Spotify has lost 20% market share in 2 years, in the same time pushing their annual losses to $200m.
Growing your losses whilst losing market share is not an enormously attractive value proposition to investors.
Growing your losses whilst losing market share is not an enormously attractive value proposition to investors.
Examples:
- Redesigning the client multiple times
- moving from native clients to essentially a bundled browser
- removal of lyrics feature
- can only store 3333 songs offline on a device - 10000 songs is the limit for the library
- Still no Hi-Fi option
- Can't add third party songs to the cloud library
And the competition is definitly rising: For example, Apple Music offers lyrics, a song limit of 100000, can store all of those songs offline, play back on 10 different devices at the same time and store all those songs offline. Also, you can drag and drop the songs that are unavailable into your library, which makes them available on all of your devices.
Once Apple Music releases a web player (or a client for Linux), I'm done with Spotify. For the moment, I need it for my desktop, which runs Linux.
On the other hand, they added things like making discovering new music much easier, like "Daily Mixes" and "Discover Weekly", which - again, I don't have any hard data to back this up - made a ton of users very happy.
I use Spotify as much as conceivably possible (~20 hours per week) and haven't heard a peep of discontent from anybody. Totally agree - Spotify is incredible.
Lyrics; people listen to music and then enjoy singing along. This little thing called karaoke supports a whole industry, for engineers and non-engineers alike, so people can get together and sing songs.
Redesigning the client. New interfaces are scary and different for non-engineers.
Can't add third party songs to cloud library. Non-engineers understand that some licensing nonsense means they can't get Taylor Swift on their Spotify, and then... just don't use Spotify, because all their music is on the Apple.
I'm not including "native client to bundled browser" as something non-engineers care about, but people do ask "why does the new version of $program make my laptop fans get all loud?"
I have much better results playing a full album on youtube and letting youtubes auto play feature pick the next album for me. I've discovered a half dozen artists that way on the last year.
My daily mixes never flow correctly. I'll have a softer, technical indie track followed by a technical heavy metal song. It's bad enough that I can't use them at all.
My friends and I average over 20 hours a week as well and we're all pissed about their recent decisions. The removal of messaging/direct sharing was the final straw for me.
If there isn't a "I do not like this" feature for a machine learning feature, that UX isn't good. Other users have raise this concerns too (google it).
Supposedly, the feature works at least in part by analyzing your playlists and giving recommendations based on what the people with similar songs in their playlists have there as well. He claimed to be receiving less Finnish rap m after removing his playlists with northern Swedish rap, so you could try that approach if you still have any Chinese/Korean playlists.
I just remove the few offending songs from my discover weekly, which I don't find too much of a hassle, but it doesn't seem to learn from that.
As a big fan of data analysis I've also noticed that they no longer accurately report or record user preferences and instead heavily weight popular artists. They also only sent out the "Year in Review" to people that were subscribed to their spam emails.
Those two things are what brought me to them over Google Play Music. I'm currently in the process of switching back.
Also, complaining about stuff like "only" being able to store 3333 songs is pretty silly.
Better headphones make the illusions of the psychoacoustic models work better, much like a stage magician will be more convincing with more precise execution of his tricks.
Or in other words: if you are good at identifying the differences between lossy and lossless that might be because you have golden ears. But it could just as well be because you are using tinny cans. (Or any combination thereof)
I have been a premium user of spotify for over a year now and I actually really love it. Maybe I don't use as much features as other people do.
I have a bunch of playlists (18) and love their discovery feature as well. I listen to it every time when I am at work - or doing chores at home - and sometimes during the commute on my phone. Same goes for 2 family members.
I don't miss the lyrics feature - I used it occasionally but it was shortly after I started using spotify so it's hard to miss something you have not really had the opportunity to use for a long time.
I have used their client on Windows and Mac (work), Linux (home) and mobile (android) and actually did not have issues with either of them. For what I use it (listening to music..) it does everything I want and does so perfectly.
Storing songs offline? No thank you, if I wanted to do that, I would just torrent the albums I like.
About the Hi-Fi option, they do have a HQ option but I am not sure which "quality" that actually is. I'm not an audiophile though, but I bet the average user isn't. So they might not care.
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But, like I said, to me it is essentially just a cloud music player and should not be anything else. I don't use any of the social features, I'm surely not an audiophile, and I can actually not compare it to Apple Music.
(Sidenote: The pricing is really good as well, at least the premium model where you can add family members).
EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm not affiliated with Spotify, and as always, this is just my opinion and yours might be different which is completely OK. :-)
Like the parent I really would like to be able to complete my library with my own music files when I can't find something on Spotify. That would be massively convenient for me and it doesn't seem like it would be a massive hassle for them to implement (as long as they limit the maximum amount of storage to something reasonable). I'm sure many users would love to be able to add their own audio files and podcasts to their library to access them from their spotify client everywhere.
I would also really love if they added a truly random mode. I get that they try to have a "clever" shuffle mode that's supposed to avoid playing the same artist back to back and things like that, but for most of my playlists I don't actually need that and spotify ends up replaying the same tracks before it's exhausted the rest of the playlist. As a side effect it also seems to favor certain titles over others in my experience. Just give me an option to turn on "dumb" random mode and I'll be happy.
"Hi-Fi" mode is probably snake oil but I guess it'd make for a nice marketing gimmick. I'm personally perfectly content with the premium audio quality as it is currently.
I still don't plan on canceling my subscription but I'm mildly annoyed that in this past year I've seen features disappearing while nothing of great value was being added.
The problem isn't the storage, but figuring out who the rights holders are and ensuring they get paid for those streams too. And it gets even more complicated for things you might have that Spotify doesn't have in their catalogue vs. is not allowed to let you play due to geographical restrictions. There's no easy way to guarantee correctness and completeness of the metadata uploaded by others whereas they can reasonably trust what is given to them by music labels.
Dropbox "allows" for it but they're in a grey area, just like other services have been able to skirt the issue. It's likely to not be a big enough concern for anyone right now to go after that particular use case.
Spotify supports 320kbps. Lossless streaming is borderline a pointless luxury, and I'm happy not to subsidize it for people who want to stroke their gold ears or egos. There's luxury services for that.
My problem with Spotify is their lack of TFA. My account had a unique password that was somehow stolen a year and a half ago, at which point I realized users' full names, address, DOB, etc are all exposed on the profile screen once logged in. There's absolutely no email or text verification for new signins either. That, and the android app runs like shit, pushed me over to Play Music.
People don't care how an app is made usually. I really dislike the 10000 song limit too but none of my friends seem to know or care. A hi-fi option def can't matter much to people or Tidal would've been more popular for that reason, no?
I have my own ax to grind with offline music not scrobbling to last.fm even close to properly but I'm not going to even pretend that more than a fraction of their users care or know about the feature. Similarly I don't think people would have an issue with 3k+ offline track limit. That's a lot to me.
Apple Music does seem to have a lot of good features though. Give you that.
The move to Apple Music wasn't entirely without friction. There was no very good migration story, only third party apps and the results of these were so-so at best. But this was a one time cost, since then it's been a smooth ride. I pretty much only use apple hardware and the fact that Apple Music works great on all platforms is a huge win for me – Spotify doesn't even have an Apple TV app which was also a pretty big reason for my switch.
I also feel that Apple Music has improved a lot in these past 6-8 months, perhaps not so much in terms of app features and the likes, but I've definitely noticed changes in music availability. Most tracks and albums that I searched for half a year ago but weren't available are there now, and when I started I felt it was hit-and-miss whether the particular songs I was looking for would be there or not. Today I can't remember last time I tried to find a song but it wasn't available.
The only annoying thing now are my friends sending me Spotify links, since it means I have to look up the link, see what song/album they are linking me to, and search for it in Apple Music. This feels like something we should've solved with URNs instead of URLs...
It runs in a web browser on Linux just fine - and I find a lot of their suggested artists/tracks are closer to my tastes than I got from Spotify.
When it also has a "Discover" system that works semi-well. Why not open to the Discover screen? If I was that plugged in into the zeitgeist pop music-wise, why wouldn't I just listen to the radio?
It's more of a "shuffle-songs-from-the-same-artist-or-even-the-same-album-until-you're-annoyed-enough-to-manually-switch-songs" feature. It doesn't seem to be a proper shuffle, or even close to a randomization, no matter how many songs, artists, or albums are in your playlist.
That's the killer feature I've been waiting for...
You can, actually. Although I'll admit it's not the easiest process. You simply need to manually add your songs into your library on the desktop, create a playlist with those songs, and all your other devices will now be able to download these third party songs via the playlist as well.
I'd argue that this is a better choice than having to develop and port features to all their different platforms. By having their clients be a web view they're able to offer features / innovate quicker.