bye bye Spotify..

It takes a big mind shift to understand why anybody would pay something for nothing when plenty of alternatives exist. The point is that you can if you want to. As long as that doesn't evolve into the only option, all can please themselves.

Rent a property and pump up someone else's investment portfolio? Lease a car and pay hundreds a month for something that will never be yours? Pay to watch TV over and above the licence fee? I suppose that if you have so much money that you can afford to give it away, then why not? The cheaper option is seldom the least expensive.

You do know you can download music to play offline with Spotify if you wish? That music will always be yours to play wherever and whenever you want, provided you have both the storage space and keep up your subscription.

The joy of this approach is that you can build up multiple playlists of your own, or even download other peoples, and simply load whichever ones you want for that day and they'll then play anywhere.

I find this really useful when I want to have certain music available to me without worrying about a connection.

So I have this wrong? If so I apologise. 

Anything you can listen to on Spotify you can keep a copy of for playback on other devices, in the car etc?

That's the bargain of the century. Presumably when they start streaming at CD quality you can quickly own a collection of thousands or even millions of CDs for a few quid a month?  Incredible. And very welcome.

Yes - that's correct. If you look at the settings in Spotify Premium you can download unlimited tracks, albums or playlists for use offline for as long as you subscribe to Spotify.

Yes, I'm aware you can do that, although when I said £20 a month, what I really meant, of course, was Qubuz . At least for the time being, as compressed is a non-starter for me. And what if you jump ship and cancel - I presume they stick a cookie on your hard drive to lock all the saved files? At least until an enterprising 13 year old comes up with a sneaky workaround...

Not quite, Harry. There are strings attached. You still don't "own the collection". Spotify allows you to make anything available for listening offline by downloading the files to one of your registered devices, but the files remain encrypted and can only be played back using the Spotify client. You won't find a folder of readily playable mp3 or ogg files that you can transfer to another device. But, if you have downloaded to your phone, for example, you can take your phone with you, in the car as an example, and listen to those songs without an internet connection. The only limit is the amount of local storage you have available. Of course, this only applies as long as you keep paying your subscription. Stop, and you immediately lose access to all that downloaded music.

This is the more accurate description of what I was trying to say...

OK. So you are paying for something which you can't universally access with any playback device you chose. Well, if that's your preference then all the best with it. God forbid we all end up there.

Spotify Premium lets you store up to 3333 tracks per device to listen to offline, and you can stay offline for up to 30 days. Not a bad deal - of the order of 200 albums say. 

I've had Spotify Premium for ~six months now and there's no going back. Awesome for discovering new music and the sound quality isn't that bad either. Of course FLAC files on my HDD sound better through foobar2000 but Spotify's usability is top notch. Mobile use is another big thing which makes it handy. I use it in my car via bluetooth connectivity, works great.

I'm currently in a process of trying out Tidal. They launched in Finland yesterday and I immediately registered for the 30 day trial. Sound quality is great and mobile app works too but there's occasional drops with the mobile application when using in my car. PC application works good and has pretty much all the basic functionality you need. Of course Spotify is far ahead with all the plugins, extensions and stuff.

What bothers me most in Tidal is that it uses DirectSound output which is not truly bitperfect. In foobar2000 I can use WASAPI, ASIO or Kernel Streaming which all bypass the windows mixer, being truly bitperfect. I e-mailed Tidal about this and they said they're working to make ASIO/WASAPI available in future. With Spotify I couldn't care less about the output since the music is lossy already.

Emphasis added!

+1  Exactly my biggest gripe with Tidal offering, followed by the tiny text which makes the desktop app hard work if operating via remote and a TV several metres away.  Not sure if Qobuz is available in Finland yet, but I am sure it will be along soon, and does offer the option of WASAPI, and ASIO if your hardware supports it.  Great for DAC-V1 owners such as myself.

I can listen to music on Spotify free via iPad etc, listening through headphones or if I feel like it as source into Hugo in the hifi system, albeit the free version is not hifi, and I cant play an album without tracks being randomised, but it is more than sufficient to decide if I like something and want to buy in HiFi quality, so I don't see the point and would rather save the £120 per year towards buying albums in the highest available quality.

And Spotify may have umpteen billion tunes, but all too often they haven't had music I've been interested in finding.

As a consequence I'm not interested in paying for Spotify just to be able to play through my ND5XS or to get albums to play properly, at what I consider to be a significant cost for less than my preferred level of quality.

If I want to hear other things new to me I can choose an internet radio station (courtesy of ND5XS) and listen to random music occasionally discover something previously unheard that I like (until I get too irritated by hearing things I don't like, or listening fatigue sets in).

In summary, free Spotify is good enough for checking if I like something I've heard of, if they have it, but there's no way I'd subscribe to Premium unless it created access to albums in minimum red book quality and preferably higher that I can download and keep without maintaining a subscription, and the Naim implementation is therefore, to me, pointless, and I'd say yes, bye bye Spotify premium, except for me it was never hello!

I spent today working from home, and gave my Spotify free trial a workout. It was just for background music, but even so, I realised after a while that I just wasn't engaging with the music at all. I was just about to give up and stick Radio 4 on, but noticed the 2 o'clock curfew was looming, so I reverted to the trusty Radio Paradise. I soon noticed that I was being distracted by the music instead of getting much work done. I have to say that Radio Paradise 320 is the only compressed music I've ever felt I really wanted to listen to. So despite Spotify's great functionality, I'm afraid it will be goodbye from me, too. 

