I had the unfortunate experience of signing up for Spotify, creating a playlist of a couple of my favorite artists and then having those artists' songs disappear the next day. Come to find out, they (or their label) didn't renew with Spotify. Went back to purchasing individual tracks that can't be deleted from my devices.
I do like the Spotify model, but find between iTunes, Pandora and Sirius my music needs are saturated.
I recently ditched the Zune "all you can eat" subscription for a Spotify subscription.
Pretty much the same deal. Stuff comes and goes, and there's no warning to the user (I imagine that a warning that content is going to go away would increase piracy).
I decided around two years ago to abandon "owning" most of my music. I started with Rhapsody and moved to Spotify. I find that Spotify has almost everything I want to listen to and the $10 / month (actually, $20 since I have two more accounts on the Family plan), is well worth it.
For people who like to listen to a wide variety of music and like to discover new music, I don't think you can beat what Spotify offers. If you have a more tightly contained bucket of music and don't want to expand in too much, it probably makes more sense to own your collection.
I've discovered a ton of stuff and enjoyed things one-off like live CD's that I would have never have purchased outright through iTunes.
I ultimately chose Spotify over Rhapsody because of playlists. I think when I first started, I actually prefered Rhapsody's mobile UI but Spotify's has gotten better since. I remember using Rhapsody's web/desktop service in the mid 2000's, but it wasn't an iPod replacement then because it's offline capabilities were limited and limited to devices that I didn't like. Once mobile became realistic to stream music, the services started making a lot more sense to me.
> For people who like to listen to a wide variety of music and like to discover new music, I don't think you can beat what Spotify offers.
Eh... Sort of. If I want to listen to something within (making it up) the top 50% most successful recording artists, or something relatively recent otherwise, it's normally got something at least.
If I want to listen to underground hardcore records or weirdy free improv or something, I'm S.O.L. on streaming services.
Still, I pay my £10 a month, because it's good for a lot of things, and convenient.
Spotify's coverage is very good but they have been catching holes in their catalogue lately. Taylor Swift's absence probably won't bother HN users too much but lack of the latest Black Keys' album might.
Spotify more than makes up for it with curated playlists and apps (pitchfork, Last.fm, Hype Machine) making music discovery easy and pleasant. But if someone wants to listen to particular songs, like they would from their own collection, their mileage may vary.
I'm a paying user. My fiance pays as well. It's a great service, but I wish they would come out with a "family plan" or something. Often we are both listening at the same time to a single account which negates the utility of having two separate accounts quite a bit. However, at work we both listen to our separate accounts and listening to the same account would not be feasible. Netflix allows for multiple queues for different users, I think Spotify should follow suit.
I enter "offline mode" and listen to songs that have been downloaded only. This allows the other device sharing your account to take over and play async without affecting you.
Despite Spotify occasionally being in the news for not paying the artists much, I bet this does add a lot of new revenue for the music industry.
Before I joined spotify (about a year ago) I hardly ever bought CDs or MP3s (defintely less than the £120/year that Sptofy costs) - there must be many other people also who are paying for Spotify now who never used to spend much on music before
> I bet this does add a lot of new revenue for the music industry.
Not that much.The music industry is over. Call it the entertainment industry , where the popularity of a song is mesured by youtube views,not actual sells. Even iTunes don't pay that much now a days. It's good, because any artist can "grow up fast" with a good social network marketing strategy. It's bad, because some kind of music need some investment only big producers could afford before. But crowdfunding can fix that. Yet no one can deny that the amount of crappy music today is just overwhelming (looking at you "hiphop"). Something like Nirvana could never happen today.But bands like Nirvana could have a moderate success.
But if you ask me, as an artist,while it's tough,i'm ok with how things work today,since I actually do some gigs and that's the most interesting part.
My biggest issue with Spotify is still their catalogue. I listen to primarily foreign electronica, and it constantly feels like none of it was there. When I finally did want to grab music from American artists, half weren't on Spotify.
