Spotify Accepting Signups for US Launch

[Daveoc64]

Why is Spotify news? Napster and MOG already offer this.

Those services have never been as popular as Spotify.

Neither of them offers the exact same features as Spotify.

With the launch of Spotify in the US, it will also be the only service to actually be in both the US market and the European market.

 

[zreoxx]

Being illegal costs time

How does this compare to the torrent + iTunes Match model? 😀

Well if your time searching, downloading and importing doesn't costs less than $10 / month and you at the same time don't wan't to support the music industry and want to get fines for downloading you probably should stick with torrents.

For me spotify works great. If I do want to have any physical media in my hands I buy the LP version. But that's just me.

 

[ksgant]

Oh, and for those who care about the musicians out there, I'll leave this little gem for ya:

Enjoy your music...

 

[Daveoc64]

Oh, and for those who care about the musicians out there, I'll leave this little gem for ya:

Image

Enjoy your music...

While the payments for streaming services may not be great, there is no reason why:

a) You can't buy AND stream music (I have Spotify Premium yet I still buy music). The music that I stream but do not buy is stuff that I wouldn't ever have considered buying in the first place. It's much better for the artist to get a ridiculously small amount for that than it is to get nothing at all.

b) Streaming Services offer poor revenue streams for artists (this is clearly a problem with their contracts, not the services themselves).

If nobody bought music and everyone streamed it, then the distribution of money would obviously have to change.

 

[MadIvan]

Just the next step in changing consumers habits as far as music goes.

I used to collect LP albums (Remember LP albums?)
Then converted whatever was available into CD's. (Remember CD's?)
Then bought some songs on itunes (Remember itun.....wait a little early)

By now I don't need to own any songs and depending on what I want to listen to at a given moment I have plenty of services pandora, grooveshark, you tube etc. Some of these give me European or other continents music that can't be bought in the itunes store due to contractual/legal issues.

Only listening to the ipod app on my iphone when I am in a bad reception area (Hello ATT 3G everywhere please and keep it in 3G) or some news and sports on testicular radio🙂

As an old geezer I think owning stuff like movies or music is so yesterday!

It is a step, and the direction it is taking us in is where the labels get paid every single time a song is played. Right now it's indirect where the subscription service pays them, but I'm sure the labels would love to get paid directly by the end user every time someone plays a song anywhere. Even if it's only a penny per play, if there's a song you really like and you listen to it 1,000 times, that comes to $10.00 for that song. Granted this is only a hypothetical right now.

If this becomes the mainstream, it is likely that these services will come to be dominated by a small number of popular artists that generate the most revenue for the labels, just like most of the radio stations have been.

I still prefer to buy music, and when possible to buy CDs at shows where the entire CD price (minus the wholesale price they paid) goes directly to the band.

 

[TwoBytes]

There is no history in the all of your last few searches.

The service is great but the iPhone app lets it down.

 

[redanime]

But they say "Stream".... to me that means nothing is kept local.... it's given essentially on-demand and then gone after play.

Can you go pick out 500 songs and have them local on your iPhone with this? Active as long as you pay your subscription? Or is streamed 4-5 at a time in a revolving door?

Yes, you can pick out songs for offline play and play them on for instance your iPhone. Spotify can even sync songs to your iPod and it works great with iTunes music. You can for instance play iTunes songs in the same playlist as you have your Spotify songs.

 

[ksgant]

While the payments for streaming services may not be great, there is no reason why:

a) You can't buy AND stream music (I have Spotify Premium yet I still buy music). The music that I stream but do not buy is stuff that I wouldn't ever have considered buying in the first place. It's much better for the artist to get a ridiculously small amount for that than it is to get nothing at all.

b) Streaming Services offer poor revenue streams for artists (this is clearly a problem with their contracts, not the services themselves).

If nobody bought music and everyone streamed it, then the distribution of money would obviously have to change.

Points well taken.

 

[deadkennedy]

Grouping as in not playlists? Sub-playlists? What is it you want to group?

Right... only by title, artist, album, length of the song, when it was added to the playlist, who added it and explicit ordering. ;-)

Cmd+f gives you a search filter within a playlist. For everything else there is the normal search box for the entire library.

Tried clicking the labels above the list?

Sorry, I was talking about iPhone app. I usually listen to Spotify from iPhone, it's great becuse you can download and listen on a plane, but with that terrible design it's nearly useless. Not to mention how it looks on iPad. In fact I can't wait for Americans to see it on iPad, let's see how happy they'll be then 😀

 

[gkpm]

Seriously, they look great at the start but then the restrict more and more to make you pay for the premium services. But then you still don't own any music and must keep paying each month to listen.

