Not only have they sold their soul, but the bastard version of spotify with facebook integration now crashes when you run it under Wine. Bastards.
Spotify 'sold soul' to boy king Zuckerberg
I can't quite recall serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson ever running a big, successful, profit-making internet business – and his latest radio venture seriously misjudges both the medium and the market. But as a pundit, he occasionally airs views that others are too timid to articulate. Robertson takes aim at digital music …
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Thursday 13th October 2011 15:00 GMT The Original Ash
The easy solution to that is to start using an alternative service. Youtube if you have unlimited data, BitTorrent if you don't. As usual, a great user experience has been ruined by corporate greed, and now unlicensed media is the most appealing format again.
Over the past year they took around £150 from me in subscriptions, and I listened to maybe 30 different artists. I'm fairly certain I could have bought the music I listened to for less than that. I won't make that mistake again :)
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Thursday 13th October 2011 17:25 GMT Tom 38
Native linux client
Yeah, it looks pretty nice, however it uses Qt (I'm a Gnome man), and it is, as you say, a native _linux_ client, and I'm running FreeBSD and don't fancy trying to locate all the necessary Qt libraries to run it under linux emulation.
I've been using despotify for now (also needs a premium account).
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Thursday 13th October 2011 14:51 GMT Alex Walsh
I understood Sony BMG Music, Universal Music, Warner Music, EMI and Merlin between them own around 18% of the share capital in spotify? Unless it's changed since the early issue back in 2008.
IMHO that alters things as little as Spotify should be seen more as a platform rather than an application in it's own right. It exists to stop punters paying their money to Apple or pirating, probably in that order :)
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Thursday 13th October 2011 16:04 GMT Jess--
the day spotify "requires" me to use facebook is the day spotify gets the premium subscription canceled and the software gets deleted. I suspect that a good number of current subscribers will feel the same.
I do use spotify and facebook but I have no wish to link the 2, as it stands right now facebook functions are turned off in spotify and it is not aware of my facebook login details
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Thursday 13th October 2011 16:21 GMT Version 1.0
In retrospect
I think Robertson has actually been spot on about the trends that music distribution is going to take - unfortunately, living at the bleeding edge of music distribution, he's always going to get sued first and then eventually everyone else will catch on afterwards.
Realistically, the music market is going to change eventually given that the digital age asteroid has struck - we're just watching the dinosaurs die these days - there's no rational reason for megalithic "music companies" in a digital age.
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Thursday 13th October 2011 18:52 GMT Fatty Eglon
Spotify plot loss ... customers next.
I was a regular Spotify user till they changed their policy on the free version. I could cope the the ads to benefit from their previously excellent product. Since the 5 plays limit, I've barely used it.
I would consider paying the ten quid, but if they make Facemuck obligatory as part of the package I'd rather eat my own hands.
I really despise what Zuckerborg has done to life, the universe and kids everywhere.
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Friday 14th October 2011 06:16 GMT mp3michael
Andrew agrees with me? Whoa - that's a victory!
Anytime I can get Andrew to even kinda agree with me, I call that a victory.
I will politely remind him that I was founder and CEO of digital music pioneer MP3.com which I sold for about $400 million. At the time of the sale we were doing $80 million in revenue with profit of $18 million. Not Google money, but show me any other digital music company that has ever made any profit with a consumer digital music business. Not sure there are many others so I think I'm somewhat qualified to make economic assessments.
-- MR
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