The only good thing it has is its recommendation algorithm and the convenience of having all the available music in one place.
Uploading your own music sucks (unreleased tracks get blocked for some reason), tags are messy (there is no standard, the labels do whatever they want), you can't customize your listening experience at all (no replay gain, dynamic playlists, custom tags or equalization) and obviously not owning your collection (which admittedly is irrelevant for most people).
Having "all the music" is a pretty important feature though.
But yeah, you are renting the music from them so you have to give it back the way you found it. I don't really consider spotify a music player of the same sort as winamp or foobar2000, it's much more like radio where you have agency over the playlist rather than a local executable to manage and play your local files.
It would be interesting if they provided some a way to get an audio stream you can then further process for replay gain and other stuff, though honestly fiddling with all that stuff seems like busy work.
"All the music" -- or having "a lot of music I listen to" is very important factor and somehow Spotify seems to be doing this right at least contents from Japan.
Library available to outside of Japan is significantly larger on Spotify compared to everyone else. It looks like some tracks are blocked outside of Japan, but compared to other services, this phenomenon is a lot less, actually magnitude less common compared to, say, Google's offering. (Haven't really done extensive research for Apple but doing a quick search, it's not very promising...)
I don't know what making this different, but as far as this relatively small segment of music, certainly Spotify's doing this right.
Yeah, the main accomplishment of Spotify is doubtlessly legal: to concentrate so much of the reproduction rights into a single company can't have been easy.
Actually, this convincing the big players to centralise is the real value Spotify provides, and this picture of them being a technology company could be viewed as smoke to obscure that they are basically an IP management company (though I expect the music industry is well aware of this and made contracts that reflect this).
I'm curious about their claim to have "no loss in sound quality", when they say they're recording Spotify's playback and saving as mp3. I'd expect double compression that way (the original compressed audio from spotify, compressed again to mp3). Are they somehow reading the actual file as Spotify plays it rather than the audio, and saving that?
They say "Spytify records the same quality that Spotify outputs" but that implies a loss in quality if it's recording an mp3 and re-saving it as a new mp3. There's no lossless option in Spotify.
Their recommendation algorithm? really? I find it to be the worst I've encountered. It constantly just keeps shoveling the same few songs I've liked once over and over.
This has not been my experience. Have you used Spotify a long time so that it has had time to get to know you? My Discover Weekly is uncanny in its ability to find me music I love. I tried going to Apple Music and came running back due to how good that is on Spotify.
I have been using Spotify regularly since 2008 and the recommendation algorithms work pretty poorly for me. For me the only reason to use Spotify is that it gives me access to almost all music I am interested in, and does it in one place.
Not the original poster, but I have been using Spotify for about 3 or so years fairly heavily (free version, not premium), and it still fails to update Discovery Weekly a good 90%+ of the time. The only time I get it to update is when I listen to a wildly different genre (Death metal to K-Pop, for example) and then wait about a month for it to figure out I listened to something different. Only then does it start showing new stuff. Searching around Google, this seems to be a somewhat common issue.
Daily Mix or Discover Weekly? Daily Mix seems to be tailored to give you a bunch of roughly genre separated playlists of stuff you already listen to, whereas Discover Weekly seems to be the "play new stuff that I might like" one.
It also might be that you haven't liked/listened enough for it to be useful yet.
Same -- that and it pushes new releases by the same artists -- which for someone reasonably engaged is kind of redundant.
OTOH when I used google play for a few months, they managed to recommend a new to me band that was based in roughly the same area and playing the type of music I listened to.
So at least for that type of music, they were a lot better than anything I've ever got in multiple years of using spotify
Maybe I'm biased because I don't use recommendation algorithms often, but on the rare occasion that I have to use Spotify it always surprises me how long it keeps me entertained before I have to skip a track. Depending on how you view / listen to music that might be a bad thing though.
Uploading your own music sucks (unreleased tracks get blocked for some reason), tags are messy (there is no standard, the labels do whatever they want), you can't customize your listening experience at all (no replay gain, dynamic playlists, custom tags or equalization) and obviously not owning your collection (which admittedly is irrelevant for most people).