Have you tried Pandora? It is an absolutely amazing service that has an uncanny ability to find very similar music, occasionally finding gems from a different genre. They also have tons of small, high quality bands.
The biggest con is that a specific "channel" can start to repeat the same 50 or so songs, but that is easily solved by making a new one.
It is well worth the $36/year for the paid ad-free version, and the adobe air desktop app is lightweight and responsive. Nice bonus: you can have up to 2 or 3 computers streaming music on the same account simultaneously.
Seriously, I cannot emphasize enough how awesome Pandora is.
On Linux and the Mac, the command line Pandora client "pianobar" works really well, and while API updates break it, it's always been mere hours before it was fixed, in my experience.
If you're on a mac and want something in the menubar (or whatever they call the thing on the top), try PandaBar. Very nice, has keybindings, and the dev adds features requested as quickly as Apple will turn around updates through the App Store.
Pandora contracted with Facebook and started showing what my friends were listening to (I had used the same emails in both).
That same day I quit Pandora. At that point in time, they did not even have a mechanism to kill your account, so I had to email the company personally.
I quit my Facebook account not long after.
I refuse to willingly partake in a surveillance society.
I've been using Pandora since before they went public and just love the service. Prefer the old Flash version better than the current one but it is good none-the-less. I noticed Spotify on Facebook and became interested in trying it. Evidently I knew very little about Spotify because I thought it was a web app. Long story short never did try Spotify because I didn't want to download client on every machine that I work on. Pandora is still the best solution to the 1 playlist anywhere problem for me.
Pandora is nice, but I refuse to pay for a service where I have to vpn to the US in order to be able to use it. I'm also not overly impressed with the Android app. --It works, but it's not wonderful.
Mog does this now. We recommend based on play history and, if you have Facebook connected, we offer you recommendations based on your Facebook likes, as well as a separate collection of recommendations based on your friend's likes.
We also tell you which friend recommended which album, so you can immediately tell whose tastes are more in line with yours and whose are poo.
It appears that I /must/ use Facebook to try out mog with a free account... is this true or is the site just overly convoluted? If it is true, yikes. If it's not true, still yikes.
Based on your comments and looking around the site, I was excited about checking Mog out. Requiring facebook is a deal breaker for me. Why restrict the way users can join?
I can't agree with this strongly enough. Why doesn't Spotify have any kind of recommendations? I'd also love to see iTunes Genius implemented in Spotify, but instead of just using my library for similar songs (like iTunes does) they could pull from the whole catalog.
"Discovery," both social and machine-generated, is MUCH better on Rdio. I suspect (but have no proof) that they use Echonest for the latter. There is also a slick Chrome extension that puts the Last.fm "Similar Tracks" under the currently playing song.
I've been using Spotify for 2 weeks now after using Rdio for 6 months and I rather like Spotify's Radio feature a lot. The recommendations I get from it seems no better or worse than Rdio's (for me) but I don't mind it and skipping tracks seems so seamless that I barely notice it. What really sold me on Spotify was Boxee support.
This is the main reason why I am using Rdio now. Their radio functionality is awesome and they now have a free version with no ads. Finding lots of new music through them.
I signed up for premium the day they launched in the US. I cancelled the day they required a Facebook account.
It may well be that Facebook virality is the only way to grow a music startup. I can't really critique their strategy. But I'll tell you this: I am willing to pay for music services that focus on the music and music-playing experience. I could give fuck all about what track 37 of my friends are listening to, and it's not like they were just tacking this stuff on, they have made this a core business strategy, and that will come at the expense of improving the core experience, which frankly could use a lot of improvement.
If you already had an account there was no requirement to add Facebook. Seems you just cancelled 'on principle'. And all the social integration within the app can be easily disabled in preferences.
Yes, I did cancel on principle. I cancelled immediately in the hopes that there would be a large number of cancellations that very day and it would have some impact on management.
Facebook is required? I have the demo of pro and as far as I can tell, I don't have Facebook linked up to it, not that they haven't suggested I could hook it up.
No one ever said there was one music service to serve all manners of music consumption. There are many to serve many.
It is a fallacy to assume that everyone consumes or enjoys music the same way, or that music has the same role in every listeners life. In fact, music could have many roles depending on artist, genre, song, album, mood, etc.
You can't as a music service do a user experience and interface, business model, etc that will serve all modalities and particularities of consumption, fanaticism and enjoyment. It isn't possible. It wasn't possible with physical media either.
I have the luxury of affording many options, and so I have many options: RDIO, Spotify and iTunes. All have different uses for me, all fill different roles in my life as a music listener and consumer.
This is no different than 20 years ago, when vinyl, CD, radio and cassette tapes all had their place in my life depending on what it was I was doing.
