Agreed, I finally admitted last year that I was tired of maintaining my own MP3 library and that $9/mo was a fair enough price to listen to whomever I want.
But ya, that sure seems like that should be fair enough and profitable enough for the artists I listen to, so if Spotify isn't doing a good job of making sure that is the case then I hope someone else arrives on the scene who does. After all, switching costs are now incredibly low for us as consumers and that is where I want my money going.
> Agreed, I finally admitted last year that I was tired of maintaining my own MP3 library.
If a subscription service could get me out of that chore, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But the music I listen to is crazy all over the place, and if the service doesn't have even one of the songs I want, then it's worthless. Even if I can upload mp3s, now I'm back to maintaining an mp3 library. If I switch services, I have to either pull out my mp3s or hold on to them, and if I'm holding on to them, why not hold on to all of them.
I'm hitting this point right now. After years of maintaining an mp3 collection I jumped ship to Spotify to try it out and loved it. It was great that I no longer had to spend any time to get access to the music I loved. Also community playlists were awesome (Especially the Top X Hit playlists that were updated monthly). Spotify even supported Last.FM, I was in heaven... Until Spotify didn't have that 1 song, or that 1 cd, or that 1 artist. That coupled with CONSTANTLY turning explicit music on my playlists to the "clean"/"radio edit" versions pissed me off to no end (I know why this is happening and I find it completely unacceptable).
For the last few months I've been using SoundCloud (Still paying for Spotify for every now and then or when a friend requests a song) for mashups (which are nowhere to be found on Spotify) but the SoundCloud iPhone is shit. It looks nice but whenever iOS knocks it out of memory it forgets where you were were and takes you back to the home screen (Which for long mashups sucks a lot). Furthermore it seems WAY more finicky with network connections than Spotify was. I have to turn off Wifi when I get in my car (from home -> work and from work -> home) because if I don't then SC will try to load over Wifi and I drive out of range almost immediately. Then I have to kill the app and re-launch (and re-navigate to where I was) before it will use my LTE connection. Also the mobile app doesn't scrobble to last.fm (neither does the website but I have chrome extentions for that).
I decided, literally a couple hours ago, that I was sick of this and decided to go back to maintaining my own music collection. I've got to do some research on how best to do this (Subsonic or similar on my home server and an iPhone/OS X that let's me stream+cache and scrobble to last.fm) but I believe it will all pay off in the end. I've found that all of these services (Netflix/Hulu/Spotify/Rdio/etc) are great for getting started but that all comes at a cost and it WILL bite you in the ass one day.
I've got some plans. Right now I've got all my music on Google Play, having moved it from iTunes last year, which was painful, but not too bad. I eventually want to write some Ruby software that will hold all the metadata in a sqlite database replicated to Dropbox. That way I know what the tracks are. I'll seed the DB, hopefully by hooking into a Google Play API that hopefully exists.
Then I want to grab all the files and put them on S3 or something and store the links in the db. Then it's a front-end problem, I'll need a command line interface and then one day I'll make a GUI. I could also find tracks that exist only, say, on YouTube, and store links to those too.
Then I'll be able to use it as a music player and store no music on my local machine.
Then the biggest pain in the ass becomes syncing to my portable devices, which is the only reason I haven't done this yet. I would hate to have to maintain two libraries at the same time. So I have to think my way through that. Though I'm sure I could write a syncer that would work much better than Google Play's, I haven't bothered to sit down to do it yet.
It sounds like you're working really hard to reinvent what Subsonic already achieves. It lets you build your own streaming service, and has apps (with caching) on all mobile platforms.
Doesn't bother me. I reinvent a lot of things. Doing it myself lets me fine-tune the interface and hook it into other projects.
Also, I've learned that reinvention often takes less time than learning someone else's service. If the API is really clean and useful, maybe it's worthwhile, but in most cases, it's not. If only because the vast majority of the time, I'm expected to use what's effectively a beta. I can write beta software too!
For this service specifically, just because I can self-host won't make it any easier to move off of it. Moving from iTunes to Google Play was pretty easy once I grabbed a library off of RubyGems to hook into iTunes. I'd have a coding task to do to move off this too. My own software can have everything I need, so I won't ever need to move off, just write translation layers. It's more work up front, but buys me a lot of flexibility down the road.
> That coupled with CONSTANTLY turning explicit music on my playlists to the "clean"/"radio edit" versions pissed me off to no end (I know why this is happening and I find it completely unacceptable).
Why is this happening? Bugs the hell out of me too
Ok, I've posted in the forums a few times on this and the reason seems to be that music gets licensed and unlicensed all the time on Spotify but they try to hide that from the user (as they should). However in a number of cases when an explicit song that gets unlicenced (even if it is almost immediately re-licensed) then it will fallback to the clean licenced version because Spotify always wants to default to non-explicit songs (In fact for a while, and maybe still, they didn't allow explicit songs on the mobile app, the only way to hear them was to add them to a playlist on desktop first, there was no way to search for or find them). I'm fine with this IF AND ONLY IF when the explicit version is re-added that my song (or rather my "pointer" to the song) gets "upgraded".
Ideally there would be an "explicit-only" checkbox like there is "hide explicit" one that would always show the explicit instead of the clean version.
They claim that the behavior matches your desired behavior of having a "pointer" that re-updates if availability changes and the explicit version is made available again
Now I just use Youtube (via Streamus, a Chrome extension that plays from Youtube) and SoundCloud. Not having that 1 song really does ruin Spotify or any similar kind of service for me.
Yeah I used this extention https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/media-keys-by-sway... (Media Keys by Sway) for a while but it plus the SC tab was chewing up memory. Now I'm using Vox (OS X client) that works with SC (and my media keys). I do plan on offlining the SC playlists I like and just playing the files directly eventually.
There's a third issue: Playback on spotify sounds horrible, even with high quality playback turned on it. It cannot come close in quality and richness to a VBR mp3. Anytime I really want to feel the music, I have to fire up forbar2000
What I suspect happens is that most Spotify consumers are undiscerning and use it as either a radio substitute or for playing whatever their friends are listening to (which is going to be "Top 40" almost by definition). So like everything else it's profitable for the big acts and not for anyone else.
But ya, that sure seems like that should be fair enough and profitable enough for the artists I listen to, so if Spotify isn't doing a good job of making sure that is the case then I hope someone else arrives on the scene who does. After all, switching costs are now incredibly low for us as consumers and that is where I want my money going.