Spotify hits 83M paying subscribers, more than double Apple Music’s 40M | Hacker News Reader

Spotify hits 83M paying subscribers, more than double Apple Music’s 40M

9to5mac.com

194 pointsmyroon5160 comments

Spotify are about to loose me as a customer after the better part of a decade as a paying premium subscriber for one reason: putting videos in the form of mini documentaries and puff pieces in curated playlists and not adding a way to auto skip them.

I have had Spotify in the background of pretty much all aspects of my life for years but these videos discussing the inspiration of a song through to an artist designing his own sneakers breaks my concentration and is driving me mad.

Spotify don’t care, an option to block these videos has been asked for, a “Community Idea” for the feature to block them has over 2,000 votes (the threshold for Spotify paying attention is 100) so I am off to Deezer.

Spotify was in the category of non negotiable and alongside heating and internet as a household bill so I’m pretty bummed they now want to be YouTube but in portrait only.

Putting some Spotify addresses in your /etc/hosts file will block those - I haven't seen one of those videos on my desktop ever.

>putting videos in the form of mini documentaries and puff pieces in curated playlists and not adding a way to auto skip them.

That sounds super annoying.

I haven't had any of those? Are they region specific?

Everything in Spotify is extremely region specific. I’ve flown from the US to Asia and lost the ability to play some songs.

Surely the labels are to blame for that and Spotify is just the messenger.

I don’t know what you mean “blame...” Spotify licenses certain music in certain countries and not in others. That’s not some kind of crime against the user, so I blame no one.

The one about sneakers they even tweeted about two days ago. It’s a Thomas Rhett one and is the first song on Hot Country, it’s not a song Spotify!! (let’s all just skip past the fact I listen to country but live in the UK...)

I'd love to learn more about this! I hate the way this sounds, have not encountered it, but keen to share my distaste with Spotify by reaching out to them if this is in fact true!

I'm increasingly frustrated with their response to Community Ideas and feature requests.

Here's a really dumb, simple one: They won't allow you to filter out explicit songs. Even though they already have the metadata indicating a song has explicit lyrics. Lots of customers have asked for it. It has been voted highly on "Community Idea". Still no progress multiple years later.

I’m not sure about letting you filter but they have a toggle to hide explicit songs in settings -> explicit content (on iOS at least)

No service seems to handle this well. I mostly want the opposite: show only uncensored versions in searches and playlists, but it would also be nice to globally toggle to clean versions if I’m hanging out with a child. It’s frustrating and cluttering to see both versions in the catalogue as if they are separate releases.

The problem is also impacted by how those songs get onto the platform. Apparently, music companies literally just upload the music files, correct metadata or not

You know what also dumb? If you have an explicit song in a playlist and then that song becomes un-available due to some licensing deal from the original licenser but is still available (in explicit and explicit) form another licenser sometimes your explicit song will get swapped for the clean version. It's incredibly jarring and at least the last time I dealt with the issue it was really hard to find the explicit song from the mobile app to fix my playlist and had to do it on the desktop.

The inability to filter explicit songs out is maddening! And it's a glaring omission to anyone with young children. I have seen it skip from a My Little Pony song to an explicit Patton Oswalt standup bit (perhaps because he voiced a character once... I have no clue) while my daughter was listening.

Another annoying one is how you can choose an exact song to play on tablet or on PS4, but not from your phone - you can only shuffle play there. Try explaining that to a 5 year old.

The search tab allows you choose any song you want on iOS- what platform doesn’t let you play a particular song?

Agree on the explicit filter though. Seems like such an auto-include for things like parents or storefront playlists

That's a bug that's been around for AGES that they still haven't patched. I hate it.

If you force kill the app and reopen it, suddenly you can choose songs(usually). Then after a while, suddenly you can't. It took me months to figure out what was going on because i'd have another phone in my house right there that could do it, then that wouldn't be able to either suddenly...

Spotify's UI and their response to features is the worst thing ever. I really wish Play Music or whatever started integrating Youtube video music as well, and that it actually stopped skipping during play so I could make the switch.

Like I can't re-size columns anymore. Used to be able to do this. Now it's gone. It's super obnoxious for playlists that have classical music in them because oftentimes the piece gets cut off.

Then there are SO many bugs in the UI. I had a super annoying one a few weeks ago where I have shuffle on, and if I manually picked a song to play, that would turn shuffle off. So any time I wanted to hear a specific song in my 300+ song playlist, I had to turn shuffle on again.

Oh and ANOTHER super obnoxious bug/feature: after a while, downloaded playlists just aren't downloaded anymore. This is extra annoying for flights because I KNOW I have playlists set to download, I KNOW they finished downloading, I KNOW they were downloaded and playable for a few weeks, but still every damn time I get on the plane, after a few weeks of the playlist being downloaded, the files are gone. And I'm stuck on the plane in offline mode with no music to listen to. Play music doesn't have this issue. In fact, I don't have to tell it to download anything. Last weekend on my flight to LA, Play Music had cached/downloaded the two playlists I use the most.

Spotify is such garbage. I hate it so much.

