I use Spotify every day and think it’s a good product. Why do you think it sucks? I’m genuinely curious.
There are various numbers floating around the internet and they are are all in the range of fractions of a cent per play, which is a weird metric to begin with. At $0.00473 per play [0], an artist needs ~100k plays to earn 500 bucks. Then has to be divided up between the label, songwriters, musicians, producers and whoever else was involved in the project.
Compare this to me buying their album on Bandcamp, where anyone can sell their work and keep 85% to 90% of the money [1]. I get to have lossless files on disk forever + streaming while Bandcamp lasts, and the artist gets more money, more control over the distribution and an (opt-in at buy) email list to update their fanbase.
Clearly the era of musicians that are not pop stars earning decent money by selling audio is over, but this is one of the things I like to spend a little more time and money on.
[0]: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/25/streaming-music-...
The _only thing_ Spotify is doing here is distribution. That is some brutal split if you ask me. The only thing holding them back from converting their user numbers into a more silly-level profit margin, like a proper Silicon Valley SaaS, is the power of a handful of major record labels, which in turn hold the artists by the balls.
As in most online industries nowadays, the ones doing the real work get the smallest piece of the pie. The best course of action for them would be to decentralize, which is entirely possible, but deep pockets need to kickstart that process and there is zero incentive for them to do that.
I used to have a big list of DJ sets. Not random bootlegs or anything, but ones that were released on CD in relatively big name series- global underground, Renaissance, etc. Slowly they began to disappear and now they're just gone and they've been removed from the lists they were on. No warning of any sort.
Just feels like we're going backwards for some of this stuff.
You mean all the artist's songs in your library? You just go into Artists and choose it, you get the list of saved songs.
a.) It doesn't have all the podcasts I listen to
b.) It's obvious the ads on Spotify aren't the same ads that are in the normal RSS-feed version of the same podcast, which feels very skeevy to me. I have no idea of the business arrangement but it doesn't feel like I'm supporting the podcaster when I listen to them over spotify.
What I mean is, if the zombie apocalypse happened, and you were lucky enough to have solar power to keep your devices going, it wouldn't matter because you would loose access to your favorite songs.
There are a lot of folks who's only music source is Spotify.
I just hope for their sake, there is never a zombie apocalypse ;)
I realized that needing every song I'd ever want to listen to on my local disk was just a form of digital hoarding. I backed up hundreds of gigabytes of my music, deleted it from my computer, and realized I never cared enough to restore it despite years of collecting and organizing it.
Bonus question: what about when this happens to a Spotify-exclusive track?
In other words with no active Spotify service even downloaded songs simply stop working.
I was even thinking of writing an open letter to Spotify to allow the user to choose 10 zombie apocalypse tracks that would Always keep working no matter what.
But, otherwise, I started to organize/curate my collection which I've largely not done anything to speak of with for literally years. (And which is messed up in various ways.) And I sort of came to the conclusion that it didn't really matter that much at this point.
That said, I'm honestly not sure I'd take the same path were I starting from zero.
Also I don't want my play queue to mix podcasts and music. When I want to listen to podcasts I continue playing in my podcast app and when I want some background noise I pause it and play my music in Spotify. Spotify's GUI is too simple and dumbed down for me and I prefer an app to do one thing.
On Android, I bought an SD card (because my internal storage was too small to host my downloaded library, for offline listening on airplanes). I found that when I rebooted, every single time, it would redownload all 11G of my downloaded songs.
Turns out, the Spotify service starts before the SD is attached and their program has a bug. I sent them the Stackoverflow link to delay the service. Support wasn't interested in helping me.
My fix was to get a phone with larger internal storage.
Uploading your own music sucks (unreleased tracks get blocked for some reason), tags are messy (there is no standard, the labels do whatever they want), you can't customize your listening experience at all (no replay gain, dynamic playlists, custom tags or equalization) and obviously not owning your collection (which admittedly is irrelevant for most people).
But yeah, you are renting the music from them so you have to give it back the way you found it. I don't really consider spotify a music player of the same sort as winamp or foobar2000, it's much more like radio where you have agency over the playlist rather than a local executable to manage and play your local files.
It would be interesting if they provided some a way to get an audio stream you can then further process for replay gain and other stuff, though honestly fiddling with all that stuff seems like busy work.
Classic interception attack
They say "Spytify records the same quality that Spotify outputs" but that implies a loss in quality if it's recording an mp3 and re-saving it as a new mp3. There's no lossless option in Spotify.
Library available to outside of Japan is significantly larger on Spotify compared to everyone else. It looks like some tracks are blocked outside of Japan, but compared to other services, this phenomenon is a lot less, actually magnitude less common compared to, say, Google's offering. (Haven't really done extensive research for Apple but doing a quick search, it's not very promising...)
I don't know what making this different, but as far as this relatively small segment of music, certainly Spotify's doing this right.
Actually, this convincing the big players to centralise is the real value Spotify provides, and this picture of them being a technology company could be viewed as smoke to obscure that they are basically an IP management company (though I expect the music industry is well aware of this and made contracts that reflect this).
It also might be that you haven't liked/listened enough for it to be useful yet.
OTOH when I used google play for a few months, they managed to recommend a new to me band that was based in roughly the same area and playing the type of music I listened to.
So at least for that type of music, they were a lot better than anything I've ever got in multiple years of using spotify
Thats like saying the only thing McDonald's french fries have going for them is that they taste good and are cheap.
Solutions like patreon would be favourable, since Spotify just condenses the most generic content.
As one might imagine, though, that low low price means something is getting squeezed. Some of the answer vs past models is in exchanging fixed acquisition and distribution costs for fractional marginal costs. But some of the answer is also in squeezing artists (and/or less powerful owners), both in the appalling fractional revenue compared to other models and in how it's distributed. The result shows up in either stuff getting pulled from the catalog, or never added, or.... never made because the artist that would have made it is doing something else in order to make up for the revenue that might have come from a system that actually assigns value to recordings.
But don't forget -- they'll also squeeze you too! Oh, sure, they know that price increases are a risk, but what risk is in there collecting as much of that sweet sweet data trail and harnessing it to sell you to others?