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Comment by rwhitman | Hacker News Reader

Lately I consume my music almost entirely via Spotify, and its increasingly apparent that there are a number of artists I love who are not a part of their catalog. As a consumer its frustrating, but then again I'm using the free service...

I really wonder what the future holds for cloud based entertainment in this regard. I now consume all entertainment via cloud services and Netflix / Hulu etc have very similar if not worse problems when it comes to movie and TV catalogs. You'd think that now we're several years into it that these problems would have ironed themselves out by now, but it seems to be getting worse. For the consumers we're all just screwed

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I subscribed to spotify premium for a year and a half but recently cancelled my subscription and went to a competitor. I feel the UI/UX quality of the desktop version has degraded significantly and they are actually removing features as opposed to adding them.

Basic things like: drag-n-drop sharing with friends, my friends list was replaced with people suggested to follow, still no outbox for songs I sent, no back button on "radio" stations nor a way to see the radio playlist/history, new UI for albums/artists/songs is horrible, Ctrl+F to quickly filter items in current result set was removed for some reason, no fuzzy search capability, etc.

I'm not sure what userbase Spotify is targeting but it's one I am clearly no longer a member.

Out of curiosity, which competitor did you move to?

I would guess rdio

Or Google Play.

It's Google Play for now. Great desktop (when chrome is in --app mode) app, pretty abysmal android app. It's not without its faults either.

I did't mention the competitor because my primary complaint was to raise more awareness about the things Spotify could fix to bring me (and others) back as customers -- Not to drive business to someone else.

Sure, understood. I appreciate the heads up, though - I'm in a similar position, myself.

A bit of a tangent, but I'm also having some issues swallowing the "pay for a license" pill in a lot of respects, e.g. Spotify and Steam (of course, we all do it anyway), so if there's a chance to continue to do that but also own things, or otherwise move away from that ephemeral type of usage, then I'm interested, so always interested to learn more about alternative products.

I'm not seeing the advantage of Google Play in desktop mode. What am I missing?

I think Google Music's Android app is preferable to Spotify's. Spotify was really bad with skipping/popping in the middle of tracks, even when they claimed to have fixed that. And I was experiencing problems with hard crashes and restarts of my phone while running it.

> Ctrl+F to quickly filter items

Boy am I missing this one, would love to see it back!

I haven't updated Spotify in a bit so I still have Ctrl/Cmd + F functionality. Good to know, I almost lost it!

A friend of mine set their Dad up on Spotify instead of listening to music through YouTube.

She said to him that he could listen to anything he wanted using Spotify. The first thing he searched for was The Beatles, one of a number of popular groups that aren't on Spotify, and probably will never be.

I had a similar issue when looking for Jimmy Eat World's cover of Take 'Em As They Come, by Bruce Springsteen. It was released as a bonus track for those that bought their album through iTunes. However, that album is no longer on iTunes, and the track itself cannot be bought anywhere else. My only choice was to find an mp3.

It's these gaps that bring people back to piracy. Anything that someone cannot find on Spotify will be torrented or ripped from elsewhere.

One of my biggest fears, as someone who enjoys such wide access to music, is that the number of services will increase to such a large a number and result in such catalog segmentation that I will have to be a member of numerous streaming services to actually listen to what I want.

Maybe this is the what is needed, though? Each major has their own service? Each independent label or groups thereof then do the same? One interesting service I have seen lately is http://drip.fm/ I am really curious as to the success of it so far.

>One of my biggest fears, as someone who enjoys such wide access to music, is that the number of services will increase to such a large a number and result in such catalog segmentation that I will have to be a member of numerous streaming services to actually listen to what I want.

As someone who enjoys playing games, it's frustrating to find that my games are fragmented between multiple cloud providers (Steam/Desura/Origin/UPlay), non-cloud middle-men like GoG/Amazon/HumbleStore and no provider at all, in the case of direct downloads from a games site.

It's very frustrating that I have zero perspective of my library as a whole, and frequently lose lesser played titles depending on where in the chain they started.

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