Spotify: Has anyone else noticed...

[SgtTimBob]

When you look at The Beach Boys profile on Spotify, there's like 17 compilation releases that have been published since Fifty Bigh Ones, all of them with shoddy looking un-official artwork that seems to have been thrown together by a chimpanzee in Photoshop. These are all listed as being published by different groups such as 'Replay Records' 'Entertain Me Europe LTD' 'Play Digital' and so on. It's hard to believe that all these releases are completely legit, surely Capitol/Brother wouldn't want to approve rival compilation albums to compete with their own official release? It just looks like some guys have decided to cash in on the promotional work from the 50th tour and pushed out a load of albums to Spotify (incidentally the fact that they all came out after Fifty Big Ones puts them conveniently at the top of the album list).

I'm not saying this isn't legit. But, seriously? Something fishy going on right there, surely?

[AndrewHickey]

This has already come up on the board a week or so ago. The releases you're talking about are all repackagings of Surfin' Safari and/or the Hite Morgan sessions, which are now out of copyright in the EU (and will almost certainly be the last ever Beach Boys music to go out of copyright...)

[SgtTimBob]

Ah okay then. That kinda sucks. Ah well.

[KittyKat]

Isn't Spotify just a legalized, cloud-based version of Napster? In other words, the tracks you get are what people have to offer to the cloud. So, if folks have those particular LP's on the system, that's what can be available. They have to be at least semi-legit releases, so they have all the tag data that are on databases such as Gracenote.

[AndrewHickey]

Isn't Spotify just a legalized, cloud-based version of Napster? In other words, the tracks you get are what people have to offer to the cloud. So, if folks have those particular LP's on the system, that's what can be available. They have to be at least semi-legit releases, so they have all the tag data that are on databases such as Gracenote.

No.
Spotify host all the music on a central server, and the music is supplied to them the same way it's supplied to any digital music store such as iTunes. The peer-to-peer element only comes in in that when you play music it's cached on your machine, and then when someone else plays it they might get packets from you as well as from Spotify, but it all originally comes from Spotify's own servers, not the users.

[Andrew G. Doe]

Isn't Spotify just a legalized, cloud-based version of Napster? In other words, the tracks you get are what people have to offer to the cloud. So, if folks have those particular LP's on the system, that's what can be available. They have to be at least semi-legit releases, so they have all the tag data that are on databases such as Gracenote.

Of course not - were that the case you'd have tracks by Zep, the Floyd and The Beatles up there, to name only the three most glaring absentees.

[KittyKat]

I don't even have Spotify but remember reading a few articles when it was being hyped. The thing about using data from users' computer caught my eye, but I didn't quite get how they were doing that and for what purpose. Why do they need "packets" from users at all, considering all the tracks are on a server?  Do other streaming services such as Pandora use such a method as well?

[AndrewHickey]

I don't even have Spotify but remember reading a few articles when it was being hyped. The thing about using data from users' computer caught my eye, but I didn't quite get how they were doing that and for what purpose. Why do they need "packets" from users at all, considering all the tracks are on a server?  Do other streaming services such as Pandora use such a method as well?

It makes it respond faster. If you're playing a song which thousands of other people have in their caches, then you can get bits of that music from all of them, saving bandwidth on the central server.

Pandora didn't use anything like that last time I used it, which was about a decade ago -- I don't know if they've changed it dramatically since then.

[hypehat]

Isn't Spotify just a legalized, cloud-based version of Napster? In other words, the tracks you get are what people have to offer to the cloud. So, if folks have those particular LP's on the system, that's what can be available. They have to be at least semi-legit releases, so they have all the tag data that are on databases such as Gracenote.

You might be getting confused by the fact that Spotify looks at your own music to see what you've already got as mp3s and loads it into your library, which is nice in theory but with The Beach Boys it always seems to load up bootlegs and on others it identifies albums all wrong, tracks in the wrong order, duplicates.... I kinda hate spotify, I guess if it made money they would have the incentive to make it work.

[Dudd]

Regardless, some of the covers they have are jaw-droppingly horrendous...