Is this with uploaded music? If so, it could be an issue with regular music syncing deleting or having them become unavailable. That feature is super finicky and iffy and I only ever do manual syncs to mostly avoid it.

Another fun classical music bug is when you try to share those songs in Discord and they break the stream, probably because the titles are too long.

Nope, it's not with uploaded music. I don't upload any music to Spotify because it (as far as I know) doesn't sync across devices. This is the issue I'm seeing: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Downloaded-songs-an...

I believe it's something with Android and restarting the device. It'll happen on my Android tablet, too.

It's a little known feature where you can get Spotify to sync local files across devices by putting both devices on the same wi-fi network. It's a pain, though, and it sometimes fails in the ways I'm talking about (I still use the feature anyway).

I've been a paying Spotify subscriber since 2010. Slowly I've grown dissatisfied with their service.

They killed the instant notifications of new album releases of bands that you follow. They replaced it with a weekly 'Release Radar' that comprises a selection of new music catered to your taste. It seems that the feature has a bias towards certain artists. I listened to Martin Garrix a couple of times years ago and he seems to pop up every few weeks in my 'Release Radar' even though all I really listen to these days is improvised jazz. It doesn't make sense and it isn't in my best interest. Perhaps there is an ulterior financial motive behind 'Release Radar' where record companies can bid for a place in that list, but I'm not sure. What I really want is to get a notification the minute my favorite artists release an album. Surely this shouldn't be too much asked in this day and age.

Until recently you could use search operators like year:1968 genre:jazz and now it's gone. I really like it when you can query repositories of data (music, in the case of Spotify) as a database.

These things really irk me and I'd love to migrate to a (legal) service that does this properly and is relatively free of "smart algorithms", and I wouldn't mind paying $50 a month or maybe more for it.

Try the combination of Roon[1] and Tidal[2]. It is expensive but the user experience is unrivaled.

[1] https://roonlabs.com [2] https://tidal.com

>I really wish Play Music or whatever started integrating Youtube video music as well

Oh boy! I'm so excited to tell you that YouTube Premium is the membership for you!

I just got the free trial a few weeks ago when it launched in Canada and it is FANTASTIC.

Plus, I just discovered the YouTube music app and it is AMAZING.

Not only can you download all the YouTube music you want offline, but you can easily download full videos -- right now I have a ton of Tableau and Excel tutorials to work through on my commute!

Hope I don't come off as a shill, but given that I commute 1-3 hours each way everyday, YouTube is a huge step up from torrents.

I’m pretty excited too, but all I’m getting is the “Coming to your country soon” type deal. It really boggles the mind why they can’t make it available sooner.

Regarding the shuffle bug: it's, uh, not a bug. They changed it to be like that in all the interfaces I've used. :(

Also, on iOS you can swipe right on a song to queue it, but can't do it on android! Also a popular community idea

Here's one better: I want to filter out an artist from ever appearing in my playlists. I would love to block artists from my music universe.

> Even though they already have the metadata indicating a song has explicit lyrics.

Heh, I talked to someone from a large tech company about this who was working with this data, and in his opinion the "explicit" metadata that record labels provided wasn't very good.

Actually, you can filter out explicit songs, but the option is only visible in the mobile app (I have Android). Once you turn it on, it also works on the desktop client signed in to the same account.

Another feature they don't have (that all other apps seem to have) is Bluetooth playlist. Not sure why their apps are so bad.

For whatever it’s worth, I found Deezer extremely frustrating while using the free year of it I got with a Sonos purchase. I would run into inconsistencies and errors in their catalog several times a week, and despite submitting support requests, these were never fixed. A common example would be several artists with the same name but vastly different styles of music and from different decades clumped under one entry. It felt like a music service run by people who didn’t care about music. This is much rarer in Apple Music and Spotify though still a problem on all services.

I have the same impression of Deezer. Clumzy. Bad UX. not much love for music despite…

I tried Deezer, Spotify, Play Music, none fits my bill so far. I'm currently using Amazon Prime Music (came free with my Prime sub so why not) and YouTube Music (same reason, free in my country for 3 months as it's rolling out). They are both OK (lots of issues with YouTube music being the same as you regular account though), but none is better than the other guys.

It’s still not perfect, but they’ve gotten much better. I’ve been a Deezer user for a few years now and agree it was quite bad early on.

I share the sentiment. Sadly it appears as if Spotify is pulling a Snapchat - "We know what's best for our users, their opinions be damned".

Deezer user here, welcome aboard. One thing of note is that FLAC files are only available via Sonos and the desktop Deezer app. I wish they’d offer it on mobile as well, but I greatly enjoy the service and feature set, and most of my listening is on Sonos.

More annoyances:

* Some songs also have a looping video instead of album art. No toggle to disable

* They swapped out built-in Musixmatch lyrics with Genius lyrics, but those are only on select songs because they (Spotify) want to mix in needless tidbits of knowledge. End result: only much-listened songs have lyrics, instead of all of them.

* No Apple TV app. This has been on request since at least 2015 with a ginormous amount of community votes. You can AirPlay, but its not nearly as nice (and no Spotify Connect).