Since you plan to buy music, and seem to have an extensive catalog, give Audiogalaxy (http://www.audiogalaxy.com) to have free access to your music from everywhere. It's my startup, so don't let me bias you - check out reviews on iTunes/Android and the web. I'm pretty sure you'll like it. :)
Do you have any plans to support automatically backing up music between devices? Current solutions seem to solve either the "play anywhere" or "keep your music safe" problems, but not both.
Ideally, I'd like something with the following characteristics:
* Syncs music like Dropbox, except does it peer to peer between my own devices so I don't have to pay for space. My wife and I both buy music on both our computers and both our iPhones, and keeping a canonical repository of it for backup and safekeeping is a huge pain.
* Lets me choose which artists/albums to sync on to constrained space devices, for offline play. It should take me 2 seconds to say "I want Iron Maiden and Blind Guardian on my iPhone while I'm camping this weekend." Lets me do this from any of my devices.
* Lets me stream music without syncing it (like Audiogalaxy currently does).
* Lets me make tracks/playlists available to my friends for streaming (licensing issues around this one are tricky, but of Spotify can do it, it should be possible.)
I would LOVE something like this.
So far, the only thing I've heard of that even comes close to the spirit of this is iTunes Match, whenever that finally happens.
#2 (marking selective chunks of music for offline playback) is available as a paid addon. Some of the other items are stuff we're working on, is all I can say at this point. Stay tuned.
Wow audio galaxy looks amazing! I love the pin feature and easy publish to Facebook. Just downloaded. Also like that it doesn't force me (a la iTunes match) to fill up my phone with 256kbps files--I think apple wants to sell larger GB devices. Good reviews too. Lol I haven't thought about audio galaxy since 1999. Congrats!
Back in the day, I absolutely loved AudioGalaxy. It was much better than Napster. You would go on artist page, and see the songs in order of most popular - so you'd instantly see which songs you should check out from new artists.
Ah, the good old days of free mp3s just laying around on the web...
Spotify, Rdio and all these other sites need to open up their catalog to local and independent artists. That's one of the reasons iTunes was so popular -- they allowed Youtube singers and other aspiring artists to post their songs and allow people to purchase them. They tapped into this long tail and both Apple and these indie artists made money from it.
These companies can't compete with the big players by offering less. No one cares about the piracy thing, they just want their music, and they want the music they are looking for. 'Social discovery' can be great and all but if I'm looking for a very specific, hard-to-find song, chances are I'm going to find it on Youtube instead and forget about Spotify/Rdio, etc. I think Grooveshark let users upload their own content, but failed in that aspect because their catalog ended up being way too messy.
Difficult problem to solve, wonder who will prevail.
At Mog (where I work) we have a highly responsive catalog department. We can pretty much get anything that is already in digital format. This includes bands who are distributed solely through CDBaby or other non-label services. Labels push stuff to us on a weekly basis, but for smaller bands, it may be a matter of making a request.
Then there's the flip side: bands who don't do digital distribution at all. Tapes and vinyl. There's nothing a digital music service can do for these. Unfortunately, a lot of my favorite bands are like this. They'll take convincing.
I've only used Spotify, but it actually has better coverage (from what I've seen) of independent acts. It's very easy to get your music on there. CDBaby will register an album on Spotify, iTunes, etc for $30.
If Spotify had Grooveshark's interface I would buy a premium account in a heartbeat. When I first opened Spotify's desktop client I was baffled by how clunky it felt.
I too really wanted to like Spotify. But the Spotify UI always felt like work rather than enjoyment and exploration. Unfortunately, until and unless Grooveshark can solve their legal issues and obtain solid licensing, they're going to remain largely locked out of the iOS market (except for an aging an increasingly incompatible legacy app).
I agree. Seeing the screenshots all these years of the European Spotify, so pretty... When it finally came to the US and I played around with it, the user experience is so clunky and requires way too many clicks to get anything done.
For me, it seems ridiculous to pay for a subscription music service that has a paltry catalog with less than half of the albums I want to listen to. That, and I can't be guaranteed of the quality of the file, if it's transcoded, etc. I have decent headphones and prefer to use them to their full potential.
For people who just want to listen to albums, buying albums still seems like the way to go (whether you use iTunes or Amazon, buy CDs or records).
Until this moment no service convinced me to change my 10-year-old habit of buy/download the music, organize the tags and put it on my mobile device. Since I bought my first iPod until today with my Nexus S I am still doing this and it is very practical to me.
My thoughts exactly. I can buy a cd, rip to flac / mp3, listen to the mp3's everywhere mobile, and flac in my home theater or on my nice headphones. All of the cd's I buy still costs me less than some subscription service.
