I write a lot about music services on here, because music services are sort of in the startup world now, they are sort of copyright-relevant, and I listen to a lot of music. Spotify has been the hot new music service, out now for paying customers and with a wait if you want an invite to the free service. Spotify’s angle is that you can listen to anything you want at any time in a giant catalog of music, with some limitations if you are a freebie customer, and essentially no limitations if you are a paying customer at 5 bucks a month.
Eager to try out the service, I paid 5 bucks figuring it was worth a month. Here’s my experience:
1:00 pm – Ooooo Spotify! I want to try it, but I’m so impatient I might as well pay the $5 and try it RIGHT NOW.
1:05 pm – Signup was easy and I’m now listening to music while I work on some other things. Immediately I’m familiar with the interface:
On the right there is a little bar with my facebook friends who have spotify (only about 20 right now), and if I click I can see their shared iTunes playlists. Spotify automatically imports all of your iTunes music into the program – convenient. On the left is a couple shortcuts – obvious things like links to my own playlists and music, and then at the top a “What’s new” button. There seems to be three main modes of discovery built into this button – New stuff featured by spotify, “top lists” which is a list of the most popular stuff, and “feed” which pulls from recommendations made by your friends.
I click feeds, and find 10 messages from spotify and 1 from a friend, who recommends a song I don’t like. Ok so that feature isn’t really working yet, maybe the service is too new.
I click “top lists”. The top tracks are basically just the top radio songs, as are the top albums – a mixture of Adele, lady gaga, katy perry, and other things I wouldn’t listen to for free.
I click “What’s new”. I see LMFAO, Limp Bizkit (??), Fatboy Slim, and Foster the People. Not really interested in those first three, but Foster the People is playing at Outside Lands and I’m going to that, so I click Foster the People and see I can listen to their whole album! Now we are getting somewhere! I click on “Pumped up Kicks”, their most popular song…. nothing happens. I don’t see any reason why the song shouldn’t play, it’s clearly available, but it doesn’t play. Bummer. So I click on another song on the album, which also doesn’t play. This is getting frustrating. I click on another song, and it plays, so I listen to that for a bit and go back to some work.
2:30 pm – After doing some work, walking around to chat with some people about some work stuff, I realize my earphones haven’t been in for at least 40 minutes and I plug them back in. Nothing is playing. I flip over to Spotify and find that “Pumped up Kicks” is still waiting to start again… Hmm, I need a new route. I realize I’m seeing a TV on the Radio show in September, so I search and find that Spotify has that entire new album up! Great. I click on a song and let it shuffle, back to work.
2:35 pm – Music stops again, one song into the album. Seems the “pumped up kicks” problem isn’t isolated to Foster the People. I click around for another song that works, forced to skip two on the album. Back to work, I was actually getting something done.
2:50 pm – Music stops again, three songs later. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THIS THING. I’ve been wanting to listen to the most recent lykke li album a bit more but have neglected to downl….. acquire it through other channels so I type that in, find the new album, and click on the second song. Lykke li bursts, and I’m back to work.
3: 15 pm – Music stops again, a few songs later. Stuck on an indefinitely buffering Lykke Li song, once again. I decide to test some of the other discovery possibilities of the service – I open the “facebook friends” bar, and am faced with a tough decision…. who looks like they listen to music I might like? A few random facebook friends are immediately eliminated based on some mental calculations of how crappy I know their taste to be, and I settle on Smephanie Momlin (name changed for privacy sake). I click her, and it shows me two playlists she has made “1forthecar” and “2fortherun”. Smephanie is apparently from the literal camp of playlist naming. I recently read a pretty hilarious blog post on playlist names here, but I’ll save time and post the relevant portion here:
Some of the other people here, most of whom are still setting up for the party, look over at my iPod playlists which is so fucking embarrassing because the things you name your iPod playlists are very personal and aren’t meant to be displayed in front of a crowd of people you’ve never met. Like sometimes I DJ under the name Big League Jew, like that chewing gum, so that’s right on the TV and 5 fancy girls are looking at it. In my peripheral vision I can see that one of them looks at me and I think, “Stop looking at me swan!!”