Payola and "promotion collaborations" are are an easy way to monetize the service. Make 20% more money from all users, lose 5% of users? Great deal, according to Excel.

In theory, someone else could make an alternative client that behaves sanely. In practice, DRM.

The thing that frustrates me about Spotify comes from a developer angle. They’ve deprecated libspotify and have been disabling bits of its functionality. A replacement has been promised for ages now but so far, it hasn’t happened.

I've tried Apple Music twice, both on a free one-month trial offer. Both times I found the product to be so frustrating that I stopped using it within the first day.

To me, Spotify is the clear winner in streaming subscription services with a great UX and by doing a decent job of finding new interesting music. I'd rank Google Play second, followed by Amazon Music. Apple Music is the only one I truly dislike.

I still feel like Pandora does the best job of finding similar new music to an initial set of tracks, but other than that I like most aspects of spotify better.

I stumbled across a great Spotify feature the other day. If you right click on a playlist, there is an option called "Create similar playlist". I did this with a playlist I had created from a bunch of random tracks. It basically went through track by track and found similar songs. It was a bit hit or miss on some songs, but a neat feature. I think Spotify does a great job because they give you so many options for finding new music, but sometimes you have to dig into the UI to find them.

It's very subjective, but I've been comparing the "create a station" from a spotify playlist to Pandora for a while, and just find more music that I both like and have never heard of from Pandora than spotify. Then I generally add the tracks I like best to a spotify playlist.

On the other hand, Pandora, it feels like has recently been making picks that somewhat mush your likes and seeds from all your stations together.

> I think Spotify does a great job because they give you so many options for finding new music, but sometimes you have to dig into the UI to find them.

While this is true it's ridiculous how often, at least for me, Spotify creates a playlist with songs that I've listened to hundreds of times already.

At least 70% of my discovery weekly playlist is a song I've already heard. If I create a "Similar playlist" it stuffs it with songs that I listen to regularly. It's deeply disappointing.

Discovery playlists filled with songs I've already 'liked' or added to my library. Discovery playlists with duplicates. And in other playlists, having to 'do not play' songs I don't actually mind because they are generally popular and the algorithm thinks I want to hear it three times a day, every day. A great way to kill your love of a song.

While I love the concept of Spotify, I'm certainly not going to pay for it and eagerly waiting for competitors to be available in my regions.

Spotify is great if I want to hear a specific song, but I've managed to curate Pandora over many years that I almost never hit the down thumb. I haven't tried the Spotify equivalent. But SoundHound and Spotify is a pretty great experience.

Agreed. With Spotify I find the songs are far too similar to be enjoyable.

That's surprising, my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist is usually super eclectic. I guess you're talking about the Radio, though?

It should be a real ease to create good music discovery/curation for spotify since they acquired the echonest. It it really simple to add similar music to what you are currently listening to, too a rolling playlist. Unfortunately, the way they fo it feels like promotion instead of individual curation.

It was easy when I created trushuffle some 8 yrs ago (before Spotify aquired echonest) and it should be even easier for a multi billion company.

I'm the other way, I can't stand Pandora. I suppose it's probably good for finding the popular songs of the genre, but I feel it always ends up playing the same small set of songs pretty quickly regardless of what I put in. Spotify gives me much more variety and of people that would be much harder to discover myself.

I had the same experience with Apple Music. Apple should know what music I enjoy listening to. Spotify rarely disappoints. Apple Music disappointed right out the gate. This completely ignores the confusing nature of Apple Music. Couple that with no ability to import playlists from Spotify, I don't see the benefit.

I had the exact opposite experience - when I used Spotify, I never got good music recommendations, and every 'radio' station I created eventually devolved into horrible music of a genre that I actively dislike. Apple usic on the other hand does a much better job for me of playing music that I like, and the human-curated playlists are excellent.

I had them all and in different countries. Apple Music had lost me forever when day after day for a month they has been suggesting Heavy Metal albums and playlists to me - genre that I do not listen too which is obvious based on my music library and habits.

Spotify is getting on my nerves due to caned music in curated playlists. But I have free subscription as part of family package.

I like Google Music best and miss Rdio.

I love Apple music. For me the distinguishing feature is Beats radio.

Even though I don't listen live, I regularly listen to various programs to find new music. Since the music is picked and narrated by various DJs (Mike D of the Beastie Boys, Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, etc.), it has a far less algorithmic feeling and there are fun stories in between, etc. Also, the different programs serve far more diverse audiences than mainstream radio.

Same.

The UX doesn't matter so much to me because I spend so little time using it. I've never cared about the social features in any music service. I either want to listen to something specific that I search for and play, or just play Beats 1 or another radio station.

Beats1 is free to listen to though.

True, but AFAIR only for live Beats Radio. I think to play shows later you need a subscription.

I've never tried spotify but I'm very happy with Google Play. It's worth the money and it has led me to discover many artists and genres that I didn't know I liked.

just switched from play to spotify a couple months ago, despite having hours of work to get things set up correctly. gotta say - so happy I did.

killer app tho was spotify's remote control functionality.

