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Comment by saym | Hacker News Reader

They've gone from 28 million to 71 million premium subscribers in 3 years with a declining, single digit, churn rate. I'm impressed.

I'm a happy Spotify customer, I hope they continue their growth and become a pillar of the music industry.

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I was a Spotify lifer until I butted up against their 10,000 song limit. [1]

Now, I'm using Google Play Music. There's no doubt in my mind that everything else outside of this limit is better on Spotify.

Please, Spotify, fix this! Let me help inflate your valuation!

1. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Library-Song-Limit...

+1. Ability to upload music on Google Play Music is also keeping me from switching to Spotify. I have a lot of tracks that simply aren't in the Spotify catalog. If they add that, I'd switch tomorrow.

I'm blown away that the solution for this has been the shitty "local playlist sync" solution for years at this point.

I guess I'm in a niche? For me, there are tons of hiphop mixtapes that will never be on Spotify that I definitely need in my music player of choice.

Hell, Spotify won't even let me import local MP3 files from my phone!

I just stopped listening to music that doesn't exist in Spotify.

I fought it for a while with local playlist syncing and such, but just wasn't worth it over time. There's enough other music out there that I gave up trying.

You should give YouTube Music a try. It has both the "regular" catalog you'd expect from Spotify (high quality audio, organised by albums, etc.) + more indy bands that publish their music on YouTube.

... until Google Play Music goes the way of Google Reader :'(

I thought this was a feature already?

https://support.spotify.com/is/using_spotify/features/listen...

Or are you referring to something different?

The problem is that, according to your documentation, local music has to be on a desktop (the only way to listen to local music on mobile is to be connected to the same WiFi of a desktop that serves that music (!)). Which I think defeats the purpose of having your music on the go.

You can still add local tracks to playlists and sync those playlists to your phone. I have plenty of albums that don't exist in Spotify's cloud that I bring with me on my phone as "downloaded" playlists.

I hit this issue with a lot of video game/movie soundtracks (Battlestar Galactica and Starbound OSTs are some of my favorite programming music), and it's extremely frustrating. Even worse, Spotify's app doesn't work on my work VPN, forcing me to use the web app... which doesn't support listening to user tracks since Spotify won't store them in its own cloud.

I pay them $10/month for service, so why can't they reserve a couple gigs of space to store my files that they don't have in their library?

Yeah this might seriously make me considering switching from my current half-baked solution of GPM and Pandora, but I still feel discovery is better on Pandora (and that's saying a lot because Pandora leaves a _lot_ to be desired).

This happened to me too, so I'm in the process of switching back to Apple Music.

I scrobble to last.fm so I can still get decent recommendations over there.

I like google play, also converted from spotify. But I don't like that albums disappear from google play.

This happened at spotify too and I assume it's due to legal issues. When an artist released a certain album on one label and only that album disappears.

It's very annoying and is pushing me back to good old piracy.

I've experienced all of these issues before, the 10k/disappearing albums is really debilitating for music lovers who like to collect full albums. I switched to Spotify from Google Music a few months ago, and my experience is mostly the same--mediocre, but functional enough.

At least Spotify has an open API, so you (maybe) can solve your own problems given some time.

(10k is really not that much at all if you're into a few genres.)

Instead of saving full albums to your saved tracks, save only the very favorite tracks, and add the albums as playlists instead.

I have a playlist folder called "favorite albums" specifically for this.

10K songs is limiting to you?! Wow, how/for what do you use Spotify?

At a (low!) estimate of 4 minutes per song, if you listen to Spotify for 3hrs/day, it would still take you 222 days to listen to all of them once.

Is this a form of data hoarding? If not, how do you use that many songs?

if you want to have music on 10hrs a day, a 10k long playlist only lasts 20 days. and 10hrs is only half a day, and you might want to have music outside of work hours too!

Good point, hadn't thought of people listening to music at work :)

10K songs is restrictive when it comes to digital music collections.

I have 15k songs in my iTunes library, and that doesn't include the music I listen to via Apple Music and SoundCloud. Given that I've been building up this music collection for about two decades now, there's quite a bit of stuff in the long tail, though I do listen to near all of it over the span of a few years.

If Spotify want to be around for another decade, I think it's reasonable that they let people build up a respectable library.

But you don't have to save every single track to your collection, there's no reason to be a hoarder. They're still there on Spotify even if you don't save them, it's not like saving MP3s to your hard drive.

Use playlists as well. Each playlist has its own limit of 10K tracks AFAIK. So I save only absolute favorite individual tracks (and take some stuff off the list once in a while), and I save favorite full albums as playlists.