One service I liked a lot was eMusic. I'm not sure what they are like now, but I got a lot of high quality MP3s for relatively little cost, due to the subscription pricing.
It's not like Spotify in terms of listening as much as you want, but once you get tired of the service, you at least have a collection of music rather than nothing.
Yes, but you could listen to more music for the same price. Even if there are only 2 new albums I want to listen to a month, it's break-even to get an rdio/mog/spotify subscription vs. buying the albums.
Try Audiogalaxy - it might be what you've been looking for. It's still your music, just available everywhere without uploading to any server and without ads. http://www.audiogalaxy.com (Discl: I work on it)
I liked it, and I definitely would use it if my 3G connection was more reliable. Here in Brazil it is still quite slow and many times it does not work at all.
+50 to Rhapsody, it's frustrating that people keep acting like Rdio and Spotify are this fancy new concept when Rhapsody has been doing all of this for years. The catalog also can't be beat compared to the other two it's so much larger. The interface was really lacking for years, but all this competition has made them finally start adding features like social.
I'm sure it's better now, but Rhapsody lost me by having _the worst web player I've ever experienced_. It's hard to overstate how bad it was. I just can't bring myself to go back, even though I realize they've worked on it. It was so. bad.
I was in the same boat. It made the platform unusable. That coupled with some of the worst and most apathetic customer support I have ever experienced, I swore to never go back.
The argument against the Desktop app seems unfounded, the author states: "I don’t usually like playlists and I’m the kind of guy who enjoys listening to whole albums, front to back". I'm of the same opinion, but when finding a new album to listen to I simply dray this into a new playlist and they become one and the same. This would also negate the argument against the mobile app as well.
What I would like is some way to tag or bookmark an album. I find I stumble upon a new artist or album I like, but then forget what it was later in the week.
Just star a song from the album. When you view your starred songs you can just click the album name in the Album column and you'll be taken to the full album that the song is from.
I really like the fact that it's easy to go from a single song to an album. I have a lot of songs I bought in my library, and with Spotify its easy to now play these songs in the context of their full album.
I just have one large play list where I add albums that I find and currently listens to. If you sort it by "Added" you can always go back (scroll) and see a time line of albums that you've enjoyed.
I've tried lots of services and apps, and Spotify is my favorite. Of course, it's not perfect but it's way better than what the author suggests in this article.
About the "Playlist a whole album is too complicated"; I'm not sure what he mean by that as you click on a song in the album and it plays all the album.. this could hardly get more intuitive than this.
Of course, there's not all songs but at least they let you upload your own local music (Unlike grooveshark for instance).
Unlike the author, I really like the concept of playlist in Spotify. Basically, it's simply a list of pointers to the real song. So, basically, if you want to save the album, just create a playlist with the name of the album.. in fact, it does that for you automatically if you want.
On the negative side, as someone else pointed out, I wish they had a better "Suggesting new music". Yes, there's a radio but I feel it's not really good. They always show the same songs and most often than not they're not in my taste. I mean, I've got 1000+ songs in my playlists, I'm sure they could use those datas to guess a little better what I like.
A missing feature that I loved from grooveshark was: "Show me a playlist who contains that song". It was a nice way for me to discover new artists/songs. I'm not sure why it's not in Spotify as, unlike guessing a good songs, this is fairly straightforward to implement.
Another thing that is annoying is how the sync mode works in the desktop app. Basically, if you're in "online mode", it syncs it.. while offline don't use internet. The problem with that is sometime I want to "be online" to listen to the radio or something, but I don't want it to download all songs that need to be synced. (Say when tethering from my iPhone). Also, in the desktop app, if spotify starts when I'm not connected to internet, and then get connected, it will stay in offline mode forever.. there's no way to "turn on online mode". I have to restart the app and then it notices that I'm on internet. And yeah, same problem, since I'm on internet it will automatically start to sync everything.
And, finally, I wish it had a web interface. Yeah, we get it, with the desktop app you have more freedom to implement whatever you want. But still, a materialistic web version to listen the radio or your song might be useful..
So, in summary, it's not perfect, but it's the best solution I've found. And, it's legal :-) (Even though I had to hack the system to get it working in Canada as Spotify is illegal here.)
If you start playing an album by simply playing a song in it, then Spotify won't stop when it reaches the end of the album. Instead it moves on to whatever song is listed after the last album song. I'm an album listener too, and that _really_ bugged me when I was testing out Spotify.
I've been using Spotify since it first launched in the UK a couple of years ago and have been a premium subscriber for over a year. Spotify's cat log is excellent. I have an eclectic taste and most things are available. I do find the odd thing missing but it tends to be classic rock bands which didn't even allow iTunes to sell their music until recently.
