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Comment by Shoop | Hacker News Reader

Do people actually take exclusives into account that much when picking a streaming service? It seems to me like the biggest differentiating factors would be price and familiarity, as long as the services in question had a reasonable amount of the content one wanted.

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Exclusives are just a good way to get people to try out your service. It works best when someone doesn't already have a streaming subscription, and their favorite artist releases an album exclusively somewhere. You sign up to hear the album, you like the service, you decide to stick with it.

With timed exclusives they can also capture some amount of revenue from conversion of free trial users into "forgot to unsubscribe" users.

They got me with Coloring Book a few months ago. It wasn't available elsewhere, so I signed up for the free trial. Well before the free trial was over Coloring Book appeared on Spotify (my preferred platform). I prompt forgot about Apple Music until I saw a bill in my inbox. I then couldn't figure out how to unsub without googling the process, it's certainly not readily available as an option in-app (although that just might be the way Apple sometimes tends to obfuscate through streamlining).

The unsubscribing process is truely awful. I'd try them again as rumour has it they have got a lot better, but importing Spotify playlists wasn't possible early on. I'll have to look again to see if that's solved.

Features for me are the big ones. Currently i debate between Spotify and Google Music. I vastly prefer Spotify's social features and collab playlists.. currently using Spotify. With that said, i was using Google Music for ~5+ years due to having a large custom library which was accessible cross device.. Unfortunately Spotify doesn't support this.

Tough decisions on the features front, atleast. Exclusives and other crap.. those don't matter to me. Fwiw.

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