
What's important is whether or not it fails gracefully into letting you manage
those missing music files yourself and Spotify, Rhapsody, and Grooveshark are
the only ones that let you do that to some extent.

~~~
shinratdr
True, but I expected them to have more deals in place. Most artists are
missing key tracks, albums, or aren't represented at all. I also don't really
think it's a few songs. Knowing my library and how mainstream it is, at least
8,000-10,000 tracks should have been matched. That's my library minus most
independents and instrumentals.

------
thebandrews
I just started playing around with spotify and the one major feature missing
is something akin to itunes genius. I wonder if anything like this is in the
works?

~~~
tallanvor
Not really. In Europe Spotify does have radio features - both genre and
artist-based versions. But to be honest, neither option is very good. My music
tastes don't seem to fit in well with the genre options you have on Spotify,
and the artist-based radio plays that artist way too much, so you don't get a
lot of variety. --Hopefully this is something Spotify will try to do better
on. Right now you really have to know what you're looking for.

------
tedkalaw
The killer feature in Spotify for me is that it aggregates the music on my HDD
and their stuff. I have a library of 14000 songs, so it's nice to have all of
this music side by side.

The higher quality MP3s in the premium version is a nice touch too.

------
greenie
Unless the US version of Spotify is drastically different from the European
version, discovery on Spotify is excellent in my opinion. The Radio feature
does exist (although it's not one of Spotify's strongest features) and when
you're on an artist page there is a tab to view related artists. There is even
an radio tab on the artist's page which will play music from related artists.

~~~
forza
The radio feature is not available in the US.

"The lack of a radio feature for the time being is a factor of licensing
agreements with the rights holders but it will eventually be available."
[http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/radio_mode_missing...](http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/radio_mode_missing_in_premium_us_account)

~~~
greenie
That's a shame for now, but the fact that related artists are presented very
clearly (and you're able to quickly see their most popular songs) doesn't make
discovery as bad as the article is claiming. I find myself listening to a lot
more different music with Spotify than other discovery services such as
Last.fm.

~~~
chrischen
Pretty much every service out there has related artists. But the US version of
Spotify has _only_ that.

~~~
parbo
There is also friend's playlists, which I find very useful to discover stuff.

~~~
chrischen
Amounts to browsing random peoples' music. Compared to MOG's discovery
features, MOG's is much better. You might get lucky if a friend just happens
to find lots of new music you like though.

~~~
parbo
You can add Spotify-users to your friends list too, you don't need to be
Facebook friends.

To add me, go to spotify:user:parbo or <http://open.spotify.com/user/parbo>
and click the "Add Pär" button.

------
megaman821
Spotify should lose a point for having no web based player. Installing the
Spotify client on a friend's computer can be kind of intrusive.

All of them should lose a point for having not having an integrated music
locker to fill in the holes where they don't have licenses to certain tracks.

~~~
chrischen
You can fill in the holes with Spotify, Grooveshark, and Rhapsody.

~~~
megaman821
Speaking to just Spotify (and Rhapsody if I remember correctly), only in some
scenarios. On your local machine it is easy to fill in the holes. On your
phone you have to sync everything over wifi, this is slow and limited by your
phones memory.

Comparatively these limits don't exist on Amazon Cloud Player where I can have
much more music the my phones memory and after syncing it to their servers I
don't have to sync it with each device I have.

------
jonknee
I was very unimpressed with Spotify when it launched in the US this week. The
app (at least on a Mac) seemed very non-native and used a lot of resources
when it was inactive. It apparently uses Flash, so that may be it. It can't
connect to my speakers, though that's Apple's fault more than Spotify's
(AirPlay). I saw some top music lists, but not much else. My iTunes Playlists
sort of came over, but not the Smart Playlists which are the only ones I use.
Didn't see any recommendations.

tl;dr I closed the app and haven't listened to any music with it.

~~~
DrJokepu
I strongly encourage you to give it another try. Spotify is not iTunes or
Pandora, it has very different strengths. At least here in the UK, it streams
insanely quickly, streaming starts immediately and the size of their catalogue
is simply incredible. You might still find that you don't like it in the end
but I wouldn't give up on it after five minutes, really.

Also, just to clarify a few things: it's not based on Flash. It's written in
C++. It uses Ogg Vorbis. The user interface closely resembles iTunes so if
you're familiar with that (many people are) Spotify shouldn't be too
confusing.

------
jdjohnson
"…suffers from one same key issue as Rdio: the inability to manage non-
catalogue music makes it incapable of being an exclusive music player."

This is simply not true. I am an exclusive Rdio user and despite the opinions
of the author, their management system does not render it useless as an
exclusive music player.

~~~
chrischen
There are many songs not in Rdio's catalog and I have to pull up iTunes to
play them. I cannot mix and match non-catalog music with Rdio. I did not say
it's useless, just that it cannot be my exclusive music player. Furthermore
this becomes even more of a hassle on the go as I would have to pull into a
different app on the phone to play non-Rdio music. New releases will not show
up instantly in Rdio and there's no way to get them into Rdio's interface. MOG
suffers from the same issue.

Of course this has been my experience. I reason it's possible for someone to
be completely satisfied by Rdio's catalog but for most people there will be
missing music.

------
rednaught
Is there a reason Slacker is not reviewed?

~~~
earbitscom
They are a radio service. This is a review of on-demand services where you can
access songs whenever you want and build your own playlists.

~~~
rednaught
Their premium service is on-demand.

<https://store.slacker.com/store/Subscriptions.do>

~~~
chrischen
Ok thanks for the tip. I'll try to review their premium service too.

------
grimen
Spotify "discover" 7/10 IMO, I find new music everyday via Spotify + Facebook
integration.

Though discovery should not get high ratings in 2011 as there are so much that
could be done using social and Music-DNA to discover music - so giving any of
these services more than 8 is just a joke.

~~~
chrischen
If you only use Spotify and whatever it provides to discover music then you
will discover music from what Spotify provides. The rating is relative to what
the other services provide, and a service like MOG provides a superior
discovery experience.

0/10 means you cannot discover any music, which is almost impossible to
achieve. 4/10 means yes it's possible to discover music but the features are
not very optimized for it or they dont perform as well as other services.

Discovery isn't weighted very heavily in the overall rating since there are
plenty of other places to discover music from.

------
canadiancreed
Kept hearing about Spotify this week and after reading this article decided to
give it a try...and found like almost everything else involving media,
Canada's left out in the cold. Guess I'm sticking with grooveshark for now.

------
bentlegen
The "social" component of these services are worthless if your friends aren't
there. Most of my friends and co-workers are on Rdio, so I plan to stick there
for the foreseeable future.

~~~
chrischen
Even if they are you'll find that it's mostly inconsequential towards your day
to day music listening.

------
nikcub
does anybody know what these apps, such as spotify, are written in, and any
hints on resources used? itunes is good at not spiking CPU usage, which means
listening to music while running servers, doing dev work etc. is possible,
while some fat clients (especially thinking of Adobe AIR here) are just
terrible

~~~
chrischen
Rdio's desktop app used to be adobe air. Now it's something else, probably
native. Spotify is C++. Most of the others are just browser sites. Grooveshark
is now mostly HTML5 with the music playback component in flash.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Rdio is some native UI, a lot of HTML, and a copy of the Flash runtime (I
installed it just last night, and was curious about why it was so large).

------
ethank
I can't figure out this rating. What perspective are you taking on usage?
Technical user? Casual music consumer?

------
RyanKearney
I have no incentive to switch from Grooveshark to Spotify since I'm
grandfathered in to Grooveshark's $3.00 a month plan that has no ads and lets
me stream to my phone.