Something I've wondered for some time, is if the world needs a music service that both allows smaller artists to stream their music from it, but also negotiates with companies like iTunes/Spotify/AmazonInstant to allow their music there as well.
The "incrementally even more convenient than piracy" for Spotify (and also iTunes Rentals on Apple TV) has really surprised me.
I used to use oink/what.cd to download all my music, but now that I use Spotify I never stray from it. A friend emailed me J.Coles newest album in MP3 but I opted to just wait until it was on Spotify for the sake of simplicity and accessibility.
Similarly with movies, whereas I would once always simply torrent them, sitting in front of my TV and just renting them for $4 feels so much cheaper than battling an advertising laced torrent site and figuring out how to stream it from laptop to TV.
Pirating stuff was much easier than buying CDs or DVDs, but purchasing stuff online has became even easier than piracy.
When I was in high school (quite a long time ago now), I'd try to buy 2-4 albums a month. That was an average cost of $25-$50 to listen to 20-50 new songs... some of which I enjoyed, some of which I didn't.
$10 per month to listen to almost anything is such an astounding underpricing of the value I personally derive from the service. I can hardly believe my good fortune to be alive at a time when I can pay so little to listen to so much with so little effort.
And this is exactly why the music industry is failing.
Even if every American paid $100 per year, that maxes the revenue at $30 billion with no further growth possible.
Now how much of that it going back to the music creators? Almost zero.
If I take your high school numbers and extrapolate ($250/year across 300 million) with a $.50 per CD (20 albums per year) we get a $75 billion business with $3 billion actually going back to artists. For 20,000 CD's (roughly the number of releases last year) that's 150,000 per year back to the CD creators.
That's an ENORMOUS difference.
Yes, these are all bounds (not everybody would buy--there were fewer CD's in the past--CD's were more expensive to produce), but you can see the difference.
Now, this isn't all Spotify's fault, but the middlemen are taking WAY too much out of the pie.
In addition, there are so many entertainment options that music has to compete with that it will never get back the privileged position it had in the late 60's to early 80's before both VHS and videogames.
Shameless plug: I'm a paying Spotify user but they don't get hiphop mixtapes and they miss some hiphop singles, so I built http://hooked.fm. It's new hiphop music and notifications when your favorite artists release new music.
if the money never gets to the artists what is the point? its good to build up an infrastructure but this is more to keep the industry's pockets lined than the artists, so i've seen at least a few who encourage to just torrent their work instead.
there are some who argue that the pricing model is not really incorrect/askew, but i think even they tend to admit that its insignificant income from the perspective of the artist.
(as someone who is not into pop music, i really don't care about building a whole economic/industrial mechanism just to make sure that beyonce & WMG keep getting a disproportionately large piece of the pie compared to independents, that is not really in the spirit of the internet IMHO it is just a web-based continuation of the old system that smaller artists hated...)
It's so hard to put a value on something like Spotify. I use the Spotify Pitchfork app pretty much every day to find new music. Before that I'd have to read Pitfork.com and then either torrent or buy that artists music. This forced me to be super selective in who I gave the time of day (because reading + downloading would take hours). With Spotify I can listen to 4 whole albums in one day.
If I find an artist I like I will definitely go to one of their live shows. I feel like I spend more on an artists now than I did when I bought their album outright.
There's gotta be some way to make a pay-only streaming service that would fairly compensate artists...
What if, instead of being paid per play, artists were compensated based on the number of unique visitors that played their music? So if one person plays one of their songs, they get paid (for instance) a whole dollar. If one person plays that song 5000 more times, the artist still only gets paid one dollar. But if 5000 different people play that song, the artist gets 5000 dollars. Once. I think this scheme would compensate artists much more fairly, like iTunes, while also providing the cloud hosting and flat monthly fee that attracts users.
Have any independent artists with a significant amount of listens posted how much money they are making? I am sure there are some rules against this...
