I was about to sign up for Spotify but I couldn’t get the first page of the signup to start. I fired up IE in case it was an issue and found exactly what the problem was - my “Facebook Disconnect” extension in Chrome was stopping the signup from showing up. This was very confusing at first until I realized and found that Spotify uses ONLY Facebook to handle account management and sharing features.

Okay… well… I guess for a free account that makes sense. Lets try out a pay account - $5 for a month to test it out isn’t to bad. Except ALL Spotify accounts, including the $10 a month premium account requires a Facebook account. What the holy fuck is that shit?

No Spotify for me. Even though I have a Facebook account (because if I don’t some people won’t contact me via email, sms, or phone), a premium service relying on Facebook for all account management and services is crap. On Facebook, the users are the product; on a premium service I am the customer. Why pay to be a product?

I guess I’ll stick with Amazon Cloud Player (syncs my iTunes better than Google Music) and Pandora for my streaming and cloud music playing. Unfortunately Pandora uses some Facebook integration too… but I can disable it.