The clock is ticking for Spotify
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Spotify and music is like a library and books. It's fantastic and accessible for listening and discovery. I'm hard pushed to find a friend that didn't use napster or limewire that's moved to Spotify - it's just easy, there and the price is right. And with the exception of a few hold out artists (lost back catalogues, or smaller artists who are unaware of 100% revenue services like distrokid.com) it's pretty complete. It'll be such a shame if it slowly goes the way of the buffalo.
Well at least they want to be one. It's not like they want to be the good guys there. This is what disappoints me a little bit
1) Modern contemporary electronic music, which is usually available vinyl only.
2) Classic albums in their original form. When there's a remaster, Spotify typically only has the remaster, original was either never there or will be removed when remaster is out.
Now, when you start to invest to your sound system even a bit (not talking about 100k wires here), you notice the lack of dynamics in many remasters. The originals just sound better with good soundsystem, not so much with below-average systems.
When I listen to music, I like to have the best possible master from it. And preferably lossless, or that I have the control of the compression parameters and format. I guess Spotify will take the masses, but I'm not the only serious listener who prefers my own files and physical copies.
Streaming is handy, but you can do a lot of things already with big hard disks with your computers, some syncing NAS system (as in Synology), beets[0] and a big enough microSD in your phone.
[0] http://beets.io/
PS - I've been collecting vinyl for over twenty years and consider it my one serious vice. This comment is the equivalent of a drug addict suggesting that you "just try it once." You've been warned...:)
Yes, now I need to get CD's to have the best mastering, rip them to flac and opus and put the CD's to a box collecting dust. Or in some cases I need to buy the vinyl, record it to flac and opus and maybe play the vinyl a couple of times more when I do a house party.
Waste of resources...
Oh, the irony.
Audio compression is an old technology by now. Lossless CD audio is ~1200 kbps, and we're only compressing to something like 1/4th the original size. There really shouldn't be much room for error. Even completely lossless CD audio compression can still get to ~50%-ish of the original data rate.
Imagine if you had H.264 video at 50% the data rate of a completely lossless signal. That would be completely perfect.
And if you're listening on a speaker setup, your room will distort the sound orders of magnitude more than compressing an audio signal 4x will.
But if I own music, FLAC is the proper format. I can go into any other format from it and re-pack my whole collection in the matter of minutes. Buying and storing content in lossy format doesn't give me this freedom.
And even if Spotify Vorbis sounds ok, it doesn't change the fact that many records in there have a very bad mastering and no other versions at all. Which was my original point here.
At first (especially some years ago when the catalogue was much smaller) this used to annoy me. But Spotify has made a lot of progress in side-stepping the issue.
The Discover Weekly playlist of recommended music in particular was a great invention. It doesn't matter that much if artist X's latest album is not on Spotify, as long as they can find some other music that satisfies what people are looking for. Some techno with no vocals to code to, something chill in the evenings, like a personally curated radio, not a perfect on-demand player.
Focusing more on recommending music instead of having people search for music means that they get away with missing some artists - and they can take the cost of licensing deals into account when picking the recommended songs.
Thumbs-up or thumbs-downing songs in a radio playlist will change the songs that show up, but I find just having a seed playlist is more reliable and repeatable and easier to fine-tune.
But will it be the music industry ruining Spotify if that happens or will it simply be a failure of the business model? You could certainly argue the latter.
I think it could possibly be. Nobody has been successful yet at least that I can think of. I think the problem is the better you do the more those licenses will cost. I am trying to think of another industry that works that way. I guess cable is similar with content in that the more subscribers a cable operator has the more expensive licensing the content is. So maybe licensing entertainment content is just a very constrained business model?
I can't imagine if I ran a restaurant and my costs from my food purveyors increased with the success of the restaurant. I think it would be very difficult to make a go of that.
Its support is abysmal, its apps are bug-riddled and get worse with every update, and it's consistently doing boneheaded "pivot" moves (like mandatory Facebook login a couple years back, "version 1.0" of the desktop app more recently), and so on. It's squandering the good faith and great library it has.
Pardon my ignorance but why is Google Play Music not worth mention here?
Now though... There's bloat every where, bugs everywhere, zero user feedback has been incorporated into the product. There are bugs that have been open for _years_ that still haven't been addressed.
From what I hear of the company culture, it's not surprising. International parties, organizational bloat, defunct acquisitions. What started as a really nice piece of tech quickly devolved into a hedonistic wannabe mainstream media company, and it shows.
Even to me it sounds counterintuitive. Finding new music I love should have been worth more to me than a player with a lot of features. But my instinct was to let foobar2000 pull me back. Something about sophisticated control of playback and playlists turns out to be really important too. But power users are the minority, I'm sure.