I know for signed artists it is a really small amount.
It seems like most groups have accepted that they will make most of their money from shows and merchandising. At least that is the feeling I get.
Surely they'll figure it out somehow, otherwise why would artists continue to give them their music?
Please no sob story about innocent artists being exploited by their publishers. Same logic applies - why would artists continue to work with such publishers?
I think premium is too expensive for my needs. So I found a way to use trials from time to time. Basically create a new paypal account every time you want sign up for a new Spotify 30 days trial...
How does Spotify count users? They can game the proportion of paying/non-paying users by discounting infrequent unpaid users, for example. A more interesting number might be the number of /plays/ by paid vs. unpaid users. I.e., normalize it for activity.
Say they do? that's still 15M people paying 10$~ per month.
150M a month is a revenue of 1.8 bln dollars per year that's quite a big sum of cash...
At some point people stop looking at the paying to non-paying ratio of your costumers and when you starting bringing close to 2bln a year you are probably there.
No one really looks at how many "free apps" people download from the app stores and says Apple are padding their numbers when the app stores brings higher revenues than the GDP of many countries.
[+] [-] josefresco|11 years ago|reply
I do like the Spotify model, but find between iTunes, Pandora and Sirius my music needs are saturated.
[+] [-] kabdib|11 years ago|reply
Pretty much the same deal. Stuff comes and goes, and there's no warning to the user (I imagine that a warning that content is going to go away would increase piracy).
This is why I still buy CDs.
[+] [-] jobu|11 years ago|reply
It's a great way to inflate subscriber numbers for an IPO, but I doubt it's a long-term trend.
[+] [-] ssharp|11 years ago|reply
For people who like to listen to a wide variety of music and like to discover new music, I don't think you can beat what Spotify offers. If you have a more tightly contained bucket of music and don't want to expand in too much, it probably makes more sense to own your collection.
I've discovered a ton of stuff and enjoyed things one-off like live CD's that I would have never have purchased outright through iTunes.
I ultimately chose Spotify over Rhapsody because of playlists. I think when I first started, I actually prefered Rhapsody's mobile UI but Spotify's has gotten better since. I remember using Rhapsody's web/desktop service in the mid 2000's, but it wasn't an iPod replacement then because it's offline capabilities were limited and limited to devices that I didn't like. Once mobile became realistic to stream music, the services started making a lot more sense to me.
[+] [-] tragic|11 years ago|reply
Eh... Sort of. If I want to listen to something within (making it up) the top 50% most successful recording artists, or something relatively recent otherwise, it's normally got something at least.
If I want to listen to underground hardcore records or weirdy free improv or something, I'm S.O.L. on streaming services.
Still, I pay my £10 a month, because it's good for a lot of things, and convenient.
[+] [-] blfr|11 years ago|reply
Spotify more than makes up for it with curated playlists and apps (pitchfork, Last.fm, Hype Machine) making music discovery easy and pleasant. But if someone wants to listen to particular songs, like they would from their own collection, their mileage may vary.
[+] [-] relaytheurgency|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielStraight|11 years ago|reply
https://www.spotify.com/us/family/
It launched a few months ago.
[+] [-] potench|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arb99|11 years ago|reply
Before I joined spotify (about a year ago) I hardly ever bought CDs or MP3s (defintely less than the £120/year that Sptofy costs) - there must be many other people also who are paying for Spotify now who never used to spend much on music before
[+] [-] wvenable|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aikah|11 years ago|reply
Not that much.The music industry is over. Call it the entertainment industry , where the popularity of a song is mesured by youtube views,not actual sells. Even iTunes don't pay that much now a days. It's good, because any artist can "grow up fast" with a good social network marketing strategy. It's bad, because some kind of music need some investment only big producers could afford before. But crowdfunding can fix that. Yet no one can deny that the amount of crappy music today is just overwhelming (looking at you "hiphop"). Something like Nirvana could never happen today.But bands like Nirvana could have a moderate success.
