Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

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I am all in on Apple and only a few dollars away from the Apple One bundle being worth it for me but I just don't like Apple Music. The UI is just too difficult to use and it feels slower than it should be, definitely slower than Spotify. While I have no love for Spotify's podcast ventures and dislike them trying to push me to listen to podcasts on their platform, I do love it for music and it "Just Works". Also I can use Spotify with my Echo's in ways that don't work with Apple Music. Yes, you can play Apple Music through the Echo's but only using your voice. With Spotify I can throw music to an Echo or a group of them and control it all from my phone.

Spotify is a nonstarter for me because I can't upload my own music. I don't want to be beholden to whatever they decide I can listen to, and there's lots of music I want to listen to that's not in any streaming catalogue.

edit: note I say "upload," not syncing local files to my phone. I want a built-in streaming catalogue + cloud music locker that all my devices stream from, not something I have to manually transfer files between for every device

That's completely fair and I even pay for iTunes Match even though I don't really use it anymore, it and Apple Music never meshed well in my experience but maybe it's gotten better. There is a way to listen to your own music in Spotify (even mobile) [0] but it might be a little shaky, I doubt they care much about it. I've used it before but only on desktop.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-upload-music-to-spoti...

I've read up on Spotify's custom library stuff, and it seems to just be a weird hack that only works on one device. What I really want is a music locker I can stream to any device to fill in the gaps that aren't available in the streaming library.

We had it all with Google Music

You can upload your own music, it's a bit janky sometimes but it works: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/local-files/

In Spotify's settings on your PC, you can configure directories to look for "local files". Then, you can make playlists of local files and they will sync to your other devices over your local WiFi network.

You can import local files to Spotify [0] and if you download the playlist for offline use on your mobile device, they'll be synced over from your desktop [1].

[0] https://support.spotify.com/us/article/local-files/

[1] https://community.spotify.com/t5/iOS-iPhone-iPad/Syncing-Loc...

The problem with Spotify's Local Files feature is that the music you add cannot be added to Liked Songs. They must be in a playlist in order to be synced across.

As someone who listens to their music by just tapping shuffle on Liked Songs, this is a no-go.

Have you considered Jriver cloudplay: https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Cloudplay It's not free but Jriver is a pretty good media player for local files. The one downside of Jriver is their android/apple apps are a bit crap, but there are 3rd party alternatives.

I agree that Spotify is a much better ‘listening experience’ (ie discoverability etc) but the problems I have between Spotify and my HomePod(s) is almost enough for me to switch back to music - it is infuriating, needing to reboot the HomePod to get it to play anything again (apparently an issue with Spotify not supporting airplay 2 but the flow on effects are weird)

Yeah, I've thought that if I ever go all-in on the HomePods then I might use Apple Music just for them (like I said, I'm close to getting the Apple One bundle once my last trial runs out) but the Echo's are a lot more open and play nice with Home Assistant. If I want to replace all my Echo's with HomePods (mini I guess since that's all there is) it would close to $1K and I'd have to use Home Assistant's HomeKit integration and every experience I've had with HomeKit (or HomeBridge) has been bad. Sure it works great for a few weeks, maybe months, but then it just stops working and you have remove and re-add everything (and re-add them to the right rooms, the HomeKit setup is so terrible).

I got a HomePod mini last week. I have used Spotify probably about 20-30 times by tapping it with my phone or using AirPlay from the control Center. Zero issues. The lack of _native_ Siri support is a joke though. Spotify really need to pull their finger out on that one.

I’m with you here. While I don’t have the same issues as you, Apple Music sometimes feels like a beta version to me. Spotify does too, sometimes.

One giant annoyance with Apple Music is their artist matching/suggestions. I have a few artists with very generic common names. Anytime another artist with the same name releases another album, it’ll be wrongly matched to the artist I listen to for a few weeks. More annoyingly, I keep getting the other artist in my recommendations constantly!