Spotify does a great job generally but they lost me as a customer because they keep testing removing the Discovery functionality. I don't understand why that's a section they want to kill, but so be it. I canceled in 2016 after a year of being annoyed by the on again-off again presence of the Discovery section. It looks like the same game is still going on.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Discover-re...

https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/7rbvnr/discover_se...

I tried Google, Amazon, and Apple's offerings and went with Apple Music since I'm a Mac, iPhone, Apple TV user. Couldn't be happier. Should Apple remove their discovery section I'll find a different provider. Rinse, repeat. I've found a lot of awesome bands that way without any effort on my part.

I never honestly noticed the difference here, but now you point it out... it looks like they're pushing advertising no matter what kind of user you are.

What made me notice that is how subtle the payola is. I follow my best friend's Discover Weekly playlist too because we share similar tastes, and every now and then I would spot that we get the exact same songs (typically some new release but not always from a big band), at the exact same position in each of our playlists.

I still enjoy Spotify greatly, but it's a shame that they're trading serendipity for marketing. The Release Radar thing is practically useless.

My interpretation of a similar scenario (my girlfriend and I both followed & listened to each other's Discover Weekly) was that Spotify noticed that traffic and started assuming our tastes were converging (they were).

This also drives me crazy. Maybe not exactly the discovery feature, but how flimsy the UX feels. Features disappear and reappear all the time.

I've listened to a Spotify people brag about their A/B testing efforts. It is absolutely crazy how many different variants they have at any given time. A/B might be valuable, but to me it should be conservative.

> I've listened to a Spotify people brag about their A/B testing efforts. It is absolutely crazy how many different variants they have at any given time.

Yeah, I once "decompiled" the Spotify desktop app (it’s mostly a bunch of zip’d web apps glued together), and found details about ad targeting and A/B identifiers. I had 20+ identifiers, most of them regarding ads (i.e. named `ads_<something>`), but also some with weird names like `liar_detective_rollout_Exposed`.

I already had iTunes Match, and then Apple Music launched first in my country, I tried Spotify but when they finally launched but their catalog was worse, and syncing your existing library of music never worked well (network error? let's delete everything!).

Apple Music's killer features for me are the iOS integration and cloud sync+playback of your existing library of MP3s and iTunes purchases. Also as bad as the iTunes UI has gotten, my experience with the Spotify app was even worse.

Apple Music seems to be the only service that handles uploaded music and syncing well, integrating uploads seamlessly into your library. I think it has an edge with anyone who downloads albums that are too obscure to get licensed to the streaming service or unofficial releases. It probably partly accounts for the popularity of Apple Music with younger hip hop heads who need to integrate mixtapes in their libraries.

Google Play Music has a cleanly integrated locker, which I love, loads of my favorite music isn't available from services.

Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on anything related to music.

Spotify is the best there is today, Rdio is the best there ever was

>Apple Music is the only one I truly dislike

The same here, being half an Apple Fans I would have put up with minor annoyance, in the hope they will improve one day. But no, it was another iTunes.

They may succeed in US or EU, but I would bet $100 they won't succeed in Asia + Japan Region.

I'm an Apple Music user. On my iPhone, it's very good. performs well, features that weren't there 3 months ago have been added (like when I select the album/artist on the now playing it asks if I want to go to that album or the artist, for example.)

Apple Music on the desktop has been functional but like iTunes (I'm on Windows) it's not quite as fluid. Having said that, trying Spotify after using Apple Music has been awful. The UI to me is very clunky. It's slow. And I find its classical music collection (a big piece for me) is woefully lacking.

Is Google Play Music anything more than the audio from YouTube uploads? Music uploads on YouTube can have wildly variable audio quality.

> Is Google Play Music anything more than the audio from YouTube uploads?

Yes, Google Play Music is a regular “official digital content from music publishers” streaming service.

The All Access bundles commercial-free YouTube access and if the same song has an official video on YouTube you can switch to it instead of the audio directly from the GPM app, but the catalogs are separate.

I'm pretty surprised of the high number of Apple Music subscribers. As hinted at the end of the article, geographic, but also age distribution would be interesting to see.

Anecdotally in my mid 20 central European bubble, ~95% of my peers use Spotify, with the rest using Google Play Music (including me). I don't know a single person using Apple Music, and I wasn't even aware that it existed as a paid service (though I think I've heard of it a few years ago).

> I'm pretty surprised of the high number of Apple Music subscribers. As hinted at the end of the article, geographic, but also age distribution would be interesting to see.

Just shows the power of controlling the platform.

This. Spotify should be worried about the growth of Apple music - which is only available on iPhone's but already have 50% of the subscribers?

Then you account for the other big platform which is Google Music... I don't see a play for spotify here.

> Spotify should be worried about the growth of Apple music - which is only available on iPhone's

Say what now? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...

Apple Music is on Android. I heard it isn’t a great experience but it’s been there for a while.

> and I wasn't even aware that it existed as a paid service

If you have an iPhone and tried to use the music app to play your songs, you should be well aware that apple music exists. One of the more blatant up sells on ios.

