Spotify launched in the US today, to become the third serious provider after MOG and RDIO services that offer unlimited streaming of their catalog for a rather small-ish monthly fee. Napster, Real, ZunePass, Thumbplay (now sold away), also offer a similar service, but they never managed to capture the market the same way. I have used all three services above over the last year (some in a short trial mode, some through lengthy subscription), so here’s how I see them go down.
RDIO and MOG are very similar in what they offer. They both have a $5 PC plan, a $10 “mobile + living-room + offline” plan, PC/Mac apps, a radio mode, they have mobile apps, a Sonos app, and a Roku app. RDIO wins in discovery, usability/UI and app stability over MOG (MOG’s Android app continues to be unstable for me since my last article here on OSNews, despite MOG contacting me and telling me that they’re fixing it). However, MOG has a substantially bigger catalog, and higher audio quality. RDIO refuses to disclose their bitrate, but some users online claim that it’s no better than 128 kbps (we don’t know for sure), while MOG’s ranges from 128kbps to 320 kbps depending on the quality of the connection.
Spotify on the other hand has the app stability, and UI expected, but with music discovery and social networking being only so-so. Their quality ranges from 96 kbps to 320kbps, depending on the plan or wireless technology used. They feature the same plans as MOG and RDIO, but with the addition of a free plan that allows for 10-hour a month of free streaming, with some ads (that’s enough for 12 or 13 albums of free streaming a month). Spotify also has a Sonos app, but not a Roku app. Spotify also works in more countries than just US, so if you’re traveling in those countries you won’t have to always use “offline” synced mode, but live as well. Spotify can also integrate your own local music into their player, not just stream. It also features PC/Mac apps, a radio mode for its paid plans, and it has broader mobile support for more mobile OSes.
So if you try to weigh all three services, you’d likely say they’re about the same, with Spotify having an advantage, with possibly RDIO getting a 2nd place. However, it’s not so. Spotify/MOG leap ahead to a huge advantage over RDIO in regards to their catalog size. At the end of the day, if your favorite artist is not part of the service, having a nice social networking integration won’t do jack to keep you satisfied. That’s what’s killing RDIO right now: their limited music catalog. They have about 8-9 million songs, while MOG has about 11-12 million, with Spotify having about 13 million (15 million according to some news outlets).
Through the last few months that I have been subscribing to RDIO, I’ve routinely been unable to find many indie bands. I’m an indie music enthusiast, so every Tuesday I’d browse the iTunes Alternative genre listings, to see the new releases. I’d preview stuff there, and then, for whatever I liked, I’d go back to RDIO and add them in my “Collection”. Well, bad luck for me, I constantly found ~1/3 of the artists I was looking for to not be available (either not listed at all, or being “greyed out” in the RDIO UI). RDIO would direct me to their catalog requests page, and there I would fill up their form. None of my requests have made it to RDIO yet, so at some point, I gave up filling forms.
However, I did keep a list of 20 artists I filled on the RDIO form early on, so I used these artists to check MOG and Spotify. I found out that from my small sample of 20 artists that were missing from RDIO, both MOG and Spotify covered 15 of them, and missing only 5 of them. The same 5 artists. The universally missing artists are: Secret Cities, Teen Daze, Pure X, Holy Other, and MemoryHouse (most of them self-released, or on small labels, but they all exist on iTunes, and 3 of them exist on Amazon MP3). Spotify fared better than MOG in the album selection of artists that exist in both services, e.g. Spotify had more albums/songs by AG Silver than MOG had. RDIO does not carry AG Silver at all.
I’m personally considering unsubscribing from RDIO because of their weak catalog, and their reluctance to fix their Roku app that has a reproducible crashing bug (they were notified months ago to fix it, nothing was done yet). I’m torn between MOG and Spotify, because while I prefer Spotify overall, they don’t have a Roku app (I have wired my Roku to our Yamaha amplifier, so I can stream to our huge speakers in our living room). See, to me any service is incomplete without some living room support, that’s where music can be most appreciated (failing a live performance at a club). If Spotify were to offer a Roku app soon (and possibly the ability to control the Roku app from the Android app — with my TV OFF), there won’t be any question, Spotify is where my future would lie.
As for RDIO, if they don’t have the funds to sign more labels/artists, I think they should enter in a strategic partnership with Bandcamp (down the street from RDIO’s offices), to at least get the kind of artists that are usually not signed in any label, and no other service offers (not even iTunes).
Finally, I’d like to say that having used every kind of music service out there, from local playback (iPod), to radio (Slacker, Pandora, Last.fm), to unlimited streaming (MOG, RDIO, Spotify), to cloud-services (AMZ, Google), I much prefer the unlimited streaming services. I have 150 GB of legal music that I can’t fit on any cellphone, radios don’t play exactly what I want, while cloud services not only can’t fit my music for a low price, but the upload times are so high that it makes them non-worthy of my time. With unlimited services I can get 90% of what I want to listen, for a very small fee, and I can fill up the rest 10% with local playback (I usually buy from Amazon MP3’s low prices, but most of the indie stuff I listen to are legally free for promotional purposes on various well-known music blogs, or on Bandcamp).