Two examples would be SIERRA (techno) and ALEX (synthwave). SIERRA often gets mismatched with Sierra and now I keep ending up with weird spanish music in my recommendations. With ALEX it’s with ALEX&RUS which is some russian rap duo. Super annoying.

I have an artist with a name conflict and even though I have control of the “official” artist distribution page for my work and have reached out to Spotify (and Apple) repeatedly, this other artist with the same name keeps appear amongst my tracks.

Super frustrating.

The thing that kills Spotify for me is how pushy it is combined with the frequent unnecessary UI changes.

The lack of an API that allows track playback is a huge, huge bummer too (look up the saga of libspotfy if curious) — shockingly, Apple Music is more open in this regard, with multiple alternative third party clients being available thanks to JS and native Mac/iOS SDKs.

I'm curious what UI changes you're talking about. I can't remember the last time there was a UI change, and I've been using them for 5+ years.

In fact, as I was reading these comments I was thinking they've been totally stagnant UI-wise, and the only hate I for the iOS app is the pop ups for events, etc. I make a point to never read any text in them and dismiss immediately.

The big one pinning podcast recommendations to the home screen above the fold with no option remove it. Same with unremovable "recommended" playlists that mix music with podcasts. Podcast settings are at the top of the list in settings too.

But because podcasts are treated equally to music on every page and user backlash to remove podcasts, they added [Music] and [Podcasts & Shows] filter buttons to the header of those pages, wasting page real estate. But the slap in the face is it doesn't even remember to keep those filters applied.

Plus, even if you actually like some podcasts, it'll randomly swap out [Your shows] section for podcast [Recommendations] instead.

OK, I ignore podcasts in Spotify. I use Pocket Casts.

You're right, there should be an option to remove/move it.

In the last year there was a rather large UI overhaul on the desktop client [0] that was met with mixed reactions from its users (doing a search in their community forum can locate some such threads). I for one was left with a bad taste in my mouth when it launched due to some pretty major changes of how libraries and albums were handled. Though some things have been fixed, I'm still sour on a lot of the changes.

[0] https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-03-25/introducing-a-new-sp...

The UI on Apple Music is atrocious. It isn't possible to go back a track when using their radio mode, nor is it possible to even see what the previous song was in case you decided you want to hear more by the artist or whatever. Truly awful design.

Use the bottom right icon on the “now playing screen” to go back on your played history

IIRC that shows the history of tracks you've played from your own playlists or when you play specific albums and songs, but not if you're using the radio feature (where you start playback by pressing the center and not the bottom right of the tile).

I think this is indicative of the whole Apple Music experience. They are like 80% there but that last 20% is what makes a product feel polished and easy to use. It's like they half-implement things or get them to a state and say "good enough" and never look back. Really that describes most Apple-created apps. They really want to create an app, release it, and move on. They don't understand these things need constant improvements and even apps that do get some love only get updates once a year (usually) meaning that /at best/ they jump frog the competition once a year then fall behind almost immediately. A lot of their apps don't even getting in spitting range of 3rd party apps right after an update.

Like their new paid podcast thing was like 5-10 years late and will probably see 1 update a year at best.

I pulled the trigger on an Apple Music subscription this year because it pays artists better.

Spotify still considers a penny per stream "entitled" according to an exec giving one of the most absolutely tone-deaf AND nonsensical justifications for their choices ("we solved piracy by more or less adopting piracy's business model and legitimizing it!") [0]

Apple stepped up to that level. [1]

Revenue streams from recordings matter for supporting artists. There's still some issues with the economics of buffet streaming, but a penny a stream starts to at least approach the right magnitude.

[0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22387453/apple-music-arti...

> Apple Music subscription this year because it pays artists better.

I wonder if this is a growth tactic. If Apple was more altruistic, one could argue that they would pay their App store 3rd party devs (by taking less of a cut via the App store) better too.

So, I am going to chalk this up as a possible business decision for growth.

