[metmac]

Premium customer since 2013. Spotify would only give a refund in the form of Spotify Premium credits. And ironically canceled my subscription in the process of giving me the credit. SMH. Likely will GitHub Actions export my playlists and let the subscription expire.

I feel Spotify is really losing sight of its core competencies and its actual value proposition at this point. Will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

Spotify was amazing in recent years for 3 reasons: 1. Early pioneers in good ML based music taste making aided by teams of people who knew the various genres.

2. Spotify’s ability to do this well came from its strong investment in metadata which gave them a corpus of insight into what people listen to and why. Somewhat analogous to the rich tagging TikTok does to its videos on support of FYP.

3. The ubiquitous and continuous client support made it so easy to bring Spotify everywhere, that any alternative was going to mean more friction. In a way Spotify Connect is their iMessage blue bubbles moat. The ubiquitous and branded clients available on tons of hardware and every OS was their social contract. It was cool to use Spotify and not cool to be an Apple Music or Tidal user. The slow but continued atrophy of client support only builds distrust in this narrative. And that gap is closing when compared to other services.

[metmac]

3.1 - Car Thing was likely never going to be profitable but it was continued investment in that social contract. You can bring a Spotify UI everywhere. Even places where maybe it wasn’t needed or already served. But kept the mind share of its customer base. I used mine on my desk for example and was asked about it constantly.