I find the desktop app to be great. It's very lightweight and simple to use. To add tracks to your library you star them. Simple. You can also star albums to add those to your library.
The mobile app is the weakest link but not too bad. It has full library access (starred tracks), integration with the iPod library, full search, and offline capabilities. The UI isn't great but it has all the features needed.
Like all products, spotify is a constantly improving product. The desktop app is not that great, but the fact that i can access a lot of music within a few clicks without doing anything illegal makes me happy . If you have an exotic special taste you'll have difficulties with every service i guess. I used to listen a lot to last.fm ... but i prefer "on demand" music like spotify offers. The service still needs to improve a lot, but they will get there in the end ... its the new way of listening to music. It doesn't make sence to me to "buy" a song on itunes, since everything is moving to the cloud, "owning" a song really doesnt make sence.
spotify is generally non hardware/os/file dependant. iTunes is not any of these things. this is why I'm staying. sure you have to compromise a little on selection, but to me at least the previous benefits greatly out weigh this deficiency.
Is there a way to disable all "sharing" of what I'm listening to? I really don't want to share that info. It appears that one has to choose "private listening" whenever starting the app.
I'm using Rdio and I've been pretty happy with it.
Before I plopped down my money, I did a comparison with Spotify on the artists/genres I cared about, and Rdio pretty much matched Spotify blow for blow.
Rdio was definitely lean at first (they didn't even have the Pixies!) but now they have a pretty solid US catalogue. Plus their mobile apps and music discovery features are superior to Spotify.
I know that these are fundamentally different services, but if you have a decent home internet connection and a digital music collection you can easily set up a streaming server to listen to your tunes anywhere. I personally use Sockso, which made my mind up to not purchase spotify. I heard Subsonic is good as well. I only pay for the most basic cable internet package and I have no issue streaming my tunes anywhere I may happen to be.
I wish I could favorite an artist somehow. Am I missing this option some place? It seems so obvious to me. I like listening to albums, not a random mix of tracks usually and want to be able to keep tabs on my go to artists.
Right now I have resorted to adding full albums to a new playlist so I can see artists names as there are times I can't recall every artist I've liked listening to in the past.
I'm pretty happy with my account, the one downside is that with iTunes my wife and I could share an account. With Spotify only one account can be playing at a time. I realize they do this so people don't share accounts with multiple people, but it would be much better if you had five registered devices like iTunes allows.
Spotify seems to have fixed the problem where the desktop app sucks up ALL of your outgoing bandwidth (although it is still bad enough to lag YouTube and other streaming video), so I started using it again.
However, would it kill any of these streaming music apps to add an equalizer?
Edit: Also, I highly recommend EarBits for music discovery.
I like to keep an eye on bands in the metal genre... one issue I noticed is during (and after) the US launch, quite a few metal bands pulled their music off Spotify. Perhaps the US launch was a big enough milestone for these niche labels to decide whether or not to continue using the service?
He mentions selection. One of the problems I have with Spotify is region lock out. I'm American, but listen to a wide selection of music from different countries and genres. It's frustrating to see music available in one country not be available in another country.
The convenience of being able to instantly search and listen to the universe of music cannot be understated. It is a killer feature. iTunes Match is a step backwards compared to this - anyone that thinks otherwise is kidding themselves.
Well, not that my iTunes library is larger than my online streaming library, but it has a larger library of songs I listen to than my online streaming library if that makes any sense to you.
Also, my iTunes library is available offline cross-platform. I'm not limiting myself, which is why I'd say I'd use both. I'm expanding myself. + my offline library is more organized. Am I alone in this viewpoint?
I think the library is probably the biggest thing for OP. I mean, when I first tried using Spotify and found out they only had a single track from Blink-182, I immediately stopped using it. They have their entire catalog now, but, I'd imagine still not some songs for OP which, if a service doesn't have an artist/song you want to listen to, why use it?
So, you cancelled spotify to replace it with 3 other competing or related products with their own unique interfaces and quirks. I think that somewhat complicates matters.
Most, I think, will stick to spotify in that scenario.
I don't buy music, don't ever pay for it either.
But Spotify has very much upped the "scam" factor recently, by first cutting from 20 to 10 free hours per month, and now not even showing how many hours are remaining till you run out. Also, not until you find and read the long terms and conditions do you find out the first "6 months" (which already seem to be up for me) are a trial of premium, after that you get 10 hours a month free, but they won't tell you till you have 0 minutes left.
Spotify's "Radio" feature compounds my dislike of "genres" as a means of navigating and discovering music.
Radio, play me a stream of "Rock / Alternative / Pop / 70s"
What the ---- does that even mean? Guaranteed you'll be skipping 9 out of 10 tracks it serves up.
I hate genres. Every file in my local music collection has that tag blanked.