I'm happy about this. Maybe they can convince people music is worth paying money for and instead of wasting time selling ads they can spend time and money building a good product.

>> "- Spotify is even available as a web app,and desktop client which i use most. This one???"

It's available on Android, iOs, Windows Phone AND the web at http://listen.beatsmusic.com

>> - "The item you've requested is not currently available in the Swedish Store, but it is available in the U.S. Store."

Like most music/video services it's launching in one location (US) and planning to expand to others soon. e.g. iTunes Radio is still US only. Spotify took years to branch out of Europe.

>> What are the advantages I will gain if I switch from Spotify?

After a few hours of use the main benefit seems to be playlists. I've described how they work in another post on this thread so won't repeat but they seem infinitely more useful to me on this than playlists on Spotify (which I've been using for around 5 years).

I know. My music listening habits have changed since I dropped Spotify. I am not less happy for it. In fact, I value the music that I listen to much more now, since the music I listen to is pretty exclusively a set of music that I thought was good enough to pay money for specifically.

> Not to mention the underavailability of music on a service like Bandcamp. What % of the top Spotify tracks can actually be bought there?

When you add 7digital and Amazon music, I think the % is over 100. I have never not been able to find a DRM free distribution of an album or song that I wanted.

I'm not a musician. I'm a listener trying to find music that I like to listen to. Do you have a recommendation for us on the other end of the speaker wire?

I would say that Spotify does not compete with traditional media players, it competes with radio.

If i want to listen to my favorite songs, there is no reason to use Spotify for that. But if i want something different-but-similar and i do not really know what, because i am not very interested in music, then discoverability of new music by Spotify is game-changing.

Spotify has two drawbacks though: you need a constant Internet connection and it removes tracks at will. The constant internet connection can be solved by downloading media to the device, but the fact that some tracks (even whole albums) can become unavailable suddenly is utterly disappointing. This is the reason I keep buying CDs. Spotify is an amazing tool to listen on the go but whenever I feel a real connection (no pun intended) with an artist's music, I have to buy their art in a physical format.

This has been my experience as well.

I’m not sure what part of the service you consider ‘inferior’ to Spotify (I personally dislike Spotify’s UI/UX), but ? Music’s iOS integration is really great. I can also use it in my android devices and Sonos stuff too.

I also find Music’s professionally-curated playlists (and radio stations now that there are a variety) to be far superior to any algorithm I’ve come across for music discovery.

This is what I do. I use Spotify as an on-demand radio. If I like an artist or album, I buy it in physical form. (Usually on record because why not? And it often comes with a download code.)

Spotify doesn't have the music I want to listen to.

No clue really, I am more “forceful” these days in terms of requiring software to be open if it is to set foot on my devices. Bandcamp is great and it is where I get the majority of my music these days.

Spotify was only available in Sweden for the initial 3 years, and after that they launched in the UK as well. 5 years after the local launch, they expanded into the US.

The original iPod had no wifi so that would be tough. And iTunes is more locked in than I like, so I use Amazon for my media purchases.

> "At some point, corporations convinced consumers that buying a whole service contract everytime you play a song."

Well, no one is a buying a new contract every time, but I assume you mean that I'm agreeing to a contract when I listen to a song. If that's the case, yes, it's better than it used to be. I have access to millions of songs. We have on demand radio where I can pick every single song I listen to and I pay next to nothing for it. It's something we've dreamed of for decades.

> " is more convenient than just playing a song"

And are these companies supposed to just provide these songs for me for free to listen to? How would that work? And I can still buy music if I want, which I do for the artists I enjoy.

> "Now you will have to buy a whole new service contract everytime you drive a car"

I will?

Or maybe it does? At least the things you are complaining about (minus the auto reset) are exactly what I desire to happen.

I barely ever listen to a specific album (in a specific order), but often listen to an artists entire catslog.

Disagree I consider myself the average music fan and the reason I like this service is that I have all my music with me where ever I go, even if its not my device. Other people I know who use Spotify are mostly average the other half isnt.

Spotify has converted me from a pirate in my younger days to a paid music subscriber.

I've run into this as well, Apple Music seems to have much wider coverage than Spotify, even when it comes to fairly mainstream 'indie' labels. Both services have big holes in their catalogs, though, and sometimes when deep diving into particular artists or labels, I find YouTube more likely to have rarer albums and such (usually recorded from vinyl by some kind soul).

Which is verifiably false.

Spotify launched in 2006, and expanded into the US in 2011. You truly believe that it never expanded in the EU in the intervening 5 years? How then did it launch in the UK in 2009? Or how did it have a million paying customers in the EU by the time they launched in the US?

It is to me, though. I don't need another way to discover music. I have that well-covered.

And by "buy music", I wasn't referring to a way to pay artists (that would be a followup question if I didn't already know that part). I mean, can I download the music in a high-quality, open-standard, format?

I thought Spotify only did streaming, and I am not interested in a streaming service.

this is a bizarre analogy

no one had to limit themselves to listening to only one band before Spotify

FWIW, I currently have about 100 GB of music on my phone. And that is in a fairly high quality AAC format. Converted to lossless, it might be about five times that size? I don't even think of my music collection as all that extensive. But still, 160 TB would be a different ball game altogether. For sure, there is no mass market for music players with that sort of capacity. (Especially now that streaming is taking over.)