I am sure this is not about Apple being altruistic or caring about artists at all. All streaming services pay out about 70-80% of their revenue. It just happens to be that for Apple Music "money to be paid to rights holders" / "number of total streams" equals a slightly higher "payout per stream" than their main competitor. There are other players on the market that pay twice or even three times as much per stream compared to Apple Music.

I used to use Tidal for the same reason, but the ongoing MQA debacle pushed me over to Music. I have to say that I preferred Tidal's recommendations.

I signed up for Google Play Music for the same reason, artist payout, long ago.

It looks like Youtube Music is still the highest among the major brands.

https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2021/09/why-youtube-musics-m...

I really respect your decision to choose your streaming service based on how they each pay out artists. I work for an independent label and the most recent analysis we did shows that in the US, Apple was paying out roughly just under $0.007 (7/10 of a penny) / stream, while Spotify was paying out around $0.004. These rates go down as you bring a more international user base, depending on where in the world the music was consumed. Of those payouts, depending on the clout of the artist, they're typically only seeing their 15-20% royalty of those payout rates on the recorded music side (music publishing is a different story). So it's even worse than it seems!

A big reason that Apple is able to pay out higher rates is they're fully a premium business model with no ad-supported tier (they have a free trial period though). Due to Spotify's ad-supported tier, artists are able to reach a more cost-sensitive consumer, but at a lower overall blended rate per stream.

Do you have numbers for Tidal or Amazon Music? I'd guess they'd land somewhere between the two.

# of Streams to make US $1:

YouTube Music: 1,250

Pandora: 752

Spotify: 315

Amazon Music: 249

Deezer: 156

Apple Music: 128

Tidal: 78

Napster: 53

Source: https://hiphopdx.com/news/id.66835/title.t-pain-disrupts-mus...

Original source: https://twitter.com/TPAIN/status/1476032631255060490 (not sure why this link isn't working)

If I had to guess, T-Pain's #s are encapsulating more regions than the US - everything I calc'ed was US-only. It gets really bad when you look at rates in emerging countries so I find it helpful to be very specific about what data is encapsulated in these rates.

Most importantly, while his title is not wrong, remember that this is not what it takes for an artist to make $1, it's how much money is paid out in aggregate for each recorded music stream. Artists make a smaller percentage of that amount, the label typically takes the lion's share.

> Pandora: 752

Some streaming services are net-equivalents of terrestrial radio, where the user selects the rough genre but doesn't drive the program. Pandora's a good example.

Some streaming services are meant to be in-the-cloud replacements for your record collection, where you select the program. Spotify is like this; Pandora is not.

Their payouts should probably be different.

> YouTube Music: 1,250

That's astonishing, considering YouTube can function as a cloud record collection.

YouTubes low payout is because they consider themselves a radio station provider and not an alacarte music streaming service.

Amazon's interesting because when you look at their premium tier, it's just under $0.01 / stream. But on a blended basis when you are include their ad-supported streams and their Prime Music streams, it's actually a bit more than $0.007 / stream so better than Apple.

I can't easily pull our Tidal numbers unfortunately.

Do you have separate numbers for Spotify for paying accounts vs free ones?

It looks like a stream by a free account makes less money, which draws the average down. However that ends up being a higher total than if that free stream didn’t exist. And also it would mean that those numbers aren’t useful for choosing between services for a paying customer.

Deezer has been pretty staunch in their advocacy for "User Centric Payment Systems" (https://www.deezer.com/us/ucps) where your monthly subscription gets proportionally split between the artists you stream, rather than being put into a common pool which then pays out based on global listening stats.

They can't unilaterally move to UCPS without renegotiating licensing deals with labels, but they do decent advocacy work, including publishing a personalized dashboard at https://www.deezer.com/us/ucps/me which, for me, opens with "Hi callahad, during December 2021 your Deezer subscription generated: 97% of royalties for artists I didn't stream, 3% of royalties for artists I did stream."