But if you ask me, as an artist,while it's tough,i'm ok with how things work today,since I actually do some gigs and that's the most interesting part.
[+] [-] quaunaut|11 years ago|reply
Something I've wondered for some time, is if the world needs a music service that both allows smaller artists to stream their music from it, but also negotiates with companies like iTunes/Spotify/AmazonInstant to allow their music there as well.
[+] [-] stephenc_c_|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pclark|11 years ago|reply
I used to use oink/what.cd to download all my music, but now that I use Spotify I never stray from it. A friend emailed me J.Coles newest album in MP3 but I opted to just wait until it was on Spotify for the sake of simplicity and accessibility.
Similarly with movies, whereas I would once always simply torrent them, sitting in front of my TV and just renting them for $4 feels so much cheaper than battling an advertising laced torrent site and figuring out how to stream it from laptop to TV.
Pirating stuff was much easier than buying CDs or DVDs, but purchasing stuff online has became even easier than piracy.
[+] [-] jeremymims|11 years ago|reply
$10 per month to listen to almost anything is such an astounding underpricing of the value I personally derive from the service. I can hardly believe my good fortune to be alive at a time when I can pay so little to listen to so much with so little effort.
[+] [-] bsder|11 years ago|reply
Even if every American paid $100 per year, that maxes the revenue at $30 billion with no further growth possible.
Now how much of that it going back to the music creators? Almost zero.
If I take your high school numbers and extrapolate ($250/year across 300 million) with a $.50 per CD (20 albums per year) we get a $75 billion business with $3 billion actually going back to artists. For 20,000 CD's (roughly the number of releases last year) that's 150,000 per year back to the CD creators.
That's an ENORMOUS difference.
Yes, these are all bounds (not everybody would buy--there were fewer CD's in the past--CD's were more expensive to produce), but you can see the difference.
Now, this isn't all Spotify's fault, but the middlemen are taking WAY too much out of the pie.
In addition, there are so many entertainment options that music has to compete with that it will never get back the privileged position it had in the late 60's to early 80's before both VHS and videogames.
[+] [-] rahilsondhi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fat0wl|11 years ago|reply
there are some who argue that the pricing model is not really incorrect/askew, but i think even they tend to admit that its insignificant income from the perspective of the artist.
(as someone who is not into pop music, i really don't care about building a whole economic/industrial mechanism just to make sure that beyonce & WMG keep getting a disproportionately large piece of the pie compared to independents, that is not really in the spirit of the internet IMHO it is just a web-based continuation of the old system that smaller artists hated...)
[+] [-] ryanSrich|11 years ago|reply
If I find an artist I like I will definitely go to one of their live shows. I feel like I spend more on an artists now than I did when I bought their album outright.
[+] [-] rthomas6|11 years ago|reply
What if, instead of being paid per play, artists were compensated based on the number of unique visitors that played their music? So if one person plays one of their songs, they get paid (for instance) a whole dollar. If one person plays that song 5000 more times, the artist still only gets paid one dollar. But if 5000 different people play that song, the artist gets 5000 dollars. Once. I think this scheme would compensate artists much more fairly, like iTunes, while also providing the cloud hosting and flat monthly fee that attracts users.
[+] [-] mej10|11 years ago|reply
I know for signed artists it is a really small amount.
It seems like most groups have accepted that they will make most of their money from shows and merchandising. At least that is the feeling I get.
[+] [-] facepalm|11 years ago|reply
Please no sob story about innocent artists being exploited by their publishers. Same logic applies - why would artists continue to work with such publishers?
[+] [-] jnellis|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] victorantos|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dudurocha|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] matt_morgan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogma1138|11 years ago|reply
At some point people stop looking at the paying to non-paying ratio of your costumers and when you starting bringing close to 2bln a year you are probably there.
No one really looks at how many "free apps" people download from the app stores and says Apple are padding their numbers when the app stores brings higher revenues than the GDP of many countries.