Moving from Grooveshark to Spotify
Finally, the day has come for Spotify to offer its services to us Swiss folk. Previously, I have spent days trying to ‘hack’ an account so that I can start paying them money instead of Grooveshark.
Why did I switch? Let’s just compare two numbers – after that, nothing else needs to be said.
Cold startup time
| Grooveshark: | 33.8s |
| Spotify: | 2.3s |
And that’s without Adobes’ ever annoying “There’s a new Adobe AIR update available” message that pops up every other day and takes another 30s to click through – not counting the inevitable restart of the application afterwards.
Cold Start + searching and playing a song (Paul Kalkbrenner – Aaron)
| Grooveshark: | 124s |
| Spotify: | 8s |
Mind you, the numbers are including typing the artist and song. Spotify would serve the song right in under 3s if I were to type fast enough. Anyway, there’s a difference of 3 magnitudes in speed!
The benchmark was done on a contemporary Macbook Air with 4GB Ram and SSD, so not the sloppiest machine in the world. 124s to start listening to a song – in other words that’s two friggin’ minutes! I honestly can’t imagine a worse user experience.
Like I proclaimed, nothing else needs to be said.
Switch now and enjoy your life instead of waiting for the music to play!
P.S.: Migrating your existing playlists from Grooveshark to Spotify is made kinda easy with playlistify – so that’s not a reason to hold back.
Category: personal 3 comments »
November 17th, 2011 at 4:42 pm
I use Grooveshark with Mozilla Prism. The startup time and overall feeling is much better. Even adblock works.
One thing that bugs me with Grooveshark is that they don’t pay money to the artist. Thats why I consider to switch to Spotify too.
November 17th, 2011 at 7:17 pm
Now that grooveshark.com is off flash, Prism actually is a good suggestion. As a paying customer I had access to the dedicated desktop client and an ad-free experience anyway.
But even Grooveshark/Prism won’t give a native experience including the usual keyboard shortcuts – I can certainly see a speed improvement. But even so, building the dedicated client in AIR just feels like an incredibly bad choice to me which reflects on the overall impression I have of the product.
Apart from speed and a (to me) much nicer GUI, Spotify offers a consolidated library. No more trying to find out which version of a song actually has the least buggy ID3 tags. Also, there’s a pretty neat iPhone app. For some, the offline mode is a real killer feature compared to Grooveshark, as well.
I didn’t even know that Grooveshark is not paying the artists at all. But knowing so just proves my prior feeling of Grooveshark being inferior in almost any conceivable way.
April 11th, 2012 at 8:43 am
Hello, let’s pray all together that it would come to Turkey as well… it’s addictive, i started using it in Spain and now i can’t compare it with anything. I’m miserable.
:(
cheers
elif