Spotify arrives in the US; brings a shiny webOS app with it 45
by Tim Stiffler-Dean Sat, 16 Jul 2011 4:40 am EDT
Spotify music streaming has finally arrived in the US, and with it the app that made webOS-toting Americans everywhere jealous of our European neighbors has come along as well. We've been waiting on this day for a long time, even before we found out a week ago that Spotify was already planning on making the move, and now it's finally here.
Sadly, the service is invite-only for right now to free customers, but you're welcome to pay the $4.99/month Premium fee to get access immediately and start your jam session straight away. Click the links below to grab the app or read more details, and don't forget to read our review of the original UK version of the app over here.
Source: webOS App Catalog, TiPB; Via: webOSRoundup;
45 Comments
so the only way to get access to the free version is through email invite? Can someone please pm me with an invite? I would love to try this service..... Thanks!
Me too please!
Of course you can sign up for an email invite at spotify.com, but also try Trent Reznor's (from Nine Inch Nails) invite. I did this and got my invite almost immediately: https://www.spotify.com/us/trent-reznor/
Thanks for the Trent Reznor invite. That worked great and fast. (Got it in a half hour) Still waiting for my original regular invite.
We got ours from Mos Def on FB
I don't see it in the TouchPad app catalog. I have an invite and it is running on my laptop fine.
You need the premium services to use the app anyway on your phone anyway.
You should be able to sign up w/out an invite by following the below steps:
1) visit spotify.co.uk while going through a proxy server based in the UK. You can use DavesProxy.com
2) sign up for an account using your normal email and a UK based postal code (McDonald's.co.uk and search for London)
3) log into new account on spotify.com (us site), and change your zip code to your real zip code
Enjoy! This worked for me a couple days ago.
The above will allow you to stream via desktop via free account. You must pay to use via mobile device.
Spotify is really good :) Used it while I was in the UK. Too bad we don't have it in Germany. Effing GEMA.
Please correct this:
"but you're welcome to pay the $4.99/month Premium fee to get access immediately" --- NO, this is the "Unlimited" price, which offers unlimited streaming, but no offline caching. For Premium, it's $9.99/month, which is a step up from "Unlimited" and offers offline caching/listening of songs for when you're not online.
Source:
https://www.spotify.com/us/get-spotify/go/premium
Also, all I get for almost every song I try to play is "This track is currently not available for streaming on Spotify." Anybody getting this as well?
Are you using the right subscription? The other difference between the Unlimited and Premium plans is that only the Premium plan lets you use their mobile apps.
I got my invite through Coca Cola promotion. Just google Spotify Coca Cola, enter your email, and a few minutes later your invite is in your inbox. Here's the link: http://www.spotify.com/us/coca-cola/
http://www.spotify.com/us/smashingpumpkin/
Get your free invite!
And tell me again WHY THIS IS SOO GOOD? If it was 10.00 done then fine. As an ongoing charge A NO! That's why I have the amazon cloud player along with 8 gigs on my device.
It lets you stream any song. With Amazon cloud player you have to own the songs first. For people who have not had a chance to build up huge music collections, streaming services are better.
that's not good for me. i have a lifetime of music so paying to play my own music is crazy. So i guess if you don't have a music collection, which at my age is criminal and i don't know anyone that likes music that doesn't, but for them it's fine i guess.
For me it's not a service i want or want to pay for. i'm more looking to stream the 22000 songs i already own from my house. And i'm just not interested in paying to do it.
Yep, I can see that. For someone like me, I never got into buying a lot of CDs or even mp3s, so services like this have really helped me get music. I have maybe ever paid for a hundred songs.
yep. see. I grew up in a musical family and my father was/is an audiophile. I'm not an audiophile but i loved music and was buying record when i was about 7. Obviously graduated to cds and mp3s and stuff. But i spent highschool accumulating tapes and records, college accumulating cds, grad school ripping cds to mp3s and even hooking up a turntable to a computer to turn vinyl into mp3s. I was also a dj so i had tons of mixtapes i made and versions of songs that are not in mass release, like remixes, extended cuts, etc. Then you add to that my fathers massive Jazz cd collection which i ripped, the classics that i didn't already have. I ended up with a massive collection. Oh and then there was the napster days where. But i literally have a bunch of boxes of cds in storage, which that reminds me i need to take them and see if i can sell them at a shop around here.
