I mentioned Spotify on the old forum and told you all how much I loved it but I wanted to re-affirm my love for the service. I'm now a paid subscriber and take it with me everywhere on my phone (which is why I pay) but even free it was a great service. Anyway, reading today that Spotify is now active in the USA and apparently invites to the service stateside are like gold-dust. However, as a paid subscriber I get 3 invites for every month I've been a full paid member and I think my invites would get people in the US online. So, if any of you guys in the US want an invite, PM your email address and I'll send you one and see if you can get online. If we get a few others signed up we can share playlists
So what exactly does the service entail? I gather it's a subscription that lets you listen to music that's stored on a database somewhere, is it just the popular music or is the collection huge? Sell me spotify if you will.
You can get spotify for free if you only want to listen on your PC but you have to put up with ads and I think they've just capped how long you can listen for in a month. But there is a huge collection of music, create and share playlists and if you want..it's great. There's nothing to sell. If you like music you should have it. Man you're in England, just go get Spotify free and try it.
There's no sharing. You don't give away any music. You just listen to a huge catalog of music for free and perfectly legal.
If you're just looking for "free" music then probably not much, but its huge popularity in Europe has meant that it's got a legal catalog of 13 million songs to choose from. From what I've read about Last.fm (I don't use it), it seems LastFM is more about sharing and recommending songs where Spotify is just about playing them. That said, there are tonnes of spin off sites doing things like Playlist sharing and it has facebook integration so you can see what your friends are listening to. I also think the software itself is pretty cool; it's like having a free version of the iTunes store in which you just search for a song and play it. As a subscriber I get to use it on my Galaxy S too whch is great; songs stream just fine over 3G and better still you can store all of your playlists for "offline" playback; no internet needed. Now it's launched in the US I think it's going to be the number one choice for music online
This is quite a bit nicer than Pandora. You aren't getting slammed with ads and you can pick the music yourself. Pandora has "stations" where it randomly plays songs based on your preferences, but it plays a lot of crap. We have some Nazi copyright laws in this country, so I really hope this doesn't get taken down.
Spotify is fully licensed with all those "greedy" entertainment companies, so no worries about it being taken down because of copyright law.
Gosh, I'm sorry if I think suing ordinary people for millions of dollars for downloading a couple of crappy songs is greedy.
That's not correct though. The lawsuits have been aimed at uploaders, not downloaders. Distribution, in other words. Personally, I think that "greed" is better aimed at corporations that make their money off of necessities in life, like health care, education, and energy, rather than a non-necessity like entertainment. That's the greed that actually hurts, because those are things you can't just walk away from as a consumer without suffering the consequences. And really, compare the legal choices you have for significantly reducing the cost in entertainment while retaining the same quality to something like health care or education. There are a lot more options for entertainment, clearly.
You mean like in the case of Jammie Thomas-Rasset, where they got a 1.9 million dollar verdict because she downloaded 24 songs. Sounds like she was a big distributor to me. Clearly the source of all piracy on the internet. Or how about all of the cases where they've gone after children or the elderly? The RIAA are scum. They're just as bad as any of the other greedy corporate asshats you mentioned. Maybe worse because they single out people for financial ruin over something trivial that everyone does.
Jammie Thomas was taken to court for uploading, not downloading. It was her choice to turn down the original $5,000 settlement offer to go to court and risk higher penalties. It's literally the same scenario as Joel Tenenbaum. They both could have paid a tiny fraction of the penalties awarded by civil juries. Jammie Thomas has actually lost in court three times now. They've also both had the penalties reduced to the $60,000 range by judges...which is still over 10 times as high as what the RIAA originally offered to settle.
Well, the great thing is these people can now listen to the music they like for free with Spotify. With something like this they can either make use of the limited service on their PC or pay the very reasonable price to have the mobile and offline functionality and best of all avoid prosecution. Better still the record labels will have to accept the fact that digital delivery means this is they people will want their music now...
I downloaded spotify and am giving the free version a go. It seems pretty good actually. I've discovered I really like the Tron Legacy album from Daftpunk. The adverts are annoying but I know they go away with the paid versions. I'll experiment a bit more with. Maybe this is the replacement to itunes... It seems to be having trouble working though. I got it yesterday and it's already stopped responding about 5 times causing it to shut down. If spotify can go 30 minutes without giving me the stopped responding message I might subscribe. Why do they give you the option of buying music on spotify if you can stream it?
I've never had any problems running Spotify on my computer at home or at work. There's probably something on your PC conflicting with it somewhere.
I haven't had any issues. Sounds like you need to clean up your computer. I would check to make sure that your sound card drivers are properly installed, and then make sure you don't have a virus or spyware. Then clean the registry and defrag.
It seems to happen while I'm listening to music and I go to click on a button such as the devices button or the starred button.
Try reinstalling your sound card drivers. http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&ServiceTag=&SystemID=INS_PNT_PM_1520&os=WLH&osl=en&catid=&impid=
spotify is the future of music. I think I tunes has been de-throned. Why buy music when you can rent it? Awesomes. I'll be subscribing when I get paid Cheers Ichi, you sold me spotify.