Spotify Plans CD Quality Music Streams Comments

"it's increasingly looking like Premium will be £10 of our hard recession earned cash well spent... "

Nope. Still don't see any incentive what-so-ever to pay for the premium service! An advert every 5 or 6 songs is actually a welcome break for me, and as for quality - well it's already superior to my early CD rips and sounds amazing as it is. I don't think that the audiophile market for streaming music is a huge one either!

If the mobile version was only available to premium members and If the normal service had adverts every 2 songs and 56kbs quality music - then I would get the premium service.

I find it impossible to distinguish a Spotify 160K stream from a CD WAV file through fairly serious HiFi equipment, and I very much doubt if most people could tell the difference under lab conditions and certainly not on the equipment most people listen to Spotify with.

So no it is just a sprat to catch the uninformed out. Spotify should concentrate on improving its targeted advertising model or drop the subscription price substantially.

I didn't know mobile version was subscribers only, wasn't mentioned in your article, but that doesn't exactly make sense to me unless Spotify are going to give some of that money to the Telco ISP's to keep them happy.

I am saying that they may have shot themselves in the foot...yes, the service is too good to be free but they can't exactly retract an existing service without annoying a lot of people now.

Essentially, I am saying that I disagree with your opinion that it would be £10 well spent for a majority of people ;)

are there any signs of spotify eventually incorporating/moving to a pay-to-download subscription service similar to what virgin media are talking of doing?

I use spotify through a reasonable amp and speakers and popping on a CD is still miles better - if upgrading guarantees no drop outs and true CD quality, it will be worth it. Once you can get it through a set-top box and drive it without a PC it will be brilliant.

Personally I'll be paying the tenner for the mobile. I don't often notice a difference between 160k and CD, but I'm sure to switch it on if it's there.

As for paying the mobile operators; I don't see why this would be necessary. Mobile data plans are 1Gig at best or you pay per megabyte and you can be sure you'll get a hefty bill from the operator when you go over this.

i personally think the free service is great and there's not much value for me in the paid service. also very unsure about the mobile version. it'll eat through data and how good will the quality be over 3G? if it's limited to wifi (which it probably will be on some phones) it'll have even less value.

the free product is too good.

One thing to bare in mind, unless/until there is a big take up of high bit rate tracks you will not benefit from Spotify's lightning fast track start-up and downloads. There will be too few if any other high bit rate users out there to make the most of the p2p system - it will all have to come down from Spotify's servers.

I love Spotify and I'm quite happy with the 160kbps Ogg and even the adverts are not that intrusive but there is a dark cloud on the horizon for the service. there are already a number of third party apps to save the music and I wonder how long the record companies will accept this. I have saved music so I could listen to it in the car but I like the original idea of not having any physical media at home, what about having ICE with a built in Spotify receiver with a combined subscription between 3 and Spotify?.