If you are an active playlist maker who isn’t a literal playlist titleist (like “Workout 2,” “Dance Party 8”), look through your playlists right now. What would people think of you if they saw them, right? Would they think you haven’t gotten over any of your exes and you are annoying and sentimental? It’s hard to say exactly what they would think, but you still wouldn’t want to show them.
Note to self – remove embarrassing shared playlists before logging into Spotify. I’m neither in the car, nor am I running, so I click on another friend, who it turns out has no shared playlists. I click on another. No shared playlists. Apparently Smephanie is in the minority. I randomly decide to listen to The Beatles. The Beatles, I find, aren’t on Spotify. Okkkk what else do I want to hear but know I don’t have? How about Talking Heads, I just saw “Stop Making Sense” last weekend. Oh good, they have that, I click, and head back to work.
3:40 pm – Happily chugging along with Talking Heads, I decide I want to hear the live version of “This Must Be the Place”. I search Spotify and find they have it! Great, this service is coming ALIVE! Click… nothing. Music eternally buffering. My internet is pretty solid, this doesn’t make much sense. I close the application and reopen it. Still buffers eternally. Disgruntled, I queue it up on Youtube instead.
4:18 pm – After some work leads me away from the computer, I’m back, and I click over to Spotify. Decide to try some Radiohead, they have it, so I click and it works! Back to real work.
After my short afternoon with Spotify, I’ve got a few conclusions:
– It’s awful for discovering new music. Pandora just owns it on that front. Seeing my friends’ playlists is great, but if Smephanie only has shared a handful, or if other anonymous friend hasn’t shared anything, it doesn’t help at all. The “what’s new” and “top lists” pages are populated purely with the crap that people listen to on the radio, which I can easily get for free on Youtube, and I don’t really need to “discover” that music because it a) sucks and b) is all over the radio. I need to know what I’m looking for when I want new music on Spotify, which isn’t necessarily terrible, it just doesn’t leverage my social graph in any discernable way, and it doesn’t suggest anything to me based on what it should know I like.
– Tracks randomly won’t play. Listen, I know this service just launched. But I’m not a beta tester – I shelled out $5 for this thing. Some people are paying more for the super uber premium version, and I would be truly miffed if I paid for that price point and was given eternally not-streaming songs. It’s a buzz kill to be in the groove doing something else and have to switch back over because Spotify hit a “Pumped up Kicks” again.
– It’s not better than downloading the whole album for free as a torrent. People who pay for music pay for music, and maybe for them this service makes sense. But people who don’t pay for music get nothing from Spotify that they aren’t getting for free at a torrent site – on both I need to know what I want, and search for it. As a torrent, I can have the whole thing in 3-5 minutes, on Spotify, I have to pay, they may not have it, and it may not stream if they do. The only chance the music industry has to recapture the people who don’t want to pay for music is to either ramp up enforcement (which they’ve tried, and doesn’t and will never work), or to offer them a value proposition that they can’t turn down – Like utilizing the social graph in a new and cool way (turntable.fm) or offering an interesting method of discovering new music (pandora). Spotify doesn’t do either of those things well. It’s just a legal version of Napster, which is cool, but Napster was cutting edge in 1999, and didn’t have the possibility of drawing on advanced algorithms or facebook friends to suggest new music. Spotify should utilize those things, but it doesn’t.
I’ll give Spotify until the end of the month to convince me, but right now that $5 is probably the last Lincoln they are getting from me (Lincoln is on the five right?). I give Spotify a 72/100, barely passing, and not worth the cost.
(Next Day Update: Spotify seems to have largely fixed the nonplaying issue I was experiencing, which at least makes the service useable. Based on the search terms that brought people to my blog, I definitely wasn’t the only one experiencing the problem, but it’s good that Spotify fixed it so quickly. My other criticisms stand, but this improves my score to 80/100, a B-.)
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