Spotify - where's the catch?

[Martinus]

Ok, so I was loyal to iTunes, being a Mac user and all... but Spotify apparently lets me listen all kinds of music for free.

So where's the catch? 

[katmai]

Need premium account to listen on smartphone. Other than that, haven't seen any catch.

[katmai]

Well and if premium on PC don't get the ads every 8-10 songs if i recall correctly.

[Martinus]

Ok, didn't notice that. But that's about 5 Euro per month, so still pretty cheap.

[The Brain]

No catch that I know of. It's the civilized way to listen to music. Obviously you pay the tiny sum to avoid ads.

[Syt]

I like it a lot, even though I've come across quite a few albums missing (e.g. a lot of Napalm Records releases or most Welle:Erdball albums).

[Josquius]

without premium lots of stuff is off limits and you can only listen to a song 5 times too.
it used to be great, despite a sometimes iffy libraray ive not used it for years.

[Razgovory]

Talk about a coincidence!  I helping my dad install stuff on his computer and I found this on there last night.  My brother (who also uses that PC), installed it.  Had no clue what it did.  Almost deleted it, (My dad had a bunch of junk on there for some reason) but my brother intervened and said he used it.

[DontSayBanana]

Grooveshark.  No premium account anymore for mobile app, not ad-supported.

[mongers]

Ok, so I was loyal to iTunes, being a Mac user and all... but Spotify apparently lets me listen all kinds of music for free.

So where's the catch? 

The musicians and songwriters get Very little money compared with what they recieved if you bought a CD or to a lesser extent the digital download.

[Eddie Teach]

Does it offer anything that a combination of youtube(songs on demand) and Pandora(shuffle + discover new stuff) don't?

[Tonitrus]

While I like Pandora, my understanding is that compared to other music-streaming/radio sites, their overall content library is rather limited.

[Neil]

The musicians and songwriters get Very little money compared with what they recieved if you bought a CD or to a lesser extent the digital download.

Who cares about them?  If they wanted to make money, they should have gotten a real job.

[DontSayBanana]

The musicians and songwriters get Very little money compared with what they recieved if you bought a CD or to a lesser extent the digital download.

Mongers, please look stuff up before you start talking.  An artist on iTunes will probably get less than 6% paid out to them.  Streaming is expensive for the provider; they end up saddled with the satellite radio rate, or 10.5-12% of the revenue for the playing time (a couple years back, I was actually part of one group that lobbied unsuccessfully to keep the rate hike from going through).  CD rates are actually by far the lowest.  The regulatory rate is 9.1 cents per song or 1.75 cents per minute, whichever is greater.  Most of your Billboard Top 100 artists don't put out songs longer than 5:12 (the break-even point), so for that $20 CD you bought at the store with 10 short-ish tracks, the artist got 91 cents.  Less than 5 percent.

[mongers]

The musicians and songwriters get Very little money compared with what they recieved if you bought a CD or to a lesser extent the digital download.

Mongers, please look stuff up before you start talking. An artist on iTunes will probably get less than 6% paid out to them.  Streaming is expensive for the provider; they end up saddled with the satellite radio rate, or 10.5-12% of the revenue for the playing time (a couple years back, I was actually part of one group that lobbied unsuccessfully to keep the rate hike from going through).  CD rates are actually by far the lowest.  The regulatory rate is 9.1 cents per song or 1.75 cents per minute, whichever is greater.  Most of your Billboard Top 100 artists don't put out songs longer than 5:12 (the break-even point), so for that $20 CD you bought at the store with 10 short-ish tracks, the artist got 91 cents.  Less than 5 percent.

This is a good way of getting people to disregard the rest of what you then say; you should try that approach more often.