Sometimes I just want to remember stuff for years later. 222 days to listen to songs sounds like a long time, but not if you spread it over 20 years.

I don't understand - I thought you could stream any audio from their collection that you wanted on Spotify? Do you have to add audio to your library first? Otherwise why does it matter what is in your library and what isn't if you can stream anything?

It allows you to quickly look through music you like, rather than having to manually search for the artist/album/song every single time.

It's still streamed (unless you save it for Offline, which it supports) but it's waaay better for organization. Have you ever forgetten the name of an artist or forgot an artist exists until you scroll past them in your music library?

Use playlists, they each have their own limit of 10K songs AFAIK.

I left Pandora for a similar reason. They had (still have?) a 100 station limit. It was lame. I am also a Google Play Music user.

I believe playlists don't count as library (please correct me if I'm wrong) - so you can effectively surpass the 10,000 as a limit by adding songs to playlists instead of the library.

I've actually changed my model primarily around playlists and don't actually use the library feature of spotify hardly at all.

This is true, but IMO it's not a great replacement. I imported my old Rdio library this way and it's effectively useless. I've had to become a playlist-first user as well, but boy I miss having a browsable catalog of all "my music"...

I've been a Spotify premium user for years now and have never used my Library, but have a ton of playlists organized and nested into different genre/mood/etc directories.

I'm sure there's a good reason why people want to use their Library instead and why the "playlist" way is inefficient since I've seen a lot of users annoyed with the limit, but anecdotally I've never had a problem with the playlist-first way of using the app.

Actually at this point if they put the limits on playlists and had an unlimited Library I'd probably be jumping ship to something else myself.

I use spotify in a lazy way, but essentially if I like a song, I press the check mark. If I'm doing my normal listening I just have all of my songs that are in my library on shuffle.

I imagine if I hit the 10K limit this inability to use shuffle on ALL of my tracks at once would annoy me.

I only save my very favorite tracks, for full albums I add them as a playlist.

That way I can still shuffle my collection of favorite awesome tracks, but I also have easy access to my favorite albums, where I still consider the whole album to be good, but only a few of the tracks stand out as absolute favorites.

I use it the same way, so for me hitting that 10K limit would take a very long time (if ever).

I can see some use cases where it would occur though.

Ironically, I tried and failed to switch to Google Play Music because they limit playlists to 1000 songs, and I have a couple different playlists with 1600+ songs each.

Does anyone know the technical background of this? They talk about providing a great experience for others, so I guess it's about performance. But library entries can be partitioned by users so there should be no performance effect of 100k songs per library of one user on others? Also, the current 10k limit doesn't represent much data if stored with a bit of meta data.

Instead of saving full albums (which adds every single track to your saved tracks list), focus on saving your very favorite tracks, and add the full album as a playlist instead.

Same. I'm a Spotify lifer unless something catastrophic happens to their service or media availability.

The only alternative service I even debated about was Apple Music when they first announced their streaming service, but there is no clear advantage to their service and I hate the Apple Music UI.

I hope they find a way to help a bigger % of the revenue get into the hands of artists and start cutting out the big record companies who just middleman everything. But other than that, no complaints.

I was an Apple music since launch(till a month back). But once I tried Spotify and the playlists, I switched instantly. While Apple Music is a competitor, it's not everywhere like Spotify is and their recommendations are horrible. In all time using them, I discovered 2 songs that I liked. With 4 weeks on Spotify, I'm already at 25!

I've switched to an Amazon ecosystem (dot, fireTv, etc) and Spotify just works seamlessly between them all. I love it.

I have to wonder how many users Spotify picked up when Apple blew the christmas HomePod release and Amazon flushed out Alexa-enabled devices at heavy discounts.

The echo dot was the best selling product on amazon over Christmas. Luckily for Apple, I don’t think a $30 device will lock someone into an ecosystem.

Man, I don't know. I'm moving away from iOS/Siri/HomeKit/HomePod/iCloud(ugh) instead of moving toward it.

It might not be a lock-in, but given my track time on a non-Apple ecosystem and the value I'm getting out of Spotify compared to Apple Music...I'm not going back any time soon.

And, yeah: all it took was a $30 device.

As an alternative opinion I used both Apple Music and Spotify. Apple Music’s recommendation has been amazing for me, and Spotifys terrible and I have fairly strange tastes in music (play dark-Berghein techno, but then like exploring as many genres from around the world as possible).

If Apple Music was supported in as many places as Spotify I would drop Spotify.

