I was a Spotify subscriber for about a decade (I was successfully hooked by their discounted college student rates), but I switched back to my own music curation recently: I noticed that Spotify would consistently "rabbithole" me into the same ~150 songs, most of which I didn't even like. They would also frequently lack small artists or independent labels, so I ended up having two media libraries anyways.
I switched over to Navidrome[1] as a self-hosted solution about a year ago, and I've been extremely happy with it (especially since it exposes a Subsonic-compatible API that most clients know how to use). The only thing I really miss is the mobile client experience: Spotify handled periodic disconnects (like on public transit) very gracefully, while no Subsonic clients that I've tried do so nearly as well.
Spotify UI sucks and they’ve gone completely Netflix in terms of recommendation dark pattern and yeah in general bad UI.
But the best selection of Hindi/Urdu songs, especially the old ones, is on Spotify by a margin. Apple Music is awful at this — a lot of songs, even ultra famous ones, are available only as shitty “covers” by seemingly random people. So I tolerate Spotify UX. Every few months I’d pay for Spotify a month or two (they keep throwing trials or cheap “X months at Y” offers) and then get frustrated again and come back to their ad-supported music listening.
But I always keep my 700-800 songs on my phone. And once in a while update the offline library with newly found/liked songs.
I grew tired of Spotify's repetitiveness (I suspect their recommendation algorithm prioritizes what is already cached on your device, to save bandwidth), of their terrible treatment of classical music (impossible to see full track titles), of their peddling of stuff I don't want (exclusive podcasts on a closed platform) and of the never-arriving Hi-Fi version.
So I re-ripped all my CDs and started a Roon subscription. Huge improvement, and the integrated album reviews are an incredible value, especially for jazz.
One thing about Roon which many people miss while complaining about paying for a subscription is that Roon's goals are aligned with the users. I pay them for providing a good experience of listening to my music. They don't have to peddle their own exclusive podcasts, optimize algorithms that feed me cheap stuff, all they get paid for is user experience. I'm quite happy with this arrangement.
The music industry should be worried, though. I almost forgot about my CDs, since Spotify worked so well. But now I took the time to re-rip all of them, which took quite a bit of time and effort. And if people have their own music collections, they might look for other (ahem) sources of music to fill their collection.
I think it's interesting that they have 295 million ad-supported monthly active users, which accounts for a revenue of only 449 million euros in Q4, compared to the 2 717 million euros from their 205 million premium users. That means each ad-supported user is only worth around €1.52 per quarter, or around 50.7 cents per month. That's not a lot of money, so why even bother? Why not limit the free accounts in other ways to get an even bigger difference to the premium accounts, and remove ads completely? And why are Netflix adding an ad-supported tier when there's so little money to make from those users?
I recently cancelled myself. it was the only service I used for a while, but they started to annoy me with their podcasting focus and suggested content started to get a bit weaker IMO. it used to be a great discovery tool, and I would frequently listen to the provide discover streams, but something started to change and it seemed to be a lot more 'pay to play' and they were suggesting a lot more ad content.
Of all my paid subscriptions for media, Spotify is the stickiest. I use it probably 10x my next most used subscription service and I bet I'm not alone in this.
And somehow they did it with the absolute worst client you can imagine. The UI is excellent at getting you not to use it. I would pay for a subscription if they actually put some effort into a native application for Windows instead of Elecron or whatever crap web tech they built it on.
Love spotify, but I have always wondered about what seems to be an intentional choice re: their iOS client.
Certain actions related to the speakers/mic outside of the app itself cause music to stop playing, and be unrecoverable unless I reopen the app and tap play.
For example, if I am listening to Spotify, open iMessage, and accidentally hit the dictation icon, I now have to go into Spotify to start playing the music again. If I drag the hidden iOS control pane down, it says no music is paused, so I can't start playing it from there again.
The only artists that benefit from Spotify are the top of the top, as in Beyoncé/Lady Gaga level.
I always suspected that the falloff is pretty steep as soon as you step away from let's say the top n artists at a time.
This confirms this suspicion again.
I'd go as far as say that piracy is much better for artists due to the lack of dark patterns (which funnel more people to fewer artists). And once you visit a show or buy a piece of merch you have given an artist more money than Spotify listening alone ever would have, and it is not even close.
People complaining about losing connections while streaming offline. People complaining about perpetual subscriptions. You know what doesn't have that problem? Owning your music.
When the music is owned by you and on your device then you can play it anywhere, anytime, regardless of network connection and you don't have to keep paying for it in order to continue listening to it.
Owning also allows you to slow down your intake of new music - which is actually a good thing. It takes a while to really get into an album and savor all the details and really get to know the album. And you get to keep that album forever at no additional cost!