So the thing about like icloud and google music and even spotify is, I really just want to listen to my own music. iCloud is crazier because you have to pay for storing stuff you didn't buy on itunes (which for everything) and there's no streaming.
i have the same issue with pandora. It's ok just not for me.
But the spotify app for webos is pretty good. i tested it. it works. but it's probably much better with a premium account.
Now a google music account would be interesting.
So I have to pay for "access" to the music I already bought and ripped? This is better than my own Ampache machine how?
(seriously, I'm honestly asking the question)
M.
This also lets you stream music.
I'm honestly as confused as you guys are with regards to the hype surrounding the sync feature. Maybe the ease of doing it plus having all your music in one place is what people like?
I agree. If you're going to keep your music collection up to date through whatever means, why come and complain about an app charging to do something that you don't need? Don't buy it, duh. Personally, I look at it like, someone could recommend Colour Revolt to me and I could listen to 30 second clips of their songs on the internet for a incomplete opinion or take the time to download it and listen to it, either wasting my money if I bought it or having wasted my time searching for it if I don't actually like it. Oooor I could do a minute search in Spotify and have instant access to all their albums and be more likely to give it an honest listen since I can easily play it as many times as I want quickly.
These services are rarely about playing your own music, it's about discovering new music, which is why quite a few customers were miffed the radio feature is not yet included for US customers.
Because everyone has an Apache server....or even knows what the heck that is.
Not only that a lot of people don't like leaving their computers on all day.
Curious if someone who has used both Grooveshark and Spotify can explain how they are different or why one is better than the other. I love Grooveshark, seems to provide the exact same service and only costs me $3 a month stream any song ever created, make play lists, radio mode based on songs I select (pandora mode). I have heard great things about spotify for well over a year but I am wondering how it is better or different than Grooveshak?
I've been using Grooveshark and just signed up for Spotify Premium. Since I still have the grandfathered rate of $3 instead of Grooveshark's new rate of $9 a month, I'll probably keep both for a while.
Both Spotify and Grooveshark let you search for and play any song in their library. The difference is that with Grooveshark, you're playing songs that other users have uploaded (and that Grooveshark most likely does not have the rights to stream). Spotify, however, lets you steam any song it has the rights to stream and after having signed agreements with all four major music labels, this amounts to about 15 million songs. The difference ends up being that Grooveshark has a larger library (particularly for foreign music and newer releases - for example, Adele's 21 is not on Spotify), whereas Spotify's collection is more accurate and organized, making it easier to search (as it is not dependent on user's tags, which tend to be inaccurate). Spotify features a radio mode as well, although this is currently not available to US customers due to ongoing licensing talks.
As far as applications go, both Grooveshark and Spotify has cross-platform desktop clients (Spotify does have a Linux app for Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora, but it is only available to Unlimited/Premium members because they can't make it reliably run ads). Grooveshark's desktop app runs songs strictly from its network, while Spotify seeks to be a more complete media experience. It plays both streaming songs and local songs (which it tries to match up with songs in its database to make sharing to other Spotify users easier). It also allows you to wirelessly sync your playlists and songs to your mobile device. The Grooveshark app lacks this ability, however, it is more likely that it will have every song you own on its streaming network, making local file playing not as necessary as long as you're willing to build your library up on Grooveshark yourself and you're not concerned about your data usage.
