Comment by ssharp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ssharp | Hacker News Reader

I decided around two years ago to abandon "owning" most of my music. I started with Rhapsody and moved to Spotify. I find that Spotify has almost everything I want to listen to and the $10 / month (actually, $20 since I have two more accounts on the Family plan), is well worth it.

For people who like to listen to a wide variety of music and like to discover new music, I don't think you can beat what Spotify offers. If you have a more tightly contained bucket of music and don't want to expand in too much, it probably makes more sense to own your collection.

I've discovered a ton of stuff and enjoyed things one-off like live CD's that I would have never have purchased outright through iTunes.

I ultimately chose Spotify over Rhapsody because of playlists. I think when I first started, I actually prefered Rhapsody's mobile UI but Spotify's has gotten better since. I remember using Rhapsody's web/desktop service in the mid 2000's, but it wasn't an iPod replacement then because it's offline capabilities were limited and limited to devices that I didn't like. Once mobile became realistic to stream music, the services started making a lot more sense to me.

> For people who like to listen to a wide variety of music and like to discover new music, I don't think you can beat what Spotify offers.

Eh... Sort of. If I want to listen to something within (making it up) the top 50% most successful recording artists, or something relatively recent otherwise, it's normally got something at least.

If I want to listen to underground hardcore records or weirdy free improv or something, I'm S.O.L. on streaming services.

Still, I pay my £10 a month, because it's good for a lot of things, and convenient.

I disagree. It is actually a very rare for me to not find a band on Spotify, and my listening is mostly focused on esoteric or small bands in a variety of niche genres.

What are you disagreeing with? You both have different music preferences.

There is an old radio show, Bob & Ray... they once were nominated for a Grammy.

Rhapsody has many (though not all) of the collected volumes, dozens I'd say. Spotify has one 1970s album of theirs.

Also noticed a standup comedian on Rhapsody, Ralph Harris... his album Hickey Head is there. Nothing on Spotify except a single track on someone else's album.

I find about one or so artist per week that's not on Spotify.

there are tons of good bands that are not on Spotify, even modern (florida noise punk scene is really easy example)

Yeah: I listen to a lot of very obscure 90s emo records, which were all fly-by-night bands on tiny vinyl-only labels (and other similar corners of the music industry). This stuff is not on Spotify. I did not expect it to be on Spotify, and thus was not disappointed.

For contemporary stuff of that level of nicheness, Bandcamp is a much better source. And selling one $5 download/print-on-demand CD is probably more lucrative than all the Spotify streams most bandcamp bands could ever hope to get put together, so it's hardly surprising that they go this way. Spotify seems a more sensible partnership for labels with significant back catalogue than individual artists. (Which makes it peculiar that I can't browse by label, but there you go.)

I like Spotify for classical music and jazz, but my tastes are more 'mainstream' in those categories. It also has a surprisingly good collection of house/techno/etc singles, but I kind of need the files for those for DJing purposes and such.

You can use "label:xyz" in the search field.

Well... the more you know.

Spotify's coverage is very good but they have been catching holes in their catalogue lately. Taylor Swift's absence probably won't bother HN users too much but lack of the latest Black Keys' album might.

Spotify more than makes up for it with curated playlists and apps (pitchfork, Last.fm, Hype Machine) making music discovery easy and pleasant. But if someone wants to listen to particular songs, like they would from their own collection, their mileage may vary.

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