I use iTunes-match and the built in music on ios ("upload" and stream all your music) and eventually figured out you can tone down the apple music reminders by turning of settings->music->show_apple_music

Beyond Apple Music and iCloud storage, what other “up sells” are there on iOS? I can’t think of any, let alone any that I would call “blatant”.

Unless you have an iPhone you wouldn't know about it anyway.

This really comes down to what you expect from the product and what your use case is.

I don't want something to select music for me. I listen to whole albums. I want to be able to search or an album or an artist and listen to one of their albums. Not a playlist that might feature them.

I hated Spotify's UX because it felt like it was hiding all of its music and trying to force me to listen to what it wanted me to hear.

The entire iTunes catalog free for me to listen fits my needs exactly.

If there are any Apple Music engineers reading this: My wife and I changed our Apple ID country/region a few weeks ago. Without warning, we both lost our entire Apple Music library.

I’m a little surprised that a service with 40M subscribers doesn’t seem to consider that users might do this.

Well, your Apple ID is the key to your music library.

How else would they tie it? Anything else used as the key would still cause you to lose your library if you changed it.

Besides, was it really lost? You can switch your old ID to a new ID and keep your library. Was it lost or merely waiting for you to link it to the new ID?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201389

They changed the country/region of an existing Apple ID, they didn't change their Apple ID.

Interesting. When I changed my Apple ID region I couldn't do it without canceling my subscription first. Just canceling wasn't enough though, as my current subscription period wouldn't end until later. I had to contact customer support to have them terminate my subscription prematurely to switch regions immediately.

After switching regions I also switched back to Spotify and I haven't bothered using it since. I just went back to check in the Apple Music after reading this—surprise surprise, all my playlists and songs are gone too.

Yeah, we had to wait until our Apple Music subscription expired too.

In general the country switching experience seems pretty sub par: if you had just purchased a year long app subscription (I believe some apps can offer that), your options for changing country would either be to forfeit your purchase by calling up to terminate the subscription, or wait an entire year for it to expire...

Apple Music has regularly screwed up the playlists in my library, removing most of the songs on them for mysterious reasons in several instances.

If my Mac routinely deleted files from the filesystem Apple would be working overtime to fix it, but with Apple Music data loss seems to be the norm.

I looked into switching to Spotify recently, but one of the first songs I looked for wasn't available which turned me off (the song is available on Apple Music).

Yes, playlists are really broken on Apple Music. If you remove an album from your library, its titles will be removed from all of your playlists too. The song ordering is also not consistent between the mobile app and desktop iTunes.

This is great news IMO. Spotify's platform is leagues better than apple music. Also I know they don't have the best track record w/ third party apps but Spotify also offers the most comprehensive API when compared to the other major streaming services. This lets people like me make apps[1] which (I think) attract more subscribers and create a stronger network. That being said I don't know if I would run out and buy the stock... there's still serious competition and the music labels run their business like the mob.

[1]https://www.jqbx.fm

How is this such “great news”? Spotify is having a Dropbox issue - in the grand scheme of things, their only reason for existing is just a tiny line item to their major competitors - Apple, Google, and Amazon. They are a feature not a product.

Revenue means nothing without profit.

http://fortune.com/2018/05/30/spotify-ipo-profit/

bit bullied. Despite steadily increasing paid subscribers (75 million and counting) and revenue (about $1.36 billion last quarter), Spotify continues to bleed. The $49 million or so that it lost in the first three months of 2018 wasn’t because the company can’t keep a tight rein on its own spending, but because it can’t keep a rein on its suppliers. Yes, that’s right: As Spotify grows, so do its royalty payouts to record labels and other music providers. And those marginal costs are an anchor on the Stockholm company’s profit potential

Okay sure the full picture isn't all sunshine (I didn't say I'd buy the stock) but it's not bad news either. With the lions share of the streaming market and low churn rate I would expect they can negotiate some better deals (or possibly get enough of an edge to raise prices).

Why would the music industry negotiate? If Spotify tries to play hardball and doesn’t agree with the terms of one of the three major record labels, they lose access to the music. Neither Apple, Google, nor Amazon really care if their music streaming service is profitable or barely break even, they are using music streaming to sell other higher margin products.

Apple is still growing faster than Spotify and YouTube is a bigger brand.

If they try to raise prices - Apple Music and the YouTube offering starts to look a lot more attractive - it’s hard to compete against the default.

With a large enough differential between customer #1 and customer #2 it becomes a lot of cash to leave on the table if you don't renegotiate. But I don't know the numbers and you're right to point out that everything could potentially go wrong, but IMO it's not a sure thing and at least this report is a step in the right direction not the wrong one.

Yes, it's bad news. The article states that their losses have more than doubled in the past year from $220M to $460M. Their average revenue per user has dropped 12% to $5.72 and Spotify says that won't be getting better anytime soon. Most of their "new" customers are the result of family deals and promotions. Spotify thinks they can grow their way to profitability, but they are competing with Apple Music, which doesn't have to be profitable.