As for as mobile apps, I can only make an incomplete accessment because the Grooveshark app on webOS is just a little better than terrible, however, their apps on iOS/Android are supposed to be much better. If you're going to be changing platforms soon, ask for reviews of the Grooveshark app elsewhere. However, for a webOS only view, the Spotify webOS app is so ridiculously better than the Grooveshark webOS app that the latter cannot really compare. Once the Spotify app has ran through your on-device songs after the initial load up, I found it to be far more faster and reliable than the Grooveshark app, which is bogged by down choppy scrolling and mysterious "decoding error" messages. It also looks a lot nicer. It plays songs almost instantly that the Grooveshark app will take anywhere to 30sec to 1min to play, if it doesn't pop up with an error and doesn't play it at all. So if you're going to be sticking around with webOS, I would highly recommend getting Spotify instead.
At the $10 Spotify and $3 Grooveshark pricepoints, I would say keep both and use Grooveshark in the case Spotify does not have a song you want. At the $10 Spotify and $9 Grooveshark pricepoints, I would get Spotify and just buy or download the occasional song it does not have. I really don't think Grooveshark's team is as capable as the Spotify team to charge almost the exact same price.
I think the difference is that HP/Palm works more closely with Spotify than it does with Grooveshark (Spotify has appid com.palm.app.spotify). Though I do wonder what was with the delay in making the app webOS 2.x compatible...
At least for Touchpad owners, the full Grooveshark site works, where they don't have the option to use Spotify yet.
I have the $3 grooveshark account and I am annoyed that I can no longer get the app on my Pre- since I doctored.
Otherwise, the app worked okay. It's definitely not as nice as the iOS and android apps but it was functional.
I wonder why HP/Palm won't work with Grooveshark to bring the app back to "legacy" devices, but they work with Spotify.
Well, it's not exactly the most legal service. But I think the Spotify thing happened through a relationship with Palm UK and not the US team, so their policy/focus may be different than the team over here. And truly, Palm doesn't build the best apps themselves nor are they the speediest - probably why it took so long to update it for webOS 2.0.
I hope the App Catalog isn't going Android/iOS and blocking the services that are "not the most legal". A lot of the best apps you can argue how legal they are, such as the emulators which have been banned from Android Market and the App Store.
If that is the case, then 2.x adoption numbers must be so small they don't have to worry about it.
I would email Grooveshark and tell them to send you the ipk file. They've had to make the Android app available through other means because it got booted from the Android Marketplace and put the iOS app on Cydia for the same reason, so I see no reason they can't upload the webOS ipk somewhere and refer people to the link.
The only thing Spotify has succeeded in doing is completely butchering my music organization, becoming unresponsive and NOT streaming music to my phone. Epic FAIL.... Glad I didn't pay for it.
For local music, I would definitely stick with Music Player Remix. These services are really only good for streaming music you don't have already anyway.
So this not an Enyo app and, therefore, no TouchPad scalability?
correct. it's the same mojo app we've been enjoying in europe for a while now. fingers cross a touchpad version comes.
Tried it. software is fine but you can't stream your own music unless you pay so it's useless to me.
I don't need a pandora and my music collection is much better. So sadly i'll pass. I'll stick with something that streams my homes stuff free like Ampache
so how does one use proxy servers from webOS apps? Or more specifically, make a specific app do everything thru a particular proxy server?
There is no Touchpad App for this .... right? At least I can't seem to find one.
How come every song on my palm says either Not Available for Streaming, or Local File but Not Yet Synchronized.
I am missing something simple I presume.
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oh I get it, winmo/symbian/palm versions don't work w/o premium plan, but iOS/android do??? Bogus.
I don't know what their seeming collaboration w/ palm has brought us..
At least the app finally became 2.x compatible a short while ago!
But if you take a look at the app on-device, their collaboration has allowed Spotify to use API's and methods not typically available to most apps. That's why it's appid is com.palm.app.spotify.
luckily i was already invited :)
I'm signing up for Spotify now, in the question of "Cell Phone OS" webos isn't even an option. How sad :(