Supermallet

You're a gentleman and a scholar. I'm loving this desktop application.

auto

Anyone else have an invite? Also submitted my email but no luck yet.

Dan

Oh you! *blush*

I've noticed a few disparities between the US and UK services.

UK has "Radio" and "Artist Radio." With Radio, you pick decades and genres, and it plays back random songs. With Artist Radio, you pick an artist, and it'll play some of their random songs mixed with similar artists. They're not great features, but they worked, and were not-so-customizable versions of Slacker, Pandora, etc.. Sad to see them missing from the US.

Second, for some artists the US catalog has more albums while the UK catalog has more albums from other artists. Some artists aren't represented at all in the US where you can get their whole discography in the UK (and vise versa). You can chalk that up to licensing. Spotify reps have stated that their goal now is to globalize their music licensing rights so all regions have the same catalogs. I'm sure that'll never happen, and even if it did, there'll be bigger better services out by then.

Still, the US version is pretty great, and at $9.99 for Premium, it's 40% cheaper than what I've been paying the UK site for the last year and a half.

Numanoid

If any of you wonderful folks want to PM me an invite, I'd be your Internet friend for at least two weeks.

Dr_Evil

If you google spotify invites and skip to like page 9 of the results you can probably find some forums with old invites that are still active from when it rolled out in Europe

Nausicaa

I got a trial code earlier today, but after 10 minutes of using it I upgraded to premium.

If you're on the fence and waiting for an invite, I'd just pull the trigger. The service is great - huge selection of music, fast performance on wifi or 3g, and the iPhone and desktop software is great.

Supermallet

I've been using it for a few hours now and I'm considering upgrading to the premium account. Not sure I want to pay $10 a month, though.

Dan

Worst case scenario, you use Premium for a month and decide it's not worth the $10 afterwards.

Numanoid

Thanks to SomethingMore for the invite. I hereby bequeath him my first born hermaphroditic child.


After several searches, it's missing a lot of the music I like. Stuff that Grooveshark has. Don't think I'll spring for a pay subscription unless the database increases.

Dan

Just curious... can you name a few artists that came up dry? I want to compare the results with the UK database.

Numanoid

Morten Harket...he has about six albums worth on Grooveshark, but only two on Spotify.

a-ha, for that matter, is complete missing the album Scoundrel Days amongst a few others on Spotify, but are on Grooveshark.

Nik Kershaw has several pages of tunes on Grooveshark, but only about one and a half on Spotify.

Bands like Fischer-Z and Polyrock are completely absent from Spotify. Same with The Call, who actually does appear in a limited way on Spotify, but under a weird listing (Michael Been AKA The Call).

Dan

Yup, only 2 albums in the UK Spotify, too.

That one's available in the UK. Seems to be a lot more there, too.

I think I counted 2 albums in the UK. Weak.

It looks like Fischer-Z's entire discography is on Spotify UK, but absolutely no Polyrock, either. I see what you're saying about The Call. I counted maybe 3 albums.

To me, it seems like Spotify's biggest problem is that, although they got the licenses for the big 4 in the US, they haven't sorted out the entire catalog yet. And they desperately need more US indie labels on board. For the last year and a half, they were claiming that they were adding about 10,000 songs per day. By my calculations, that's pretty accurate. When I joined, they hovered around 10m tracks. Now they're above 15m. I imagine a lot of the stuff you're looking for will show up eventually... but really... it could take a month, or it could take 2 years. Depends on their priorities.

edit: I've tried to use Grooveshark, but the lack of filename consistency drove me away very quickly. I checked back again today to see how it had changed, and they seem to have added a feature where clean file names are displayed first for any given album, but they still have all the crappy "TRACK 5" and "01 Awesome Tune" names in their database. That drives me crazy.

Numanoid

Here's some more weirdness: If I search "numan metal" on the Spotify PC app, I get 17 results. If I do the same search on the Spotify iPhone app, I get 22 results.

Dan

On the PC app, they TRY to compress multiple search results so the results aren't as long. So, if you look right beside the most popular result, there's a little downward-pointing button in the "Track" field. Press that, and it expands that one track into FIVE (this is because they're all just called "Metal" and they're all only by "Gary Numan", but they're on different albums. There's one more in that list that can be expanded... "Metal - live"

So, although it appears to be 17 tracks, it's really 22. The mobile app doesn't do that fancy compression of search results.

Tenacious D

Thanks for the invite SomethingMore! I'm digging it so far. I was a little disappointed at first because the first band I searched for (Sugar) on there came up empty, but I did find some live tracks from Bob Mould. Since then 95% of what I've searched for has been there. I'm still on the fence about upgrading, but I like what I see so far. Thanks again!

al_bundy

got an invite yesterday from the Engadget launch story. it's awesome. way better than pandora or slacker.

I think Zune had similar features but never figured out why Microsoft didn't push the service

Dan

ZunePass should have been made available for iOS and Android, but Microsoft chose to keep it locked to PCs, Zunes and WP7. Huge mistake, in my opinion.

pjflyer

I love my zunepass on my 125 gb player but will have to change over to something else at some point. Is Spotify with a large memory player/tablet my best option to replace zune?

lysander

I put my email in to the website but if anyone has an extra invite I would be happy to take it. thanks

al_bundy

i don't have the $10 premium account but it is needed for offline play and to use mobile devices.

slacker premium at $10 is pretty good but you can only cache on one device. not sure about spotify.

Dan

You can use your account on an unlimited number of devices, but you can only cache on three.

Numanoid

Ahh, I see. I suspected it was probably due to my lack of understanding. Thanks!

TGM

any invites left? not for me, but a buddy of mine is really interested...

Liver&Onions

Wolf Parade

Dan

3 albums and 1 EP on Spotify UK.
You can get the Sunset Rubdown albums on Spotify US, though.

I noticed that Sub Pop albums are in the UK but not US. I think this is just because they haven't worked out the deal with them in the US yet; only the majors.

I might give away some more invites later tonight. PM me your email addresses if you haven't already and I'll see what I can do.