I don’t see how they can grow thier way to profitability with negative marginal costs. You grow your way to profitability if you have high fixed cost and low marginal costs. But, they have to pay such exorbitant licensing fees that thier marginal cost is high. The family plans are making the situation worse.

Once Apple introduced the family plans, Spotify was toast.

And finally, there is another level of complexity when you have to go to their website to pay instead of just using an in app purpose. They were one of the top grossing apps when they had in app purchases - even when they charged more to offset Apple’s 30% cut.

Your first paragraph and your second are not tied together.

You say these things like Google and Apple are inherently better because music streaming is a bolt-on.

I like Spotify for the same reason I like Roku. The product they provide is their mission. Spotify doesn't want me on Google, or Apple, or Echo. It wants me to listen on its platform.

Roku doesn't give a damn what content I view. Its mission is to make a good streaming player.

---

Now, you're correct, they need to make more money. But I use them in principle because I want them to win.

I would like to see Spotify become healthy and profitable. There is no reason you shouldn’t want more competition but the odds are against them. The last 18 years are full of failed and failing music subscription services - from PressPlay and MusicNet back in the early 2000s, to Zune, to whatever the service that MS launched with MTV, Napster 2.0, Tidal, etc.

As far as Roku, that’s not a great example. I have 3 Roku TVs and a Roku stick, but they definitely aren’t the model I prefer - “I give you money and you give me stuff and leave me alone”.

For starters, the shortcut buttons on their remotes are hardwired and branded to whoever gave them the most money this month. I have one with a Rdio button (a dead service) and another with a shortcut to CBSNews.

Then half of their home screen is taken up with an ad. When you sign up for an account it’s a Godaddy style up sell.

They make money by both tracking your viewing habits and subscriptions that are bought through their service.

The Roku interface is slower than my third generation AppleTVs not to mention my AppleTV 4K.

The Roku’s saving grace is the much better remote app and private listening.

If I'm not mistaken, I think you can pair Airpods with the Apple TV and have private listening.

You’re right.

https://www.macworld.com/article/3250084/home-tech/how-to-us...

But now I have mixed feelings about that...

- The AirPods cost more than the 32 inch Roku TCL TV.

- It’s Apple, I should expect to pay out the nose for anything Apple related that I buy.

- I can buy a Roku stick for $49 for the TV in my home gym that only has a 3rd gen AppleTV and use my phone for private listening.

- I’ve already got to convince my wife to let me get a 27 inch iMsc.

- If I get the AirPods my wife is going to see how convenient they are and want a pair too.

First World Problems....

The AppleTV works with any standard Bluetooth headphones/speakers, not just AirPods

Oh yeah. And another advantage of Roku’s private listening is that all of my exercise equipment has speakers and a 3.5 inch jack. I can turn on private listening on my phone and pipe the audio from my phone to my treadmill, elliptical and bike. I don’t have to wear headphones and I can keep the audio down so it doesn’t disturb the rest of my family.

Ehh, Apple Music with the match paid addon stores all of my music and syncs it across my devices, including many pieces unavailable from the platform itself. Aside from that, all these platforms offer more or less the same commodity music service. Why use spotify?

> Apple Music with the match paid addon stores all of my music and syncs it across my devices, including many pieces unavailable from the platform itself.

The free version of Google Play Music does that, too.

Oh, I didn’t know that! I’ll have to check it out.

Since there's so much Spotify hate in here, I'd just like to say, the service is so good it has changed my life. Specifically, my music library has grown in a thousand new directions because I find it so incredibly easy to discover new music. I think I would have stagnated long ago if it wasn't for Spotify's features. I'm 6 years into my subscription and it just keeps offering me more and more value. Maybe Apple Music is equally good? I haven't felt any need to switch.

I guess Spotify (or Deezer) is the better option since they aren't trying to lock you in their ecosystem and they're available on every platforms, including Linux.

Also, I think they nailed the UI, Spotify Connect is great (also works with chromecast audio!) and Discover weekly is amazing.

What blows my mind is that you cannot connect to a Chromecast from the desktop client. Apparently there is no official desktop SDK for Google Cast (outside of Chrome). So perhaps that is what really blows my mind. Errhm.

You can actually get the desktop client connected to your Chromecast in a roundabout way. What I do is connect to my Chromecast from the Spotify app on my iPhone, and then the option will appear in the desktop client to connect. I have no idea why you have to channel through the phone first, but it works perfectly from desktop to Chromecast once it's connected.

I'm a paying customer but can anyone tell me why shuffle play is the default? If i'm listening to an album I typically want to listen to it from start to finish and the extra clicks to do that are annoying. But there must be a reason it is designed like that?

Do you mean the big green button? You can usually click the first track to start playing in order.

That's funny - I was thinking today that I really like this feature, but I do think it's an odd default.

I have massive playlists of all random songs, so I like that I can hit the button when I'm on the move to play a random selection of my preselected music.

> why shuffle play is the default

I expect it's because A/B testing showed that most users preferred that behavior. This makes sense from their radio/playlist-centric model, which seems to de-emphasize single album listening.