It's apparently working, since seeing numbers presented that starkly prevented me from switching to Spotify (and got me to post this comment...)

If "payout per stream" is an important metric to you, then Apple Music is still the wrong choice though. Just like Spotify their payout per stream is still only mediocre. Tidal pays about twice as much per stream compared to Apple Music and Napster pays three times as much!

I was a long time user of Google Play Music until they killed it and moved everyone over to the inferior YouTube Music product. I suffuer through it mostly because it comes bundled with YouTube+ which removes ads.

It's doing fairly well - the report says its the only service that grew last year. I loved that Google Play Music still had a trad aughts iTunes approach to things, but it was confusing and out of sync with the market. YouTube Music is pretty awesome IMHO.

I use the Vinegar extension for Safari which replaces the YouTube player for a simple HTML5 <video> tag and consequently removes the ads. Don't know if there's alternatives for other browsers, but worth looking into if this is all that's keeping you there.

Firefox with ublock origin extension also removes all ads from youtube.

Long time user of Google Play Music as well and I gotta say...while YouTube Music is slightly inferior (edit: to GPM), it's not even close to inferior enough to convince me to go back to Spotify.

Granted, it does look like Spotify finally fixed the thing that got me to leave in the first place (10K library limit) but there's nothing so bad about YTM that I'd bother to pick up and move again.

Depending on your point of view, YouTube Music is far inferior to Spotify. The key advantage to Spotify is that they have apps for all platforms and have a much better integration story than YouTube Music. For example, I can stream directly from the Spotify app on Android to my Sonos speakers, I can use a Spotify app on my Samsung TV, I can integrate Spotify on my Home Assistant server, and I can sync Spotify playlists to my Garmin watch for offline access. None of that is possible with YouTube Music.

Some of those things I can do (I can stream directly from the YTM app to many different devices in my house, I don't have any Sonos stuff though)

Some of it I never even thought of doing (no Home Assistant, Garmin watch)

Some of those things I explicitly do not want to do (my TV is hooked up to a Windows PC with wireless keyboard, using an app directly on the TV sounds like a strict downgrade in usability)

I'd say it's less of a "point of view" thing and more of a "how do you interact with computers and the IoT" thing

The biggest problem with the GPM -> YTM transition was that my kids were suddenly locked out of music (as Google didn't allow kids accounts to have YT and YTM fell under that). This was a serious problem and I don't understand why they let it happen.

Thankfully, I got an email not 5 minutes ago saying that kids can use YTM again. Remarkably good timing on that one.

Same. Ad-free YouTube is essential for me, and getting YouTube Music as part of the bundle is a nice bonus. I have the family plan but my kids are always bugging me to get a Spotify family plan instead. If I do ever cave and pay for Spotify, I'll have to keep the YouTube premium plan anyway since I can't go back to watching the obnoxious ads on YouTube.

Both Opera's built-in adblocker and uBlock Origin on other browsers takes care of most of this nicely for me.

But if you're gonna pirate content, I don't think paid music subscriptions are right for you either.

That only works for desktop use, on mobile it's slightly more complicated. With Premium you can use the official app with your screen locked or the video minimised, and you can download videos for offline viewing. Some of those are available with third-party apps for Android.

However, a weird limitation i noticed recently with YouTube Premium - while traveling i had a local sim card, and while using it for data ( even when on wifi), YouTube earned me some Premium features won't work and i might see ads, and i couldn't watch videos with the screen locked/minimised. When i switch data to my regular card, in roaming ( again, regardless of wifi), both of those work.

Big surprise for me is Amazon music... with 13%!

I don't know anyone that uses it. Maybe it's a regional thing?

Does Amazon give out Music accounts as a bonus when users subscribe to some other service, similar to Amazon Prime customers getting streaming? Maybe that can account for incidental and not intentional subscribers.