Their model, service and platform is not without flaws but thanks to Spotify, me and my friends get to legally enjoy more music day in and day out than ever before.
What's everyone's opinion on youtube music? You pay $11.99/month for YouTube Premium, you get both ad-free youtube (important on mobile), as well as music. Whereas Spotify is $9.99/month, but you only get music and podcasts. Granted Spotify has a much bigger library.
I do this. While YouTube Music is just okay, the issue with paying for ad-free YouTube videos is more content creators are doing sponsored videos. So, the majority of YouTube's videos are laden with these sponsored ads and this severely degrades the ad-free experience.
Spotify has a much bigger library than YouTube Music? Hmm... Much as I love Spotify, it's always been at a disadvantage. The way I see it: on YouTube, content is "available by default" due to Content ID and the DMCA safe harbor, whereas on Spotify, content is "unavailable by default."
I obviously understand the principal of being frugal for the sake of being frugal regardless of how much money you have, but the average HackerNews frequent user has to have an income between $100k-$500k/yr or a net worth of $500k-$2.5m, right?
At that level, does $50/mo vs $150/mo in paid subscriptions register as a blip on the radar?
I say that as somebody who has Hulu, YouTube Premium, SoundCloud, Apple Music, Spotify, Netflix, Peacock, SiriusXM, HBO max, Roku CBS, ESPN+, Roku Discovery (and that's just what I could find jotted down from a statement)
I just don't comprehend the idea of "tweaking" something that's $100/yr. Obviously less fortunate people need to. But then how many of them tweak their $100/yr subscriptions and immediately go to Starbucks for a $7 drink right after?
I used Google Music from it launched until when it was shut down. Then I decided that I'd rather use a service where music streaming was their main business model and not just a side project or hobby that could get shut down at any point. So I left Google and switched to Spotify.
I also have issues with Apple music competing with other services while Apple owns not just the platform but also forces its competitors to use them for distribution and payment, but that's a separate issue.
I use YouTube music and so far so good. For me there hasn't been a song I liked that was on Sporify but not on YT.
I watch a lot of yt and ad removal is worth my time. In fact their price used to be $9.99 and I found it surprising people would subscribe to any other service.
The only other service that piques my interest is Apple Music with Dolby Atmos but I still prefer yt ad removal over Dolby Atmos given the fact that you need a compatible speaker and music for it to work
I'm a Spotify subscriber. every week I listen to a song I would never have found anywhere else, not even apple music, amazon music or youtube. I don't let them currate music for me. I usually listen to artists, then find playlists that other's have made, and listen and discover other artists, and if I find an artist I like, I listen to more of their stuff and then build out my own playlists.
I never got into spotify because it was missing too many smaller artists back then. They are on there now, but I went back to buying music. On bandcamp [0] if possible, Amazon otherwise, and CDs as a last resort [1]. Recently put it all on my home server running jellyfin [2] (tried navidrome [3], but the interface was even worse), though mostly I still play it via network share on my desktop music player MediaMonkey [4]
I don't think any of the streaming services are particularly friendly to artists either, but Apple Music pays more to the artist than Spotify does, and includes (real) lossless audio at no extra cost. For now, they've got my dollar.
I have a somewhat biased opinion since I work in ML close to people building recommender systems at Netflix, but I think Tidal is a great showcase of the pros and cons of algorithmically curated content VS human curated. Tidal playlists are mostly human-curated and excellent. However it does not scale: it does not cover the long tail of wide ranges and nuances of musical preferences, nor does it cover such preferences over a large range of time. Their recommendation engine is orders of magnitude worse than Spotify's one. On the other hand, I also find that Spotify sometimes pushes algorithmic curation too far: one example of that is when they used to force an algorithmically-driven order of songs when playing an album instead of a linear order (until Adele complained loudly). I think there's a balance here: Spotify could benefit from some human-curated playlists that don't only cover mainstream genres, but Tidal should definitely invest into their recommendation engine which is really subpar, especially so because a much smaller user-base makes this problem harder to solve well.
As in that bad? Besides they haven’t been able to figure Apple Login out. In recent many months they’re the only ones where Apple Login just doesn’t work.
Is there such a thing as hi-fi podcasts they are pushing on you? Or do you mean they are really trying to make you hear the Best Hi-fi 2022 playlist by some random? No, they must have some kind of official podcast to push, I'm sure..
Same here. The sound quality difference is kind of astonishing. I wasn't expecting there to be any difference, but it's so noticable that one must wonder what Spotify is doing to "round out" their sound so much.
One thing I really liked about Tidal was how detailed the credits for the albums are. It's very useful for Jazz fans in particular I think to look at who was a sideman on an album and who else they played with.
How would you lower the 70% to increase Spotify's profits?