What's the big deal?  You can only legally occupy a rental property as long as you pay the rent.  This is no different.  

I agree it's not for everyone but when the penny does drop I think a lot of people will get it.  For example I have boxes full of DVDs - movies, TV box sets, concerts etc - that are largely worthless.  I own them but with the exception of a handful am unlikely to watch them again, plus they are worth little second hand and all the are doing is taking up space.  Knowing what I know now, and if the option was available, I would much rather pay for access to them than ownership.  I would suggest that the majority of music consumers (as opposed to 'owners', which i accept many on this forum are) will feel the same way (for now).

Maybe i've got the wrong end of the stick but isn't Radio Paradise effectively a radio station or can you listen to exactly what you want to?  

For example i've just read a review of the new Waterboys album and was intrigued so and am currently listening to the entire album on spotify premium at 320kps.  Right now I'm thinking of going to the shops so i'll make the album available offline on my phone which will enable me to connect via bluetooth to my car audio and continue listening there.  So I am choosing exactly what I want to listen to and have the convenience of listening to it whenever and wherever I want.  No, it isn't .wav quality but for casual listening of my music, where I want it and when I want it for NZ$15 a month i'm pretty happy. 

Yeah the subscriber download cache options are good. I use it both for Spotify and Qobuz. Of course the latter is lossless but you can select to store as mp3 to save space if you prefer.

i use Spotify for the car as I currently prefer their playlists for background car music.

I also like the way the Spotify (and Qobuz) app's download ahead when in dynamic listening mode, so when mobile in the car or train with 3G if and when you hit a black spot, which I frequently do, and it's not a track boundary you still have service.

Simon

The "big deal" is that I plan on listening to music for the rest of my life, whereas I do not plan on occupying that lovely flat in Paris ever again.  When I return to Paris for another holiday, I'll find another to rent for a week or two.

In order to listen to what-used-to-be-called-my-music-and-I-now-am-only-renting, I must keep paying the monthly fee.  Month...after month...after month...after month...

Another intriguing thread about Spotify, and having read it, I wonder what it's for.  Why? Because the debate is based on the rationale for the different choices exercised, but it affects nothing except for another option for how we choose to listen to, and expand our awareness, of music.  Either you get something from it through free access and put up with adverts, you pay £10 per month to have ad free access, or don't bother.  The choice is yours to make, and the relative cost/benefit yours to evaluate.

The perspectives shared are interesting in as far as they are reasonable from both those in favour and those who choose not to; perhaps we are in the midst of what will be seen as a paradigm shift in a few years.  

But then there is minor resurgence in vinyl too...

Yes, RP is little more than a radio station, with nothing like the functionality of Spotify. The only comparison I was making was in sound quality.

software is moving to a subscription model e.g. Adobe Creative Cloud - companies want to enforce a recurring revenue model and stop piracy - it's inevitable for audio and video buy while you can if that's what you want 

Bart, no-one is forcing you to sign up to spotify premium and pay month after month. if you don't like the concept you don't have to use it, I was simply pointing out that people aren't paying to own something but rather to access it and that, those who approach it from an ownership perspective, are bound to be disappointed.

Judge is right, we are in the middle of a paradigm shift. There is an opinion in the music industry that digital a la carte was a transitional phase and that a shift to services such as spotify is the natural next step. Sales of both physical and digital music are in decline (the exception being vinyl but volumes are really low) while access services such as spotify are growing in popularity everyday. The same shift can be seen in other areas as well, through the emergence of services such as Netflix and uber (edit  yes thanks AndyL, Adobe CC is another good example). I work in a very young environment and the younger staff clearly have a different prespective on owning stuff in that they see it as unnecessary and a bit of a burden.

Anyway, I was just trying to put forward the position from which subscription services make sense because it was an epiphany for me when I approached it that way. 

The difference being that I own a copy of all the apps that are covered by my Creative Cloud account. In fact I own multiple copies. I don't have to pay to access them. 

If people prefer to rent listening time that's fine. What's not fine is that this could be pushed as the default model for access to music, which would be the record labels' Utopia. No one would own a copy of anything and to listen to anything you have to pay. Again, no one who doesn't fancy that should have a problem if other people wish to adopt this model. I have no problems with it whatsoever.

Where it becomes less rooted in reality and tends to farcical is when it gets touted as something new and essential. Some of us have been flicking through and sampling from music collections much vaster than our own since the 1950s. We also use the internet to research and access new music. And we don't pay a third party to spoon feed it to us. Fine if you want to but unnecessary. And not new as a concept. The implementation is more clever - but it always is.

Obviously.  

But you asked me what the "big deal" is, and I responded.

Cheers!

it's great to see listen OnDemand type streaming services become so popular. I worked on several pioneering projects, prototypes and deployments of these OnDemand services (audio and video) in the 90s (some using private experimental ADSL, fibre and cable TV systems) .. and now it's reached critical mass with the help of the ubiquitous use of the Internet , it is very satisfying to see.

However many of us anticipated that ownership, or so called physicals, would not be replaced completely with OnDemand  services and indeed the OnDemand services could also be used to drive demand for purchases (I know it all seems obvious now, but pre mass consumerised Internet it felt revolutionary) .. And perhaps the comments on this thread bears that out to some extent. further Qobuz's business model seems to tap into this dual world as well.

Simon