All apple music did was ruin the interface for my own mp3's on my iPhone and push me to Spotify completely.

Apple thought pop-stars and EDM chart toppers and anyone associated with BEATS has good taste and to promote the playlists. It is top40 shlock.

I wonder if this is not an oversight and rights for purchased music are only for the country where they were bought. I'm not sure, but this might be working as intended, and if so I doubt this is Apple's fault.

> Apple thought pop-stars and EDM chart toppers and anyone associated with BEATS has good taste and to promote the playlists. It is top40 shlock.

Apple music has over 45 million tracks, so if what you meant to say was top40Million, then yeah - you're close.

If however you really think Apple Music only has top 40 type music in it, you're waaaay off base. They even have curated playlists for super-esoteric genres, and do a great job keeping those playlists updated.

Yes, if you only looked at a couple of "A-List" playlists, then you'd see top 40 type stuff - but that's the point of those playlists.

I've been using spotify for a few years now. I don't mind paying for premium given the amount of music available. Anything to skip ads.

However I agree with other comments here, Spotify simply does not listen to their customers. Their community ideas are worthless as nothing there ever comes to fruition, and yet we know they are working on their Apps as they continue to receive UI updates.

FTA: Spotify operating at a $460m loss up from $220m a year ago...

There is also deezer.com.

I don't know if the amount of tracks is the same, however, the service is fantastic. The app is super easy to use, and the Flow they provide (a sort of randomized playlist based on your likes) is great.

Deezer also aportions each individual's payments directly to the artists they listen (unlike Apple Music, Spotify et al who distribute in aggregate to the music labels)

Good for them. After some of my favorites were just gone (because license was not renewed or something like that - no clue) I'd rather stick with having files on my devices, like in old good days.

Spotify is great, I couldn't care less about Apple Music, but you know what is really awesome and I didn't see anyone mentioning it...

YOUTUBE !

Get on Premium so you don't have to listen to ads, and it is just amazing. I paid initially so my kids would not be exposed to commercials, but I really love it and most of the time it is the most convenient because it is always there.

I marked few playlist I like for commute and roadtrips to be downloaded, so it works offline.

> Get on Premium so you don't have to listen to ads

That's an ad blocker I haven't heard of yet.

Last time I tried Apple Music I found it terrible... it messed with my existing iTunes library and the damage could only be undone with restoring an old backup that was done by copying my drive.

Never again I trust Apple Music application as long as it is the same app also managing my "offline" music AND my iPhone sync. Like, wtf? 3 completely different things in a single app? Why?

it messed with my existing iTunes library and the damage could only be undone with restoring an old backup that was done by copying my drive

This is classic Apple, going back to the original iPod days. It's one thing to promote "convention over configuration", but Apple's destructive "my way or the highway" approach to user interface design has never made sense to me. At least with their proprietary connectors, they're usually pushing some kind of improvement over the status quo.

Hah, that reminds me of the first time I got an iPod - I let it spend a couple of hours loading songs from my computer, and then a day or two later I tried to add a single song from my dad's computer. When I hit "sync", it first deleted everything on the iPod, and then added the one new song >_<

There was a bug that affected a tiny number of iTunes users where iCloud Music Library screwed up their iTunes library. This was all over the media briefly, and about a week later Apple put out a fix.

I love Apple Music - the ability to control my music through Siri, add songs to playlists via Siri, and I really have no problem finding what I'm looking for in the catalog or via curated playlists. Also, my stations have become pretty customized at this point, so I hardly ever have to hunt for music to listen to.

The one thing that frustrates me with both Apple Music and Spotify is the lack of information density; it's really hard to use for people with large libraries or who depend on extended album metadata. It's particularly problematic for classical music.

I kind of think this is more impressive for Apple Music. Spotify had a massive head start on streaming music, they basically invented the model that everyone uses now.

If I worked at Apple and knew that I had half the subs of Spotify I'd be very pleased with myself.

I've been using Google Play Music for years now, although it wasn't my only music app until the Songza acquisition in ~2014, its now become the only thing I listen to, except for the occasional XM radio in the car when I'm bored. The YouTube Red thing seemed useless at first, but I've found myself consuming more YouTube content these days, and while I wouldn't pay for it on its own, as an add on feature its pretty useful.

At this point there is no way I'd go back to listening to music with ads in it, and unless google ruins it, I don't see any reason to even try to switch.

I'm confused by your last sentence. What music service can you pay for that has ads in it?

Whether you pay for Spotify or Apple Music, there are no ads in your music.

Spotify had that giant Drake "promotion" a few weeks ago, which a rational person would think is an ad.

I use Spotify on multiple devices every day and didn't notice anything about Drake recently, so it must not have been that effective a promotion.

It was obnoxious and took over the whole discovery section.

This is wrong. There are ads in Spotify premium, in the UI. There was a gigantic obnoxious one a few weeks ago for an artist starting with D and ending with E.

See my wording and parent's wording. We were very clearly discussing audio ads that interrupt music.

Of course there are ads in Spotify. Music itself is full of advertisements, too. That's a different problem, though.

