Its depressing to see techcrunch's continuous berating of spotify, along with it and the last.fm debacle its hard to think techcrunch dont have an anti euro startup.
Spotify is a very young company that has managed to successfully enter a market with the highest of barriers to entry, released a technically superb application, and built up one of the most devoted fanbases I have ever seen.
Spotify are still young and they have masses of potential for revenue, I think at this point they just have to have a free service because people dont believe that a service this good could existe, I have a hard time explaining spotify to people that havent used it not because its complicated, just because they dont believe it can work like that.
Its depressing to see techcrunch's continuous berating of spotify
First of all, I don't see this article as berating spotify. The headline (which is inconclusive at best, not a clear "berating") aside, the article is quite positive about Spotify's stats and their potential over the next few years.
along with it and the last.fm debacle its hard to think techcrunch dont have an anti euro startup
Secondly, this article is on TechCrunch EU, by Mike Butcher, which afaik had nothing to do with the TechCrunch US, Arrington-led "last.fm debacle" if you want to call it that. For anyone who knows Mike, it's hard to accuse him of having an anti-euro startup stance. Mike is probably one of the most active people in Europe when it comes to trying to convince everyone that Europe is a great place for startups.
TC-EU organises events, gets people together, writes about them, and generally does everything they can to help the european startup scene pick up.
To be fair I didnt check the author of the article, and I do agree that Mike has been a really good job promoting and helping local startups.
But I didnt make this comment on the article in isolation, there is a long list of techcrunch articles questioning spotify's viability ever since its inception, its being held to a much higher standard than it should be, and as as far as I can tell the only company really successfully getting any leverage against record labels I think they should be backed at every opportunity.
This. Spotify is amazing, they've done extremely well, and they will be huge.
> I have a hard time explaining spotify to people that havent used it not because its complicated, just because they dont believe it can work like that.
Any HN readers in the US that want to see Spotify for themselves, send me an email and I'll set you up with an account that will last you two weeks.
The desktop application is crafty enough to have me consider subscribing: If you lower your OS-wide volume to 0 during a grating audio ad, the ad is paused and resumes when you bump your volume up again.
Physically taking off your headphones to let ads run gets old! Perhaps the discerning cheapskate puts an analogue volume dial in the chain.
Yes a very annoying app. Also consider that it forces updates and that when the app is running and you want to click on a list item, it suddenly inserts an ad which you up clicking anyway.
They may think they have me by the balls, but they're not installed on my computer any more.
Ironically, we were all outraged at this kind of behaviour in the late 90s when it was called adware. Now, magically, it's a good thing.
Well the ads are there to support the unlimited free music they're giving you, so you can't complain too much.
On the adware front - the app doesn't auto-run, doesn't self install, is easy to uninstall and doesn't show ads when it isn't running. So it bares little resemblance to the adware of the 90s.
With all that said though - I shouldn't imagine they care very much about having non-paying customers 'by the balls' I would expect they care much more about those that pay.
My argument is based on user experience. Both spotify and the 90s adware are on the wrong side of the line separating "understandably has ads" and "annoyingly has ads". No doubt that spotify is closer to the line compared to 90s adware.
The main reason for people subscribing to Spotify here in Europe is the mobile app. Which is great, the Desktop app is also great, I can bear the ads. But really, 10€/mo (120€ year) is cheap for the quantity of music-hours it provides.
The main reason for people not subscribing is they accommodated to not paying for music #1, and #2 the lack of big (and not so big) names in the catalog (Beatles, Metallica, Rammstein, etc)
Overall Spotify is a great service and I wish them best of luck. And I hope they start making money before Apple start eating their business through the iTunes-on-the-cloud which is sort of a dukenukem3d that never comes.
That's why I have a paid account - it includes so-called "travel mode" - an ability to stream data from abroad granted that all payments are made withing countries of availability.
I'm going to let you in on a little secret: Next time a spotify ad comes on, set your volume to zero. It stops. Now hit the spotify play button. It starts the ad again, muted. Now just remember to hit the unmute button when the ad finishes, (watch for the growl notification.)
Keep this one quiet though, lest spotify find out ;)
Spotify is a great service but they are operating in a market where there is a lot of pressure from all sides, much more so than in other markets.
I hope they survive because we certainly need something like spotify, but after absorbing the 'Imeem' founders' advice from the start-up school talks I came away with the viewpoint that spotify's future is anything but assured.
As for TC having an 'anti-euro-startup whatever', they report the news, they don't actually make it. Either spotify has a loss or they haven't, don't shoot the messenger. And I'm not exactly a TC fan.
Compared to so many other IMHO less serving startups receiving funding up the yazoo it's hard to imagine spotify not being able to get the funding needed.
I have been using it ever since it was only out in beta and haven't looked back ever since. Today iTunes is primarily used for iTU and Podcasts all other music is played from Spotify which btw supports locally stored music and actually have a social service that works.
I had a completely different experience. I loved Spotify when living in the EU (ok, except for their ad shenanigans) because they had a huge catalog of music and almost everything I wanted to hear and everything my friends wanted to introduce me to. Their similar artists tool led to me spending hours in the app, and we would use Spotify for parties (using an paid account) to save the monotony of listening to someone's iPod collection.
Now I use GrooveShark, but it's lacking the artist recommendations. Aside from that it's perfect, and even more portable being browser-based. If I listened to music more often I'd have no problem paying for a Spotify account (which I believe allows you to stream outside of the EU).
I think they used to market it as "we'll find you all sorts of cool music", so the expectation I had was that I'd be able to type in an artist or song and it would run an iTunes-esque "Genius" on it to give you a playlist.
Instead, I'd type in an artist or song and it would come back with no results.
It was happy to play music that I already had on my machine, but seemingly had no capability to go out and find new music from the internet. Given that that was its stated purpose, I was annoyed and uninstalled it.
It's probably worth giving it a go but unless you have very mainstream musical tastes, expect to be at least somewhat disappointed.
Their catalogue isn't too bad for a free service (probably around 40% of what I search for comes up with useful results) although having to listen to adverts every four songs seems a bit much, and it's certainly not worth paying to get rid of them.
Spotify is a very young company that has managed to successfully enter a market with the highest of barriers to entry, released a technically superb application, and built up one of the most devoted fanbases I have ever seen.
Spotify are still young and they have masses of potential for revenue, I think at this point they just have to have a free service because people dont believe that a service this good could existe, I have a hard time explaining spotify to people that havent used it not because its complicated, just because they dont believe it can work like that.