Yes they do. Prime comes with a limited version that "only" has a couple million songs. At least in some countries. They also have a higher tier called Music Unlimited that's more on-par with the other guys content wise but cheaper if you already sub to Prime. Also have a tier that only works on Echos but gives access to the larger catalog for even less.

I switched to just using the included service with Prime. It's good enough for me and I get Prime super cheap as a student.

Some purchases on Amazon come with "3 months of amazon music", which surely adds to their numbers.

It's free with Prime and cheaper than other alternates for the paid version if you have Prime. For casual listening it's not bad at all.

It also supports so called HD and Ultra HD, which I believe Spotify still doesn't support, while Apple does.

It is not free with Prime, just $2 cheaper ($8 vs $10/mo).

I think what is driving Amazon Music subscriptions is the proliferation of Echo devices. It is easy to auto-subscribe from the speaker itself (sometimes too easy, to the point of being accidental), e.g. when you ask it to play a song.

>It is not free with Prime, just $2 cheaper

There's a free tier Amazon Music of 2 million songs included with Prime membership. That's the free music streaming my friend was using for 5+ years. She then upgraded to Amazon Music Unlimited for extra $80/year.

Can't tell if the article's 13% for Amazon Music is counting the free tier users.

In that case every Prime member is a subscriber, and that number should be a lot larger.

Nah, I'm a Prime subscriber and get the occasional email from Amazon that i have an unused advantage from my subscription and should enable Amazon Music.

As sibling comment also noted, there is a free tier that we've been using forever.

They also have a much cheaper option for students, I think $1/month or something like that.

Not sure if every Prime user uses Amazon Music, and how they count their user base.

What is the meaning of HD and ultra HD for music?

I'm sure it is just a marketing term that they've come up with.

https://www.amazon.com/music/unlimited/why-hd

HD: 'CD quality audio (aka, “lossless”)'

Ultra HD: 'Better than CD quality audio (up to 24 bit, 192 kHz)'

Does Apple or Spotify have some sort of extra feature over Amazon that would appeal to non-casual listeners?

I had Apple for a bit, switched over to Amazon because of the Prime discount... while I'm aware that morally I should de-Amazon my life, the service is pretty convenient.

For me, Spotify is everywhere. It works on Google Home, Echo, Xboxes, PC, Linux, Android, etc.

For quite a while, Google Music wouldn't work on Echo devices and Amazon Music wouldn't work on Google Home. Spotify worked everywhere, had native applications, and a decent value for a family plan.

Interesting. I've got Linux, Windows, and iOS here. The main annoyance of Amazon is that they don't appear to have a native client for Linux. At least not in my repo. I don't really mind the web interface, the higher bitrates are limited to the native client for some silly reason.

As it is... I just end up plugging my phone into my dac/amp as a (pretty stupid, IMO) workaround.

Long term, Spotify and Netflix are in trouble. Amazon and Apple are in this space, and they can use their trillion dollar market caps to decimate single-revenue stream companies.

The Department of Justice should do something about this. Neither Amazon nor Apple should be in these businesses. They do too much and apply price pressure unfairly.

If this continues, $1T+ tech will be the entire economy.

Netflix, Spotify, and all of the other "little companies" should sue the ever-loving bejesus out of these monsters for anti-competitive practices.

Increased competition is a good thing. I’m glad several companies are in this space.

It’s only a problem if a single provider is a monopoly and uses that to squeeze out other companies in order to raise prices. We’re very far off from that because there are so many companies competing and none of them control the market.

> It’s only a problem if a single provider is a monopoly and uses that to squeeze out other companies in order to raise prices.

The giants behave different to monopolies in the past.

Amazon makes its catalogs available for free, which makes businesses like Netflix and their offerings look expensive. They subsidize the costs using revenues from different business units, which is not only unfair, it's not actually competition.

It's not even necessarily about money. Giants care about attracting and keeping people on their platform.

Once actual healthy businesses dry up, revenues paid to creatives will go down. They've already begun picking apart other studios and assimilating their businesses, and this will only accelerate.

