THE SPOTIFY USA THREAD

[radiojomo]

Hi everyone! I haven't seen much discussion about Spotify on this board yet and I'd like to chime in with my thoughts on the new service. I got the free premium 30 day trial and here's my pros and cons about it so far:

PROS
-AMAZING music library! The selection available is vase and surprising. Obviously, they're going to be missing bands with costly music rights like The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, etc, but I was VERY impressed with the selection.
-The iPhone app runs very smoothly. Almost like running the iPod Music app. Offline caching also makes it easy to save your playlists so you don't waste bandwidth on your data plan.
-Takes very little time to buffer between tracks
-Sound quality is very good. Has the option to toggle between HQ audio or standard def. audio. Standard def. works very well and gives CD quality (I assume either 96 or 128 kbps sound). I hooked up my iPhone to my stereo and played the Michael Buble Christmas album and many people asked me if I bought the Michael Buble CD.
-Commercial free listening is very nice.
-Desktop radio feature is very on point to the selected genre.
-Cool feature that allows you to share music with your friends

CONS
-The desktop program is a memory hog. Slows down your computer.
-The radio feature is not available on the iPhone app.
-Very hard to discover new music on Spotify. No recommendations based on taste like iTunes or a lot of playlists set up
-$9.99 for the premium service every month seems a little too high to be honest.

Any thoughts? Comments on Spotify?

 

[scanman1]

In doing a comparison between Spotify and Slacker, I came to the conclusion that Slacker is the superior service. Better selection of music (you get the Beatles and Pink Floyd), better interfaces and more albums available for on demand playback on their premium service, which is also $9.99 per month.

 

[Casey]

Hi everyone! I haven't seen much discussion about Spotify on this board yet and I'd like to chime in with my thoughts on the new service. I got the free premium 30 day trial and here's my pros and cons about it so far:

PROS
-AMAZING music library! The selection available is vase and surprising. Obviously, they're going to be missing bands with costly music rights like The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, etc, but I was VERY impressed with the selection.
-The iPhone app runs very smoothly. Almost like running the iPod Music app. Offline caching also makes it easy to save your playlists so you don't waste bandwidth on your data plan.
-Takes very little time to buffer between tracks
-Sound quality is very good. Has the option to toggle between HQ audio or standard def. audio. Standard def. works very well and gives CD quality (I assume either 96 or 128 kbps sound). I hooked up my iPhone to my stereo and played the Michael Buble Christmas album and many people asked me if I bought the Michael Buble CD.
-Commercial free listening is very nice.
-Desktop radio feature is very on point to the selected genre.
-Cool feature that allows you to share music with your friends

CONS
-The desktop program is a memory hog. Slows down your computer.
-The radio feature is not available on the iPhone app.
-Very hard to discover new music on Spotify. No recommendations based on taste like iTunes or a lot of playlists set up
-$9.99 for the premium service every month seems a little too high to be honest.

Any thoughts? Comments on Spotify?

Spotify is interesting. The desktop app is very nice. Quick, easy to use, modern. I wouldn't say it is a resource hog, but it will eat hard disk space if you allow it. Sound quality is pretty good. I have only used the free version, but I imagine 320kbps Ogg would sound very good. 160kbps on the free version sounds pretty good considering. I can't agree on the library selection. As a Rhapsody subscriber, I have found Spotify's library to lack quite a bit of music. Not a big deal since I own most of the missing music, but still an observation.

I don't see myself switching to Spotify from Rhapsody anytime soon. Spotify is very nice and Rhapsody has plenty of flaws, but Rhapsody suits my needs much better. The fact that you can download the songs individually and put them on digital music players is what I like. I use my 16GB Cowon. Plus the Rhapsody library is awesome. The software player is pretty ugly, but it works well for me and the web player is a nice feature too. Sound quality is a non-issue for me, since my Cowon supports BBE MP, which gets rid of most of the compression shrill and added quality would not be very noticeable.

I have used many other services as well. Rdio impressed me, but the library was a bit small. MOG has a very small max library size and an awful buffering method. I'm not too familiar with Zune, but I thought the software player was terribly buggy when I tried it. Grooveshark is on it's death bed, but has an awesome library. Slacker has a great radio service. I used Imeem back when it was still around. It was awesome, but didn't last long. I've used a couple other free services too.

In doing a comparison between Spotify and Slacker, I came to the conclusion that Slacker is the superior service. Better selection of music (you get the Beatles and Pink Floyd), better interfaces and more albums available for on demand playback on their premium service, which is also $9.99 per month.

I love Slacker Plus. Nothing comes close to Slacker's radio service. But I am not a fan of Slacker Premium. It is missing too many key features. The major deal breakers are the lack of a personal library and lack of a real software player. Both are non-essential for their radio service though.