When spotify was announced, no-one was allowed to use it. You could sign up for invitations, similar to the way gmail.com worked for a while. I signed up, it seemed like it might be an interesting music service. They wanted my username, so I used the same one I do everywhere. Then I waited.
Some months later a friend said “Hey, I have some spotify invites, want to try it?” I said sure, took the code and went to log in with it. When it came time to put in my username it said I couldn’t use it, it was already taken. That was kind of good, since I had taken it. I contacted support to see how I could use my name. We interacted over a live chat.
The first thing I learned was that I could NOT use my existing username with an invite like this. It simply wasn’t allowed. So then I asked if they could delete my existing username so I could use it on an invite and they said sure, no problem. They took care of it and we disconnected.
But it still didn’t work. It still said the name existed. I gave it a day to see if a database cache needed to flush or something, but still no luck.
I contacted support again and the person nicely told me that once a username has been deleted it can never be used again by anyone ever. And it can’t be turned back on. It’s just gone.
By this time I’d sunk far more time into this service than I’d ever intended. To add insult to injury, they said they didn’t support my OS anyway, I’d have to buy an operating system and install it in a virtual machine or buy a whole new computer to use their “free” service.
That’s when I swore off Spotify. As far as I know I still can’t use my username there. There are docs now on how I can install the windows player with Wine, but who wants that?
The End.
UPDATE: 17 Aug 2016
I’ve asked a couple times now, and the answer is firm. I may never have the username topher1kenobe, and I should really stop asking.
UPDATE: 22 April 2021
Spotify has relented! On a whim I tried making an account and it worked.
yeah, I got an account for being a member of some other service at the time. I tried it and found it stupid and unintuitive. I actually got in on the ground floor of the Google Music service for $7.99 month. it works about 1000x better than Spotify and I can add any of Google’s 18-20 million tracks to my own library which mixes with the library that I’ve uploaded from my own computer. For a cloud service just, like most other things Google does, it is ahead of most other cloud based services. The only downside to Google Music is the computer client that you have to run in order to upload and download music from Google to a computer needs about 10 more options than they offer. It’s kind of an all or nothing situation and they don’t appear to save the history of downloads on the cloud so I’ve had it download things multiple times just because it seems to forget that I did that already. However, the whole point is to upload your own library so it is available on your mobile devices. For this, it does an excellent job.
I have switched to the family Apple Music plan. I still keep Google Music because it is the same as I mentioned 2 years ago, and it’s still $7.99. I still keep it because it also includes YouTube Red now and no commercials ever on YouTube is a beautiful thing. Apple Music is a very large service. I never found it unintuitive the way many people did when it first started and in my opinion it has only gotten better. Since I am in the Apple ecosystem now, it just makes sense.
Whenever a service like this says they don’t support Linux I like to ask them what OS they are running on all of their servers. The answer is, of course, almost always Linux (and if it’s not, you don’t want to use that service anyways). My standard reply to this is “So you use Linux as an essential part of your service, but don’t support it?”