> It distributes approximately 70% of its total revenue to rights holders (often record labels), who then pay artists based on individual agreements.[12]
Look, spotify is still growing fast. They aim for 20% MAU growth YoY, and they are actually achieving it: they added 23M new MAU between Q2 and Q3 last year, around 40% of those new users were premium subscribers. New numbers for Q4 will be released today.
They are still trying to capture the whole market. After doing that they will flick the lever to profitability over growth. The current goals are set for 2030. Only if Ek deviates from the growth trajectory too much he will be dropped as CEO.
That's on $12B in revenue, 4% churn, and having reformed one of the oldest, entrenched industries ever. I know nothing about the guy, but can you agree that's a remarkable achievement?
He keeps his job because he's promising that once an inflection point is reached, you become more aggressive about turning a profit. It's both your and mine guess on what that could be, but I think starting that procedure with a 200M paid subscriber base isn't the worst idea.
Does anyone have a feel for why the big three music labels haven’t developed their own music streaming services similar to how large film studios have? I’m certainly not complaining, mind you; it’s nice to be able to listen to a lot of music in one place.
Is music just less vertically integrated? E.g., music publishers don’t own radio stations whereas film and tv publishers typically own tv stations?
[+] [-] woodruffw|3 years ago|reply
I switched over to Navidrome[1] as a self-hosted solution about a year ago, and I've been extremely happy with it (especially since it exposes a Subsonic-compatible API that most clients know how to use). The only thing I really miss is the mobile client experience: Spotify handled periodic disconnects (like on public transit) very gracefully, while no Subsonic clients that I've tried do so nearly as well.
[1]: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|3 years ago|reply
But the best selection of Hindi/Urdu songs, especially the old ones, is on Spotify by a margin. Apple Music is awful at this — a lot of songs, even ultra famous ones, are available only as shitty “covers” by seemingly random people. So I tolerate Spotify UX. Every few months I’d pay for Spotify a month or two (they keep throwing trials or cheap “X months at Y” offers) and then get frustrated again and come back to their ad-supported music listening.
But I always keep my 700-800 songs on my phone. And once in a while update the offline library with newly found/liked songs.
[+] [-] jwr|3 years ago|reply
So I re-ripped all my CDs and started a Roon subscription. Huge improvement, and the integrated album reviews are an incredible value, especially for jazz.
One thing about Roon which many people miss while complaining about paying for a subscription is that Roon's goals are aligned with the users. I pay them for providing a good experience of listening to my music. They don't have to peddle their own exclusive podcasts, optimize algorithms that feed me cheap stuff, all they get paid for is user experience. I'm quite happy with this arrangement.
The music industry should be worried, though. I almost forgot about my CDs, since Spotify worked so well. But now I took the time to re-rip all of them, which took quite a bit of time and effort. And if people have their own music collections, they might look for other (ahem) sources of music to fill their collection.
[+] [-] sorenjan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kderbyma|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theFletch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redleggedfrog|3 years ago|reply
Until then my CD rips will stay.
edit: tips to rips
[+] [-] yehudalouis|3 years ago|reply
Certain actions related to the speakers/mic outside of the app itself cause music to stop playing, and be unrecoverable unless I reopen the app and tap play.
For example, if I am listening to Spotify, open iMessage, and accidentally hit the dictation icon, I now have to go into Spotify to start playing the music again. If I drag the hidden iOS control pane down, it says no music is paused, so I can't start playing it from there again.
Sounds small, but is super frustrating.
[+] [-] consumer451|3 years ago|reply
(Because they are screwing artists, on whom they depend to generate streamable content.)
As an example, he made 3x on Bandcamp vs Spotify for the same album.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
[+] [-] Herbstluft|3 years ago|reply
I always suspected that the falloff is pretty steep as soon as you step away from let's say the top n artists at a time.
This confirms this suspicion again.
I'd go as far as say that piracy is much better for artists due to the lack of dark patterns (which funnel more people to fewer artists). And once you visit a show or buy a piece of merch you have given an artist more money than Spotify listening alone ever would have, and it is not even close.
[+] [-] persedes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schoolornot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taylodl|3 years ago|reply
When the music is owned by you and on your device then you can play it anywhere, anytime, regardless of network connection and you don't have to keep paying for it in order to continue listening to it.
Owning also allows you to slow down your intake of new music - which is actually a good thing. It takes a while to really get into an album and savor all the details and really get to know the album. And you get to keep that album forever at no additional cost!
That's my $0.02 anyway.
[+] [-] mattgreenrocks|3 years ago|reply
It's kind of the economy in a nutshell: "be the middleman, not the person creating."
[+] [-] scarface74|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nebula8804|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h2odragon|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_House
They weren't a "streaming service," I guess, but I think there's still similarity. I wonder how they'd compare in "proportion of available market"
[+] [-] DrThunder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] musictubes|3 years ago|reply
Does Spotify have radio stations like Apple Music does? DJs having creative control and not having ads makes for good listening.