> Increased competition is a good thing.

Not when music, movies, and art become just features of the tech giant platforms. It dumbs everything down and ensures the tech giant opinions are the ones that get amplified.

I agree with you, which is why I subscribe to Netflix and Spotify, but man...

- Netflix's so-so content while being costlier

- And Spotify push to have podcasts instead of decent radio are not helping...

Spotify is trying to add new revenue streams and revenue growth.

Netflix is fighting content being taken away - they didn't have their own, and now content owners realize the value of their catalogs. There are also lots of new players (HBO, Disney, Peacock, Amazon, Apple). Once Netflix builds a bigger catalog, they can relax and curate better.

Amazon and Apple don't have these problems. They can purchase studios to artificially build their catalogues. If they weren't buying content, Netflix would be paying less. In fact, Netflix would probably be the beneficiary of studio consolidation if the giants were not writing checks too.

Spotify and Netflix don't have a grocery store or hardware business unit to help speed up investments.

It's vastly unfair to have horizontally scaled command of several industries, especially when they have built in synergies you can abuse.

netflix: costlier so-so content AND a soul crushingly annoying interface. I am 100% sure that I will never want to watch the vast majority of the items available, and yet I must scroll past them over and over and over in four to ten different rows during the same session even.

Spotify owns 50% of Tencent Music (pretty much Chinese Spotify). Tencent owns 20% of Universal Music Group, and a few percent of Warner Music as well.

They're all connected; you have that illusion of choice, and no matter what you pick, everyone wins (yay)!

My wife and I share a single Spotify account, so when she's listening, I switch to the free tier of Amazon Music. I wonder if that counts toward that 13%?

There is a couples account option and I think its very close to the same price of a single sub.

Edit: its called Spotify Duo and its $12.99 vs $9.99 https://www.spotify.com/us/premium/#plans

Anecdotal but my parents use the one integrated in prime because they mainly listen to old music.

Lots of Amazon music, in addition to Prime usage, is probably used with Alexa as well as that is the default music player on Alexa/Echo.

Just like Siri/Homepod uses Apple Music and "Hey Google" / Google Home/Helper uses Google Play/Youtube music.

We subscribe simply because it is the only service that works on family plans without any friction on Echo devices. Tried to get Pandora and Spotify to work, but there was always a problem or the skill would fall apart over a period of months.

I'm under the impression that Amazon Music is US-only. It's decent if you're heavily invested in the Amazon Echo / Alexa ecosytem.

sluggish UI aside, I really don't like Apple Music's TASTE in music. Spotify's playlists are reliably more niche. Apple is far more "GRAMMY/Top 40"-oriented and that's just not interesting to me.

Also, Apple should have bought Rdio.

If you think Apple's TASTE is bad, you should try TIDAL. Its really bad.

Music curation was actually what made Tidal (Wimp) great in the first place. They didn't have the tech that Spotify had, and at the time the Spotify AI wasn't very good either, so the Tidal curated lists were really good and much better than the AI-generated (?) ones from Spotify. Things changed after Jay-Z stepped in, Tidal recommending Jay-z & friends is one example. Don't know if manual list curation is still a priority for them.

Besides, perhaps your taste in music is not aligned with most others.

I'm currently trying Tidal and that's the main issue why I won't stay. Somehow there only seem to be official playlists, so if I search for a somewhat niche genre [0] I'll probably not find anything relevant, except maybe some compilation releases of dubious value.

I managed to bring their auto generated playlists to an acceptable level by favoring enough artists, but it's still a very lacking experience.

[0] e.g. searching for Detroit house playlists gives me "Classic Rock Classics". Lofi house → "Epidemic Sound Christmas".

I really don't like Apple Music's TASTE in music.

I'm with you there.

Apple (and really all the streaming services) are constantly crowing about how many millions of songs they have. How about some metric for how many good songs they have?

80% of my wife's record collection is not available on Apple Music, so I'm left ripping her records in what used to be my spare time.

