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Comment by elektor | Hacker News Reader

Yes, both Netflix and Spotify are in a tough position where their rivals (Apple and Amazon) have a much larger war chest to chip away at the market leaders of both movies and music streaming.

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Spotify is in a much worse competitive position than Netflix. Nothing separates Spotify from Apple Music. Any competitor can license music from all of the music providers. There is no reason for most people to keep both Spotify and Apple Music.

Netflix has spent years negotiating TV rights to third party content and releasing its own. Apple has a long way to go.

> Any competitor can license music from all of the music providers. There is no reason for most people to keep both Spotify and Apple Music.

Android is 81% of the US market.

Unless Apple Music comes to android, I don't see Spotify being threatened.

Done

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

Android may be “81%” of the market but then you have to subtract China and you have to take into account where the paying customers are.

Apple has more than half the number of paying customers with a much smaller phone market share (https://www.cultofmac.com/605166/spotify-now-has-96-million-...)

It’s well known that Android users don’t spend nearly as much as iOS users.

Consider them threatened. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...

Apple Music is available on Android and the web. It’s not a “walled” service like iMessage or FaceTime is.

> It’s not a “walled” service like iMessage or FaceTime is.

Steve Jobs promised that FaceTime would be open source… eventually: https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-promised-to-make-faceti...

Any time now.

It’s walled because of patent litigation with VirnetX, not because Apple wanted to keep it walled.

> _Nothing separates Spotify from Apple Music._

Does Apple Music have something similar (or as good as) Spotify Discover? That's a differentiator for sure.

I think Apple Music is good for discovery. Probably not as good, but for many of us it hits the "good enough" mark. I confess I'm an Apple Music subscriber mostly because I'm just in that ecosystem, and it's relatively low effort; I'm also a Tidal subscriber because it was the only service integrated with Roon (a music server package I use), although I'm still debating that one.

Something similar. Yes. I’ve heard that it wasn’t as good. But is that something you would want to base your company on?

It’s just like Facebook stopped the growth of Snapchat just by introducing Stories.

There are literally almost two decades of failures in the streaming subscription music space. Like Jobs said about DropBox. Streaming music is becoming a feature not a product.

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