[+] [-] nzoschke|3 years ago|reply
They made an experience so much better and easier than buying or pirating music, and collect $10 / person / month forever for it.
They also made the platform developer and human friendly. I was able to build a totally custom UX with offline listening capabilities for my app:
https://www.getjukelab.com/
Their model, service and platform is not without flaws but thanks to Spotify, me and my friends get to legally enjoy more music day in and day out than ever before.
Thanks, and keep taking my money.
[+] [-] marcofatica|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] penciltwirler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binkHN|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] montag|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MuffinFlavored|3 years ago|reply
At that level, does $50/mo vs $150/mo in paid subscriptions register as a blip on the radar?
I say that as somebody who has Hulu, YouTube Premium, SoundCloud, Apple Music, Spotify, Netflix, Peacock, SiriusXM, HBO max, Roku CBS, ESPN+, Roku Discovery (and that's just what I could find jotted down from a statement)
I just don't comprehend the idea of "tweaking" something that's $100/yr. Obviously less fortunate people need to. But then how many of them tweak their $100/yr subscriptions and immediately go to Starbucks for a $7 drink right after?
[+] [-] potatochup|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sorenjan|3 years ago|reply
I also have issues with Apple music competing with other services while Apple owns not just the platform but also forces its competitors to use them for distribution and payment, but that's a separate issue.
[+] [-] gerash|3 years ago|reply
I watch a lot of yt and ad removal is worth my time. In fact their price used to be $9.99 and I found it surprising people would subscribe to any other service.
The only other service that piques my interest is Apple Music with Dolby Atmos but I still prefer yt ad removal over Dolby Atmos given the fact that you need a compatible speaker and music for it to work
[+] [-] ei8ths|3 years ago|reply
I do the family plan and youtube ad free is the best, i do my music discovery via youtube and youtube music does an okay job.
[+] [-] speedgoose|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] segmondy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Semaphor|3 years ago|reply
[0]: https://bandcamp.com/
[1]: https://nagelfestmusic.com/shop/
[2]: https://jellyfin.org/
[3]: https://www.navidrome.org/
[4]: https://www.mediamonkey.com/
[+] [-] superb-owl|3 years ago|reply
The UI is on par with Spotify, they focus on hi-fi audio, and way more money goes to the artists.
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|3 years ago|reply
MQA isn't lossless and distorts audio: https://youtu.be/pRjsu9-Vznc
Tidal HiFi isn't lossless either: https://goldensound.audio/2021/11/29/tidal-hifi-is-not-lossl...
I don't think any of the streaming services are particularly friendly to artists either, but Apple Music pays more to the artist than Spotify does, and includes (real) lossless audio at no extra cost. For now, they've got my dollar.
[+] [-] mochomocha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threeseed|3 years ago|reply
They offer $0.010/stream versus $0.003-$0.005 for Spotify and $0.013 for Tidal.
Also offers the best quality audio with lossless up to 24-bit/192Hz without using MQA.
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gverrilla|3 years ago|reply
Is there such a thing as hi-fi podcasts they are pushing on you? Or do you mean they are really trying to make you hear the Best Hi-fi 2022 playlist by some random? No, they must have some kind of official podcast to push, I'm sure..
[+] [-] thaanpaa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dehrmann|3 years ago|reply
IIRC high quality on Spotify is Vorbis at 320kbps. If you can tell the difference between that and lossless, I'm impressed.
[+] [-] fargoth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anderber|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|3 years ago|reply
How does the CEO keep his job?
[+] [-] Gwypaas|3 years ago|reply
> It distributes approximately 70% of its total revenue to rights holders (often record labels), who then pay artists based on individual agreements.[12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify
[+] [-] super256|3 years ago|reply
- 1b subscribers - after THAT: 10% profit margin
Look, spotify is still growing fast. They aim for 20% MAU growth YoY, and they are actually achieving it: they added 23M new MAU between Q2 and Q3 last year, around 40% of those new users were premium subscribers. New numbers for Q4 will be released today.
They are still trying to capture the whole market. After doing that they will flick the lever to profitability over growth. The current goals are set for 2030. Only if Ek deviates from the growth trajectory too much he will be dropped as CEO.
[+] [-] dopeboy|3 years ago|reply
He keeps his job because he's promising that once an inflection point is reached, you become more aggressive about turning a profit. It's both your and mine guess on what that could be, but I think starting that procedure with a 200M paid subscriber base isn't the worst idea.
[+] [-] odiroot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] derstander|3 years ago|reply
Is music just less vertically integrated? E.g., music publishers don’t own radio stations whereas film and tv publishers typically own tv stations?