Spotify to launch in the US this week!!!
- Thread starter AeonicSlumber
- Start date
Yea, I'm starting to think that Spotify much has some controls on this. Maybe they only pay the band for one play per IP address of a specific song.
Othewise friends and family members could just jump on spotify and play the tracks over and over just to help the bands make money, even if it is only a tiny bit.
skyrefuge
Member
In general, the free version of Spotify doesn't allow unlimited listening. You're capped at 20 or 10 hours per month. So I'm sure that "gaming" the system is not a concern at all for them, since it would be an incredibly inefficient way to funnel money to a band. You'd probably be sending more money to the electric company to run your computer than you'd be sending to the band.
For the US launch of Spotify, the word is that all free users will be granted 6 months of unlimited listening, but after that the caps will come in like in other countries.
Finally, and let me be clear about this, Spotify does NOT share your music collection with anyone else. But it does use "peer to peer" networking technology, which is supposedly part of how they achieve such amazing responsiveness with no buffering. Again, this does NOT mean that your collection is being shared.
Neil
I'm actually paying the $5.99 a month, so I have the unlimited access. That's pennies when it comes to having 15 million+ tracks sitting right in front of you to listen to at your pleasure.... Heck, I've spent $5.99 for a fuckin big mac meal that's gone in less than 5 minutes...
skyrefuge
Member
Ah, ok. Here's some random math I felt like doing:
It looks like the average payout from Spotify these days is around 0.16 cents per stream. Assuming 5-minute tracks, you'd need to listen to music 8.6 hours a day in order for artists to get paid out the $4.99 that you're paying in.
At the absolute peak of the music industry, the average US citizen paid $71 per year for recorded music. The average over the last 40 years has been more like $50/year. A $4.99/month Spotify subscription means you're paying $60/year. That sounds like almost nothing to music nerds like us, but even if you didn't spend another penny on recorded music this year, your Spotify subscription alone would mean that you're essentially "pulling your weight".
Put another way, if everyone in the country paid for a $4.99/month Spotify subscription and spent nothing else on recorded music, the industry would by partying like there's no tomorrow, because their revenues would be near or at record levels.
Neil
What's strange is why the label are leaving out a particular album from bands. For example, almost all of the Iron Maiden releases are on there except for Brave New World and Dance of Death. I'm curious as to why those two are ommitted?
Hmmm...
Hmmm...
eppst1
Member
That was another question I had. Does seem (to me at least) there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for bands and/or their albums to be on Spotify. I'm not complaining, I was just wondering.
The more I play around with Spotify, the more I like it.
Haven't even put my music on my phone yet. Gonna try that maybe tomorrow.
I appreciate all the feedback.
eppst1
Member
sh0kr0k
Active Member
It must be due to copyright/licensing restrictions or.. something like that. I noticed when I signed up via a UK proxy server and was considered a resident of a local London McDonald's I had access to every Japanese rock and Korean pop band I could think of! When I edited my profile to indicate the US as my country, these same bands were now "unavailable in your country" (a massive disappointment). So, eventhough I know Asian copyright laws are quite different, this still could be the case for other bands, and possibly why you get the album-to-album bias.
Its like that on Rhapsody now (my primary service) regarding the maiden albums. I've suddenly found more albums being greyed out..Example Leaves Eyes now when I was able to play their albums not more than a month or two ago... the maiden albums included.
Both those albums are available for me. However two tracks from DoD are not allowed for some reason. Those being Rainmaker and Paschendale. Quite odd.
sh0kr0k
Active Member
What does a greyed out track mean? I assumed it was "unavailable" but I've been able to play greyed out tracks that I don't have located on my harddrive....
Fire breath, are you sure that you don't have Dance of Death located on your hard drive somewhere? Because if so, Spotify will show it existing, but it will only exist for "YOU". That's why I thought earlier that Spotify shared our own music, because I noticed that Brave New World was missing, so I imported my Brave new World Cd into ITUNES and the it showed up
, but it only shows up for me, locally... (or so now I understand). Dance on he Road shows up, but not the studio Dance of Death CD.
If Dance of Death shows up for you but not me it's because of one of 2 reasons.
#1 the songs are located somewhere on your local computer,
#2 the album isn't licensed(permitted) to show up here in California(where I reside).
Ok this is weird now I can play those two tracks and I couldn't this morning. They are definitely not on my drive anywhere. Must have been just some oddity going on but it's solved now which doesn't help you much cause you can't play the whole album. Must be some licensing issue.
Yea, "Dance of Death" just isn't licensed in California via Spotify. That's the only logical explanation.
skyrefuge
Member
No idea, but it's nothing Spotify-specific. Those albums also do not appear in the iTunes Music Store. For the most part, Spotify's collection isn't Spotify-specific. Its collection will be largely similar to any digital music vendor. Labels generally don't deal directly with vendors. They deal with digital distributors, telling them "here are the albums that we are making available for you to distribute to vendors", and then the digital distributors make them available to whatever vendor wants them. That way labels don't have to make new deals with every new online vendor that pops up.
So for some reason 'Brave New World' and 'Dance of Death' haven't been made available to a digital distributor, perhaps because the band/label don't want to license them, but more likely, because they've been forgotten/lost-in-the-shuffle; maybe the rights-holders who originally released those albums don't exist any more, so there's no one who can say "yeah, it's ok to make these available".
I *have* noticed that Iron Maiden releases have been going through (and have always had) strange ownership issues lately. On eMusic, a whole bunch of "new" Iron Maiden releases just appeared a few weeks ago, with the label listed as "Iron Maiden LLC" rather than "EMI". So it's not surprising things are a bit of a jumble with them at the moment (that's why there are multiple copies of some Maiden albums available on Spotify, because they come from different rights-holders).
Another indication that someone isn't minding the store as well as they should be is the greyed-out (unavailable) tracks on some of the Maiden albums, such as "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" from 'Powerslave', or "Sign of the Cross" from 'The X Factor'. These long songs are marked as "album only" tracks at iTunes and eMusic, meaning that they can only be downloaded if you purchase the whole album; they can't be downloaded as a single. The point behind that is they don't want you to be able to get too much music (over 10 minutes) for only $0.99. This sort of restriction makes no sense on a streaming service like Spotify, but since the rights-holder told the distributor that those tracks should be marked as "album only", that's how they exist on Spotify too, where "album only" necessarily gets translated to "unavailable".
Neil
KingsGene
God of Thunder
Equalify Adds an Equalizer to Spotify for Windows
http://lifehacker.com/5828636/equalify-adds-an-equalizer-to-spotify
http://lifehacker.com/5828636/equalify-adds-an-equalizer-to-spotify
Pelata
FINAL SIGN
Spotify sounds like a pain in the ass...I registered but when I saw you had to download a player, I passed. I'd rather play Pandora...
AngraRULES
Member
In all seriousness, it's not that bad. Plus, the player is light as hell. Totally worth the install. Beats Pandora big time. Give it a chance.
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