I'm only a very casual free user of Spotify, but the thing that has stuck with me is that if I start it off playing from an album and just let it continue on from there eventually it almost always ends up in very strange places with me looking up and saying "What the H am I listening to?"

I'm also surprised that out of > 100 comments there's barely a mention of Pandora - has it truly fallen so low?

Pandora has never been good if you listen to things that aren't so popular. I tried it years ago, and eventually got frustrated at their sheer lack of variety. It also wasn't available for some folks I knew. I considered re-checking them to see if there was improvement. But alas, I had switched countries and it simply wasn't available.

Pandora was never a robust enough service, so it is unsurprising that no one mentions it.

If Apple Music had as many curated playlists as Spotify, I'd be in. And almost solely for the Siri integration.

Don't know how the two compare, but my experience is there are countless seemingly impossible to discover curated playlists in Apple Music. This helps: http://mixing.io/

Thanks for the link. Discoverability has been my biggest complaint with Apple Music so far.

AM has a ton of curated playlists - and not just customer-created/shared ones, they have full-time staff that does this stuff. In fact, that was the biggest strength of Beats when Apple acquired it - I was a Beats customer at the time, and the curated playlists were widely regarded as their best feature.

I'm surprised apple music is that big! Most of my peers have iphones, yet 95% of them use spotify.

Still no lyrics ! :-(

Spotify conquered the living room.

I recently canceled my Netflix subscription. I was an early and long time Soundcloud paid user. Also canceled that this year.

Somehow Spotify keeps me hooked. The Discover Weekly is great. Listening to some Paul Simon on the Bose Bluetooth speaker thing as I type this.

The only thing keeping me with Spotify is last.fm integration.

Eavescrob[1] does a great job for me... as long as the tracks you want scrobbled are in your library...

[1] http://wil.dog/eavescrob/

Are there any numbers for Google Play Music subscribers? I've been a user of that for several years and I'm curious to see how they compare.

I tried Spotify once but it was too complex for my tastes... I liked Pandora's simplicity of training a station and being able to be hands off.

Spotify has a "radio" functionality that is very similar to Pandora's... but vastly more flexible, and with a seemingly far greater selection of tracks to draw from.

Yes, being able to create a station based on an artist, album or song is great for discovery. The stations are somewhat finite and pre-generated, I think (a few times I've seen it outright fail/come up empty with newer niche artists, like it hadn't gotten around to processing them yet) but what it does uncover has been good.

When I was a Spotify customer, every 'radio' station I started eventually wound up playing crass, offensive, and angry shout-rap, filled with words your drunk uncle never even heard in the Navy. It was very disturbing, and highlighted one of their biggest flaws - no way to specifiy 'clean' music only.

Say what you will about artistic integrity etc, but if you're listening to music with a 5 year old in the house and someone starts dropping n-bombs, c-bombs, m-f etc and you have no way to prevent that, it's a problem.

Wow, that is pretty shocking they don't have an option to disable that. And looking at the forums, it's been requested for years. Crazy.

How do they get profitable? Won't the big three music publishers just squeeze their margins cause they can?

My understanding is they have started trying to become publisher as well similar to what Netflix is doing. Perhaps remove the middle man and have content which can be exclusive on Spotify or content they can license to others.

That's an interesting problem, because Netflix is unable to achieve any sense of real profitability in their model either.

Netflix is pretending to be profitable, while they bury themselves massively in debt to pay for content (ie they can't properly fund business expansion out of operations after 20 years). A particularly inherently unsustainable model when you've got single digit margins.

Here's the Netflix balance sheet the last four years:

2014: -$914m; 2015: -$2.08b; 2016: -$4.6b; 2017: -$6.7b; 1Q18: -$7.3b

They took on on roughly $5.7b in new debt in three years, at an accelerating clip, versus combined earnings of $850m. While they might be able to sustain that for some time, it's a dead-end model: eventually the whole stacking scheme gives out, subscriber growth tails off (plausibly beginning now), and you've got a mountain of debt that costs you ever larger sums of interest and limits your ability to maneuver. Right now their annual interest costs are eating the equivalent of a full quarter of their profits. They'll more than double their debt in the next few years by necessity to keep up the content spending, and their interest costs will ballon to a billion dollars per year.

Netflix needs to become HBO, i.e. a content creator. And it's clear as day they are trying to be that. It's smart and they need to do that to survive, to the point where they are willing to debt-finance this. If they don't do that, publishers will extract every little bit of profitability from them.

Granted I’m from Sweden where Apple probably never even properly tried marketing to displace Spotify, but I was still surprised to learn Apple even had a streaming music service. I had heard the name Apple Music but just assumed it was a new name for buying songs on iTunes. Why is their service having such a low profile? Is it for example that it isn’t yet launched in all countries?

No, It seems like Apple Music's initial focus is mostly on US customer base although its available in nearly double the number of countries(113) than Spotify(59). It recently crossed Spotify in no. of paying customers in US.

https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/06/apple-music-more-us-subs...

Spotify is a vastly superior service in my opinion.

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