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I complain a lot about pricing for media so when something comes along that's actually good value for money, and good in general, I like to sing its praises. I read today that's it's finally out in the US.

It's free to use with the occasional advert, but paying is cheap at £5/10 in the UK and now $10 in the US per month. Without paying the fees there's adverts like I said, they can be annoying however they're region-orientated so sometimes it feels like listening to a particularly good local radio station. But it's not just the pricing that's good. It's difficult to find a song or a band that isn't on there, and usually that's because of a copyright issue or a remix of a remix or something. Most people I know who use it started off sceptically and came back to me surprised at how comprehensive the music is. The absolute best part is the system for finding new music. If you find you listen to a lot of the same things and want to expand a bit there is a surprisingly good recommendation system. I've found a lot of music through it that otherwise I would not have heard of, or would have waited a lot longer to hear about it on Twitter or something like that. Actually the majority of what I listen to now was found either by a friend or by myself on Spotify.

Basically I wanted to spread the word a little, and also see if anyone else loves Spotify as much as I do.

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Scepticism, that dry rot of the intellect, had not left one entire idea in his mind.

Me on the Starcraft.

Apparently, the Facebook founder and Demi Moore agree with you!

My dad's a musician, and I'm starting to learn to play also, so this'll be great for us. Thanks for the tip.

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Praise Be To Helix!

It's interesting to me that they finally got the deal done to release it in the States, because when I last read about its status in Wired, which was in November of last year, it still seemed like it was a long way from coming around.

I'm not sure I will jump all over this, having seen services like Pandora and Last.fm kind of overpromise and underdeliver in the breadth of music available and the quality of recommendation-based music matching. However, this is certainly not the only place where I've heard good things about Spotify, and they've certainly had the time to work out the issues that other services have had. It's not really appealing to me to listen to adverts, because I haven't listened to commercial radio really at all in like six years, but it seems like it might be worth a shot.

Thinking about it, though - working from home as I do now, I can't really see myself using it all that much in general. It seems that recently I've either had the TV in my office turned on, usually for soccer, or I'm just not in the mood to have the background noise. Maybe I could change my habits a bit if I had a decent streaming service going on, because CoNchat doesn't recommend as much new music to me as it used to.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

sweet, how long have they had such good coverage of songs?

I remember I tried it out back in late 2010 and was pretty disappointed with the coverage of tracks...

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Quote (Stiltzkin @ 15th July 2011 18:02)

sweet, how long have they had such good coverage of songs?

I remember I tried it out back in late 2010 and was pretty disappointed with the coverage of tracks...

To be honest I've been using it long before 2010 without much complaint on the coverage. There are big absentees like the entirety of Pink Floyd. What were you looking for?

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Scepticism, that dry rot of the intellect, had not left one entire idea in his mind.

Me on the Starcraft.

To be honest, I don't recall. It was probably some obscure indie/rock stuff - things like Josh Radin and the ilk, or some old school west coast rock. So I guess it wasn't an easy ask.

All I remember is that a good percentage of the tracks I tried to find, they didn't have. And I remember that a couple of them really should have been available - similar to your Pink Floyd point.

That said, I think I still have a basic account with them, so maybe I should give it another try.

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We apologise for the inconvenience