@Eugenia
In the UK for ages we had Ad based listen to anything free service … now we have 10 hours a month … before I upgraded (it was less than a couple of pints of Ale down the local).
It concided with this article
http://www.themusicvoid.com/2011/04/spotify-labels-trying-to-kill-a…
Which you may be interested in.
Spotify is IMO a good way of stopping piracy because the price is just right, it is cheap enough that it is more effort to pirate than to pay to use it.
I really like it.
Last.FM is a different niche IMO … more social music.
Edited 2011-07-14 21:29 UTC
You hit the nail on the head. Spotify at 5ukp a month is a no brainer, less than the price of a single album. I never bought a lot of music ( a few albums a year maybe ), nor pirated it, preferring to listen to online streaming radio etc. However at 5ukp a month I took the plunge and have not regretted it at all, very pleased customer here. Price and service is just right.
Artists make almost no money from services like Spotify, so it’s not like the piracy angle benefits them anyway.
Don’t count out Rhapsody yet. They may not have the hype lately, but various sources still claim Rhapsody has the most subscribers in the US. Not to mention the other various on-demand services offered that you did not mention. Slacker Premium, Qriocity, Kazaa, and Grooveshark all want a piece of the market as well.
Other than that I agree with your observations. Rdio simply has too few songs to make it worth while.
Last time I tried them, they had some gaping holes in their library, but that was admittedly a few years ago. I ran into the same problem with Zune.
I wish iTunes would come out with a streaming service, assuming they had their entire library available for streaming. Hell, I’d buy an iPod just for that.
If Google and Amazon implemented their music services with half a brain just hashing your legal files on the client and then looking for matches that are already on their servers should speed up uploading quite a lot.
Most digital music in this world is copied from just a few sources. Most people don’t rip their stuff, only geeks do.
Wuala already does that and for popular files the upload is just the time it takes to encrypt and hash the file.
But yeah, at the moment uploading sux.
Free spotify seems to be invite only…
edit: i was wondering. does anyone know how spotify compares to grooveshark in terms of catalog size?
Edited 2011-07-14 22:04 UTC
GrooveShark is theoretically unlimited, since it’s the users who upload songs, not the service. But the service is under fire from labels (sued), and its mobile apps are ousted from app stores. So I don’t see this is as a serious contender to be honest. It might work for those who don’t care getting a licensed, consistent-quality service, but not for the rest.
Edited 2011-07-14 22:09 UTC
Grooveshark has a tremendous following for their free service. Assuming they can win their legal battles, they could become a very difficult competitor.
I use Grooveshark from time to time to give my friends a link to a song, but the catalog is painfully spotty and inconsistent (because people usually do a crappy job tagging their libraries)… I can’t imagine using it to listen regularly.
Unfortunately I live in a wrong country, so I can’t check out any other service, but I imagine I’d have a much better time using them.
I haven’t tried Spotify yet, but I see a lot of Ars commenters that are pissed off because the free service that Spotify offers ain’t that great. Are people so f**king cheap these days that they refuse to pay for ANYTHING?
We are cheap because we were used to unlimited music with ads. 10 hours per week isn’t the only limit – you can only listen to the same song 5 times.
In other words you’re just spoiled and that’s why you’re whining?
Agreed. The free Spotify subscription is just meant for sampling the service without having to pay for it, it’s simply not meant to be a full-blown service without any payments.
I’ve been a Spotify Premium subscriber for a long time now and I’m absolutely delighted with it. I just wish they’d make a tablet-optimized version of their Android client, the phone-optimized one is simply unuseable on a tablet.
I’ve been using MOG for about a year now and it’s been great, until recently. The iPhone app no longer remembers where you left off after quitting and reopening. IT USED TO DO THIS UP UNTIL TWO UPDATES AGO! WTF are they doing over there?! Plus I hate the “queue” (Especially because of the bug I just described. It kinda sucks to have to scroll through your entire queue to get to the song you were just playing that’s 100 positions in! ). Keep the queue if you must MOG, but sometimes I just want to play a few songs from an album and be done with them… Oh well maybe Spotify will float my boat
You can have all the free sampling you want on youtube or any other “service” out there.
I want the music stored on my server, thank you very much. I am perfectly capable of streaming it to any device I may want to use it.
With a service like this it’s a whole lot easier to find new bands to listen to. Going through YouTube for example is tedious and slow whereas in Spotify et. al. you just tap on “Next.” I’ve found dozens of bands that I would’ve never found otherwise just by stumbling around on Spotify.
THAT is exactly the strength of these kinds of services.
Might as well create an interface around Youtube so you can click next then.
Obviously that already exists:
http://blip.fm/
But I’m not a user of any of the mentioned services or blib so I probably have it all wrong. 🙂
Edited 2011-07-15 12:29 UTC
Spotify has confirmed that they are not currently offering a Radio option for their service in the U.S.A. It is DOA until this is enabled.
http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/where_is_the_radio-l8mms
http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/wheres_the_radio-1h5n7b
Is this a podcast? For some reason it’s in my podcatcher feed linking to http://osnews.com/audio/