I really don't want to change this discussion into a "which is the best music streaming service" debate, but I am really curious, why haven't your considered Google Play Music? Interface? Songs count? Price?

I am subbed to GPM for a few years now. I did it first because Spotify was and still isn't available in my country, but I don't think I would switch if they become available tomorrow.

I used to use GPM and am now a Spotify customer. For starters, I was annoyed that Google removed some of its playlist interface around the activity-based radios. You'd click an activity and there would be several stations/playlists for different styles of music that were great for that general activity. Loved it. Now I can't find it anywhere.

Second is the interface in general. Spotify realizes that especially on mobile, you have limited screen real estate. I really dislike Google's choice to overly emphasize giant thumbnails of album art I'll never care about or recognize, at the expense of not providing a list view for all levels of the hierarchy. This also leads to situations where artist names are truncated beyond recognition because there's only a few characters space for them.

The GPM app on my Pixel XL also takes seemingly forever to load and play, podcasts often lose their place, etc. Spotify just works.

The album art bit I'll generally agree with, but for the activity bit... not to sound too harsh, but did you even try to find it after they did a minor redesign a while back?

Menu ("..." on left in web) > Browse stations > Activities

It's right there!

The change occurred ages ago so I might be forgetting details, but what I think was removed was a more curated way of matching stations with the activity, with descriptions for each. Now it is just a ton of radio stations that often seem unrelated, and no upfront description of what it is unless you click through. Just more giant thumbnails I don't need.

hmmm honestly it is just a case of "I used spotify first". If spotify hadn't been my first choice I probably would have gravitated to GPM instead. At this point I don't want to sacrifice any more of my life to Google, so if I had to switch it would probably be to nothing.

I was using Spotify 3 years ago but it was killing the battery life on my Nexus 4 so I switched to Google Play Music (chose it because of the upload feature).

I like the service but there is many things in the UI that I don't like:

- No desktop app

- Album listing is a mess: . It doesn't differentiate between singles and albums so the album list is sometimes very long for no reasons . You can't mentally filter them yourselves as the number of tracks and the album's length are not displayed for each "album" . It is somehow sorted by release year, but not entirely (you can't chose anyway). . On mobile the year is not even displayed so if you want to quickly see if an artist has a new album or simply listen to the more recent one, you can't really be sure of what is displayed.

- On mobile the search button is not always accessible, you have to navigate / "go back"

- Features disappearing: . You used to be able to filter new releases by genre. Now it's a general category of just popular artists. . Same for popular tracks and albums. For my tastes this entire feature is basically useless.

- Radios: the UI used to suggest auto-generated radios based on artists you listen to, it was my favorite feature that helped me discover many great artists and songs. Somehow it got moved and it took me a long time to find it again (it's now only a link on the artist page I guess ? I never think to do that)

- Bonus nitpick : the upload feature is great, sadly your music is not available to other people on the family plan

I've really enjoyed using https://www.googleplaymusicdesktopplayer.com/ for desktop. Its just an Electron App but it seems to add a few extra features that make it much nicer to use.

Thanks I'll check it out. I used Nuvola player on Ubuntu at work which is a bit the same concept. Mostly I want access to quick play/stop buttons ...

https://tiliado.eu/nuvolaplayer/

(sorry about the formatting, couldn't edit it due to the noprocrast setting)

disclaimer : I worked for a music streaming service for several years

I don't really like the Play Music UI (but I don't hate it either, the new parts are very nice, but the album pages could use a bit more love).

I dislike the spotify UI though (why is it THAT dark and depressive ?) and play music removes the ads from youtube (us user) and pays youtubers, so that's an easy choice.

Oh, the winning feature of Play Music for me is that I can add my own album, even if it does not belong to their catalog. It still shows with all it's metadata and cover as an album.

You listed the killer features of Google Music for me: no Youtube ads, auto-pay my favorite Youtubers, and upload my own albums.

Also the Youtube Music app.

I've found their catalog to be really complete, I've rarely not been able to find something specific I'm looking for.

Only advantage I'm hearing from Spotify music users is that the algorithmic selections sound really good. Meh, I put in about an hour a month of surfing different Play Music radio stations and recommendations. Works for me.

I don’t think it’s possible to really understand how great Spotify’s algorithm is until you’ve experienced it recommending a fantastic song, and you go check the artist out, notice they have less than ten thousand plays and have only released two songs

Idk how that’s even possible but it happens once a month for me

I read it's based on human curation - this is the clever part.

If you have songs in your playlist that someone else has in their playlist it'll find a song in that other playlist that you don't have. Offload the complexity of matching to humans already doing it.