Also pay a pittance to labels (let alone artists) eg from Wikipedia "Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet recently reported that record label Junior Racing had only earned NOK 19 ($3.00 USD) after their artists had been streamed over 55,100 times."

It's should be made almost as illegal as torrents tbh, the difference is the sharks get paid in this case so it's legal.

 

[krzyglue]

Oh, and for those who care about the musicians out there, I'll leave this little gem for ya:

Image

Enjoy your music...

While this may be true presently, it may change in the future. I guess what I mean is that it seems the way many consume music has changed over the past few years, to say the least. Perhaps one day these streaming-type services will be record labels' major source of income, and I suspect (or maybe more accurately, I hope...) the income distribution to the artists will reflect this.

I mean, I bet if one made a graph showing income from one retail DVD sale versus one streaming view on Netflix, you'd get roughly the same picture. Yet I don't sense the same level of hostility towards Netflix as there seems to be towards Spotify from some.


Oh and Spotify, launch in Canada please? 😉

 

[Loge]

If nobody bought music and everyone streamed it, then the distribution of money would obviously have to change.

Or the cost of the monthly subscriptions will rise substantially, which I expect will happen anyway.

 

[proximity]

I've had Spotify for a little over a year now.

After using it for 5 minutes I stopped using iTunes entirely. And have only started iTunes to update my iPhone's software since.

Spotify is fantastic. Steve Jobs said a few years ago that "people want to own Music, not rent music". I thought he was right, but he's not. I don't care at all about owning music. For a fixed price I can listen to anything as much as I want on both Mac's, PC's and iOS. When I actually pay for a song I don't feel like I own it any more than if I pay a fixed price to be able to listen to it.

The songs buffer on to the iPhone with no effort and it doesn't ever feel like streaming songs because it always starts instantly. Sharing playlists with friends via Facebook is a breeze.

There is certainly only one downside I've found with Spotify, and that's this: When Spotify started, they had rights to let me play anything I could hit it with. Any search, didn't matter. Spotify had it. But after a while I saw that some artists pulled their content away, and or their live content. But for certain songs like that, Spotify even supports integration with your own music files as well, so it's really not a problem.

I highly recommend it.

Yes and two last things: 1. they don't have an iPad app, so you have to use the iPhone app on the iPad, which sucks unnecessarily 🙂

2: Artist don't make money on this at all it seems. But it's so much better than all the alternatives that I can't really bother my self to not take advantage of the service.

 

[idyll]

I'm really excited for this news, ever since trying Spotify when it first came out but not being able to stick with it due to living in the US.

Currently I'm a subscriber of Rdio and it is fairly convenient, but I remember Spotify having slightly better quality music and a larger selection.

 

[MartinAW]

Oh, and for those who care about the musicians out there, I'll leave this little gem for ya:

Enjoy your music...

Spotify coupled with LastFM scrobbling has resulted in me listening to bands I would never have found buying chart albums from HMV. I have been to see these bands live and paid a good chunk for it, I am sure they are sleeping well at night (They do deserve it).

Exposure is great.

 

[daxomni]

It is quite a bit more expensive than iTunes Match will be, costing €60-€120/year in Europe, versus $25/year for iTunes Match. US pricing has not been announced yet.

Um, so how exactly do I get a million plus songs on iTunes or iTunes Match without paying a million dollars? Seems like the only way Spotify could be "quite a bit more expensive than iTunes Match" is if you pirate most of your music. Thanks a lot for the completely bogus analysis guys.

 

[AaronEdwards]

Oh, and for those who care about the musicians out there, I'll leave this little gem for ya:

Image

Enjoy your music...

1. Good look finding a source for the claim on what a Spotify play pays.

2. I'd love to see size of the circle for the iTunes Match "25000 songs filtered for $25 - Apple's 30% cut" service...

 

[AaronEdwards]

Image

Seriously, they look great at the start but then the restrict more and more to make you pay for the premium services. But then you still don't own any music and must keep paying each month to listen.

Also pay a pittance to labels (let alone artists) eg from Wikipedia "Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet recently reported that record label Junior Racing had only earned NOK 19 ($3.00 USD) after their artists had been streamed over 55,100 times."

It's should be made almost as illegal as torrents tbh, the difference is the sharks get paid in this case so it's legal.

Recently reported? That would be 2009. Considering the fact that Spotify was released in 2008....

The stories about artists being paid a pittance by Spotify dried up a while ago. Wonder why.

 

[firestarter]

Oh, and for those who care about the musicians out there, I'll leave this little gem for ya.

Enjoy your music...

News just in... recorded music has been a dying industry for the last decade at least (not helped by the label's cynicism).

There's still good money to be made by musicians who can actually play live. I'm supporting my favourite bands by going to see them (I also buy 90% of music on CD, but the labels keep so much of that revenue it feels like the wrong thing to do).

