Spotify

The Spotify subscription I took out by accident (dont ask, it possibly involved wine and an empty stomach) last month finishes on the 16th. I’m sorely tempted to continue it. I’ve definately had my moneys worth. I have some misgivings but overall its a great service and points to the future of music distribution.

The music itself could be better presented; there are quite a few errors and sound quality can be quite iffy. Some artist output is duplicated and other releases not present at all. And there are still a lot of questions surrounding how much revenue artists actually see from featuring their music on the service.

My experience with the apps themselves has left much to be desired. The Linux beta has a scanning problem that causes the program to use 100% CPU time while its running (on both of my cores) and constantly writes to .xsession-errors, eventually causing the app to stop playing due to full hard disk. Seriously: 8GB free on the laptop prior to running it and 12K after! There was an “improved” beta released elsewhere that fixes these issues and adds some new social features but has a habit of freezing or just crashing after you start playing a song. This eventually becomes more tedious than the .xsession-errors bug and I found myself going back to that version just so I can listen to an album the whole way through.

The Android app seems increbibly basic. Don’t get me wrong, it does the job. It just does little more. It feels like a beta that has been abandoned once they got it doing the basics. It’s ugly and not very intuitive and wont play albums unless you turn them into a playlist first. It even took me five minutes of fiddling to do that and I’m usually quite good with these things.

Still, despite these issues I believe its a service worth supporting and certainly worth a tenner a month for anyone who listens to a lot of music. The more support it receives from the users, the more support it will receive from the industry and artists… possibly.

1 thought on “Spotify”

  1. So that was decided for me. Despite the current beta client being a system hog and the test version crashing after one song, those nice folks at Virgin Media have decided to give me six months of Spotify for my continued reluctance to toss them for Sky. Little do they know it’s more out of my absolute hatred for Rupert Murdoch more than anything else…So I’ve got at least another six months of Spotify. Plenty of time for them to sort out the problems before I have a chance to ditch them.

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