Sounds kind of like pagerank for songs.

Yeah I could see that - if you think of being in a playlist like a citation.

They use human curation for many of the pre-built playlists, but those humans are also assisted by some interesting algorithm work on the backend.

For instance, the Fresh Finds playlists - music that's good but very new or undiscovered - are made by curators who sift through songs and artists listened to each week by "tastemaker users". Spotify combs through their listener data and identifies users who have a habit of listening to music that later blows up and becomes much more popular. They tag those users anonymously and use their taste to inform the Fresh Finds playlists, which also feed the rest of the editorial department.

Really cool stuff.

https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/03/02/introducing-fresh-fin...

> I dislike the spotify UI though (why is it THAT dark and depressive ?) and play music removes the ads from youtube (us user) and pays youtubers, so that's an easy choice.

I am also not a fan of Spotify's UI. I've tried in order, Spotify, GPM, and am now on AM. I may try Spotify again, since my first try was a few years ago and I didn't care for the UI and became annoyed after I built a playlist and half the songs disappeared one day (rights issue I guess).

GPM is a great deal because it also includes YouTube Red and YouTube music if that's your thing.

You can also get a deal on AM if you buy for the year for $99 and use an iTunes gift card that you can usually find for ~$80.

The AM UI is not the best, but since I'm on iOS, the integration is nice.

I've been a subscriber to Google Play Music for a few years, initially I think my choice rested on being able to upload from my personal library, which was more significant back in the days when there was much less parity in music service catalogs - this was circa no Beatles. Then they added the youtube tie in where you don't get youtube ads - very valuable. I agree with the general UI complaint, it isn't great. To add to the crit, the branding is weak - 'Spotify' is meaningful, 'Play' is not. Despite all that, I've decided $100/yr for music on demand and no youtube ads is a good deal for me.

I tried Spotify a couple years ago and the experience was terrible and I haven't been back. I don't recall exactly: there was tons of hype, I had to download and run an installer, then create an account and validate email, and then I could play a song, so I picked a song and got some audio ads and subsequent more ads and suggested songs that were not at all related to the song I picked. It wasn't just not good enough to get me to switch, the onboarding was repellent.

I probably won't be their customer but I'm happy to see them succeed for a variety of reasons: customers love it, they aren't FAMGA, and that slide deck on their organizational squads and tribes [1] was significant in my work life.

[1]: https://blog.crisp.se/2012/11/14/henrikkniberg/scaling-agile...

> why is it THAT dark and depressive ?

Different tastes. I love their green and black theme. it's focussed and clean.

I'm with you on that. I've been a Spotify Premium member since day 1 of US availability, with no intention of switching to others. The only alternative I've even tried is TIDAL, through their trial, to see if the lossless quality was worth the $10 extra a month, but didn't renew beyond that.

This may be one of my first "buy and hold" stocks simply for the personal reason of loving the service.

*18 million to 71 million in 3 years.

If you contrast this with 51 -> 92 for ad supported MAUs in 3 years it seems like they have been successful in converting a lot of ad supported users to premium ones.

In Canada, one of the largest telecom companies gives new accounts to their services/Spotify free 6 months of Spotify. That may have helped boost the numbers recently.

https://www.rogers.com/customer/support/article/share-everyt...

Those offers seem to be all over the place. They're common in the US as well.

The challenge for Spotify will be the next few years, seeing how they withstand the substantial onslaught coming from Apple's music subscription service (which is booming as well). I'm skeptical Spotify can stay in the fight financially over time. There's nothing they can do in music that will ever produce the kind of profit required to support a $25 billion market cap (critical given they're about to open themselves up to public shareholder scrutiny). If they can't, the public shareholders will eventually force a sale of the company.

They'd need 250-300 million paying subscribers, most likely, to get to ~$800m in net income (~5% net income margins), assuming they can ever actually make money to begin with. That'd be a generous ~31 PE. It's essentially impossible.

Apple, Google and Amazon on the other hand, never need to earn a penny of profit in music. It'll be perpetually in their interests to hold music service margins on the floor. The music industry won't be so stupid as to harm Spotify, given they'll want the leverage vs Apple & Co? Well they successfully killed off Pandora on margin squeezing, so sure they will. Their view is there's always another company to replace the last one, and that their music rights are the value that's core and eternal.

Yep. Spotify is in an un-enviable position of having a superior product, but with competitors who don't need to earn a profit.

Your last paragraph is one of the best takes I've read on this.

Superior for who? For me Apple Music is the superior product.

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