 

[AaronEdwards]

Quite a bit more expensive than iTunes Match, but don't you get access to the entire catalog rather than just what you already own? Seems to me like the streaming service that everyone had expected to see from Apple.
But 60-100 euro seems a little steep. That's $86-$143/year. Could buy an album a month at that price and own it. I don't think I come across more than an album a month that I would find worthy of buying.

If you only listen to 12 new albums every year, then it's obviously better to buy albums.
But then you actually don't say anything about how many new albums you're listening to every year, only how many you're willing to buy.

Ya I use Grooveshark and quite like, and was wondering how different Groveshark is from Spotify?

Groveshark is legally in limbo. But anyone, and I'm not saying you are, who would feel ok using iTunes Match to match songs they have ilegally downloaded, should be morally fine using Groveshark.

Exactly, especially when the service dies in a few years, all the money people paid will be gone.

Didn't this already happened about a decade ago with subscription services vs. iTunes?

The money a person paid for HBO last month isn't giving her something this month. If she wants to continue to watch this month too, she needs to pay for this month too.

I wonder how much of the $25 per year for iTunes Match is going to the record labels? I remember a few years ago there was a rumor of a flat fee option of a few hundred dollars being floated by Apple to the record companies that would give the user complete rights to all audio on in iTMS, and would be bundled into the price of new iPhones. That seems a better deal to the record labels than iTunes Match. Seems to me iTunes Match is going to increase piracy. Steal it first, then launder it through iTunes Match. Spotify makes more sense to me from the point of view of the labels.

Apple is reportedly taking their usual 30% cut. So that would leave $17.50 for the record labels.
Any flat fee which doesn't base the amount the artists are paid on the number of times songs are played is going to allow the record companies to screw the artists.

 

[MadIvan]

Um, so how exactly do I get a million plus songs on iTunes or iTunes Match without paying a million dollars? Seems like the only way Spotify could be "quite a bit more expensive than iTunes Match" is if you pirate most of your music. Thanks a lot for the completely bogus analysis guys.

Minor point really, but, assuming you listen to music 8 hours every day and never repeat a song, it will take you 20 years to listen to one million songs. So really, you need to take into account how many songs the typical user would actually own, how many they already have in their collection, and what percentage of the remaining to be purchased tracks they would aquire as downloads from iTunes, Amazon, etc., as opposed to buying the CD which many people still do, before you could actually compare relative costs. And even then, you are comparing the cost for use of a service against the cost of purchasing something which you then own. So for all those CD purschases, don't forget to subtract resale value from the total cost.

In other words, comparing costs is kind of pointless. If you like the service, don't mind the artists getting esentially nothing for their work, and the price is reasonable to you, then go ahead and sign up for Spotify. Of course, if these type of services end up killing off the LP, CD and non-DRM download distribution channels, well it probably won't be good for the consumer or the artists.

 

[MadIvan]

News just in... recorded music has been a dying industry for the last decade at least (not helped by the label's cynicism).

There's still good money to be made by musicians who can actually play live. I'm supporting my favourite bands by going to see them (I also buy 90% of music on CD, but the labels keep so much of that revenue it feels like the wrong thing to do).

Since you are going to the shows, buy the CDs there. The band gets more of the money. They just pay the wholesale cost for the disks and get to keep the rest. And those sales still figure into any royalty checks they might be lucky enough to get.

 

[AaronEdwards]

Minor point really, but, assuming you listen to music 8 hours every day and never repeat a song, it will take you 20 years to listen to one million songs. So really, you need to take into account how many songs the typical user would actually own, how many they already have in their collection, and what percentage of the remaining to be purchased tracks they would aquire as downloads from iTunes, Amazon, etc., as opposed to buying the CD which many people still do, before you could actually compare relative costs. And even then, you are comparing the cost for use of a service against the cost of purchasing something which you then own. So for all those CD purschases, don't forget to subtract resale value from the total cost.

In other words, comparing costs is kind of pointless. If you like the service, don't mind the artists getting esentially nothing for their work, and the price is reasonable to you, then go ahead and sign up for Spotify. Of course, if these type of services end up killing off the LP, CD and non-DRM download distribution channels, well it probably won't be good for the consumer or the artists.

Please provide us with a source for this.

 

[ESPN]

Interesting service but all I do is download music to listen too, the idea of streaming across the net while also paying a monthly fee is a turn off.

 

[QuarterSwede]

Since you are going to the shows, buy the CDs there. The band gets more of the money. They just pay the wholesale cost for the disks and get to keep the rest. And those sales still figure into any royalty checks they might be lucky enough to get.

I try to buy from then band's website in digital format only so they get as much as possible. The CD would sit on my shelf unused anyway.