I still hope something out there will use my LastFM profile to offer something better than the laughably inaccurate recommendations that I get from every other service.
I'm reasonably happy with the desktop app, although it's still as terrible at organizing your collection of music as it's always been. For example, if you save a single song from an album, that album shows up in your "Albums" view, which makes no sense. And if you go to that album, it's actually a weird, special virtual album and not the real album (there's a "View full album" link to get to that one).
I was using the "Save" function for quite a while until I met the 10,000 song limit. Which is a ridiculously low limit for any lover of music, especially when album counts toward that limit — "saving" an album is actually just saving the individual tracks. You can't raise this limit; you're done, or you have to go back and unsave music.
The "Local files" function is also pretty obviously an afterthought. You can only play them to a device if your device is on the same network as your desktop machine; this also goes for syncing. To play your "local files" on a device, you have to mark them for offline play on the device while the desktop Spotify is running. How ridiculous is that?
A final gripe: After 10 years, Spotify still doesn't categorize classical music by composer and performer separately. Apple Music does this correctly.
Could be that it's a MacOS Sierra issue, but considering the number of 'random weird shit' that happens when I have the app open (playback working fine but visually stuck on an ad, to name a recent issue), I'm inclined to think it's just a piece a shit.
On the one hand I am baffled by the terrible quality, but then I remember that even companies like Google aren't always much better. My Google Inbox app (on iPhone), for example, regularly gets 'stuck' on showing a badge icon of '1' even though I can't for the life of me produce the email that causes this. It's been this way for quite a while and I just don't get how it's possible that a big company like Google lets this happen. And again, I understand it's possible there's some weird edge case that causes this to happen for just me or very few other users, but considering that I run into a whole bunch of other weird issues using Google Inbox, I'm inclined to conclude, once again, that it's just a piece of shit.
Pandora, and pretty much every competitor in the field can.
fuck you Tool. :(
So in the end, if everyone follows this trend, you'll have to subscribe to 3-4 different services at $10/month to get a complete library, and each will be trapped into different apps, so you could end up no being able to play songs together.
Unlike Netflix/Amazon/Hulu, where you could easily subscribe to or drop one month to month to watch different shows.
Netflix can produce a series which you will watch once and seldom see again. New content is king.
In music you mix old with new. If you lose the old content you will greatly limit the listening experience.
I think if you were at the mercy of the traditional record industry for licensing and you went an signed an artist to your label whose contract was up with say Warner Bros Records you could expect some pretty unfavorable terms in licensing content from Warner Brothers in the future. This is just one example but its a slippery slope.
It would certainly be much better for artists to get paid directly from the streaming provider, no doubt about that. But I think if you are out promoting that business model you are going to find it harder to license content from people business model if based on the "old way" of doing things. I think would have to forgo licensing from them almost entirely and carry only original content. This is more or less the model that is/was Tidal. I don't think has worked out too well for them.
In this regard there has been some criticisms against most of the current streaming providers as simply "propping up" the oligarchy of the big 4 record labels.
Record contracts are exclusive. Beyonce can't go and record an album for some other records label whereas in the Netflix model those actors aren't exclusive to Netflix. They are free to go out and make movies for Universal for 20th Century Fox when their series wraps for Netflix. As such it doesn't threaten the business model of the studios in the same way Spotify becoming a record label and paying artists directly from streams might.
The other difference I think is that consuming Netflix tends to be a concentrated experience in that you sit down to watch a movie or else you binge watch during a whole Saturday while the weather is crap. Music on the other hand is more passive. People play music pretty endlessly - while at work, on the train, at the gym. I think it would be much harder to be majority original content streaming service with music while keeping your existing subscribers satisfied.
The big 4 record labels are the recipients of the $5 billion that the company has paid out in royalties to date. They've surely recouped any initial investment they put in by now. So they kind of have a vested interest at the moment anyway for keeping things just as they are.
Whether Spotify goes public or not the labels have already made out very handsomely was my point. That's the $5 billion that Spotify often states that it has paid out to rights holders. So yes it very much has borne fruit, $5 billion worth. If the company goes public its basically gravy for them.
The record labels were decimated back in 2006/2007 when Spotify started. Things looked pretty bleak for the industry as a whole. So yes the labels needed to do something as their revenues has pretty much dried up comparatively to a decade earlier.
Call me an optimist but I see a huge opportunity to capture additional $'s from less price as sensitive people like me. I'd happily hand over more money to the artists I actually like and listen to regularly but no platform gives me the means to do that (ala twitch cheer). They should start building premium features that connect subscribers more intimately with artists through gigs, merchandise or content. I see a lot of headroom in the price - $14.99/mo for 6 accounts (family plan) IMHO is very cheap.
In fact that is exactly my current pattern: wen lazy, conveniently discover [1] and browse more famous artists at Spotify and purchase their albums at Bandcamp. Very few IMPoW "good" artists lack BC page.
[1] "Discover" function at Spotify got really nice lately supposedly thanks to the last.fm integration (?). Last.fm used to be my favourite discovery page in the past, and even today I'm not able to ditch it completely.
that interesting/makes sense about last.fm integration, i have about 10 years worth of data on there and the discover recommendations are consistently great.
over the last year i've saved a 5-6 subset of the weekly discover suggestions into a super playlist, part also, part human. i'd love to proportion part of my monthly payment to those artists
Because I'm pretty sure I won't. I can't see myself going back to physical media or DRM-laden files any soon.
iTunes dropped DRM between 2007-2009. I don't think anyone is expecting you to go back to "DRM-laden files" anytime soon.
In the middle of an album but want to hear another track without stopping the album? right click -> add to up next (or tap-hold, add to up next, if you are that way inclined). It will then play after your current track and before the next track in your current playlist/album.
But it will die because of the moonopolistic and anti-competitive practices of the popular OSes: Apple preinstalls Apple Music, Google Play music, and Microsoft Groove (all 3 clones of Spotify). This agressive, monopolistic behaviour will kill Spotify, just like MS rival browsers with Netscape.
My second biggest annoyance is the increasing trend of "artist exclusives" if you pay a monthly fee and your favorite artist are giving exclusives to the other services I'm less inclined to continue using that service(Spotify) because I don't get the content I want. I don't want to pay for 2 or 3 streaming services. That fracturing of availability is more likely to people going back to pirating music in my opinion.
And that's a good thing given the fact that Google Music (like most Google services that are not free) is only available in the US and a handful of other countries.
And Google's/Spotify's problem is that they do not have any good or even decent phones.
Let me guess, you use iOS? Play Music and Spotify both integrate roughly equally poorly with Google Now/Assistant. You can say "play some X", and it'll ask you which you want to use the first time.
Unless it misinterprets which you wanted to use, which happens 90% of the time for me. It consistently interpreted "Movits!" as "Movies", even despite having their whole discography favourited in both Play and Spotify.
The problem is that digital music is a type of good that is mispriced by the free market: a public good. There needs to be just enough money to going to the artist to get the album recorded, and once that amount of money is there, there is no incentive for anyone to give more money. Giving more money won't make it easier for more people to get the music, because distributing it digitally is pretty easy/cheap. Kind of like a public park. Because this incentive is only there up to a point, the good gets mispriced.
Apple might pre-install their app on iphones, but they don't support even 10% of the devices Spotify does.
When Spotify first came out, my first thought when I saw the UI was this was an iTunes clone :) Of course it was much more than just that...
I could see youtube killing Spotify and all its competitors.
Also Google doesn't want to cannibalize their own Play Music sales.
Ultimately a generation of kids are growing up right now who use Youtube as their primary source of entertainment and for whom downloading an mp3 is likely to seem archaic. I doubt they're going to switch to Spotify so long as google can figure out offline play for audio (which I've no doubt they can)
Yes, with Youtube Red.
> Google doesn't want to cannibalize their own Play Music sales.
Youtube Red is free with a Play Music subscription for $9.99/month in the US.
I've found YouTube has been a great replacement for listening to any music I don't already own.
Like YouTube though it will suffer from take down notices on some stuff you book mark, as well as mainstream stuff you can only listen to the first 30 seconds (but I've never been big into what's radio popular).
Hard to belive but still true: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Rearrange-tracks...
* Forcing mandatory Facebook logins, only to walk them back
* Releasing a "version 1.0" of their desktop app with no CTRL-F support and dozens of missing features
* Breaking people's hardware with bugs that made hundreds of unnecessary reads and writes to drives, denying the issue existed until pressed to fix it
* Silently removing basic features from their apps, or pushing UI updates that make said features harder to use
What do you mean by that?
And separately, is it better or worse or the same as how the music industry has exploited artists over the years?
Many of my favorite bands love Spotiy, going as far as making it the platform they pre-release music on and back-catalog out of print albums. Why? It's an engine for discovery unlike anything else. A lot of people were pirating music not because they were cheap but because it gets too expensive to drop $20 to figure out if you like an album. Spotify also rewards the right behavior -- if you make the kind of album I want to listen to over and over you get a bigger return. It also automatically notifies your fans of new releases and nearby concerts which puts more money in your pocket. It's a different model than the record labels but it's far from "aggressive exploitation".