The only reason we have Apple Music is for when an artist she follows puts out a new record, so she can listen to the album to decide if it's worth buying.

Also, Apple Music's Siri integration is horrendous. For example, no matter what request I shout to it, Siri can only play one particular song by Weird Al Yankovich. My guess is that there's something with the quotation marks commonly used in his name screwing up Apple's search mechanism.

I have high hopes for Apple's new classical streaming service. It has a chance to redeem itself there.

>80% of my wife's record collection is not available on Apple Music

I'm really curious what kind of music is in her collection? I'm always amazed at the obscure stuff that is available... obscure jazz, klezmer, classical recordings, etc...

I’m not the person you’re replying to, but 80% of my record collection is not on AM (or spotify), as well. Hardcore punk!

I recently bought https://jriver.com/ Jriver Media Center and it is a audiophile dream. I am going back to ripping my old CDs and having my own local library.

I totally agree with you. I miss Google Play Music. In addition to a superior queue UI (hey Spotify, let me play a song next), they had the best playlists and song recommendations I've found on a streaming service.

I miss GPM's UI. While I'm a pretty firm YTM customer (price, features, catalog, artist payout feelgoods), the UI is pure trash and annoys the hell out of me. From playlists, queues, browsing, and recommendations, it's all awful.

Thankfully music is mostly "search for that song", "play a mix from this playlist", or "play just this playlist" so no one needs to suffer through it for long.

I have a slightly more cynical take on why Spotify pushes niche bands and music so much (in fact, I can’t even remember the last time I saw an “established” band in my Discover Weekly playlist) — Spotify doesn’t have to pay out that much per listen for these niche bands, while having, say, Beyoncé or Drake pop up on millions of subscribers’ weekly playlist would eat in their margins.

Discover Weekly is a playlist meant to surface less known artists that you might like.

Spotify pushes Drake all the time so that theory is bunk.

I expect Apple Music to continue to erode market share of these competitors... Apple One is just too compelling to be avoided, once you are in the Apple ecosphere. We had a Spotify family plan, but its a domino thing - once you start using one service, like AppleTV, it becomes a no-brainer to just switch everything over to apple rather than pay for different services. Is Spotify better for some people? Possibly, but for many (like myself) Apple Music was "good enough."

I do agree with schoolornot's post that Apple wasted a lot of time and let Spotify get farther ahead than they should have. It definitely feels like Apple has been agonizingly slow to push out and improve services.

I am curious what Google Play Music's share was before they shut it down in favor of Youtube Music. Myself and a few friends were using it until they shut it down; we basically split between Spotify and Apple Music based on what OS we were using.

I recently switched to YouTube music from Spotify.

I was a heavy Spotify member for many many years.

I can’t deal with Spotify inserting podcasts into the music listening experience. Music and podcasts are two different use cases for me. I love both, but don’t love both in the same UI.

So far I love YouTube music and very happy with the switch. I love that I can listen to live sets that people post on YouTube. Great recommendation system too.

I recently switched to iPhone from Pixel. The overall UI touch responsiveness and battery life is an upgrade but the OS features are neither upgrade or downgrade.

I also got Apple Music trial for 6 months while having a YT subscription. Even though the app seems just fine and nice looking but why would anyone pay for it vs. YouTube Music? With YouTube you get a larger selection of songs (including all user uploaded stuff to YT) and it removes ads on YT. So what exactly is the rationale to pay for Apple Music?

I believe Apple Music being the default option on Apple devices plays the biggest role in its market share

Not sure about Apple Music but I simply don’t use YouTube Music because it’s actually missing a LOT of stuff for me. Off the top of my head, some Beatles remasters and obscure synth artists

Yeah, and I've had artists I follow release new music, and it seems to sometimes not land on YTM the same day as Apple Music and Spotify. Certain albums just never showed up.

And you know what, I can't blame them for not caring about keeping up with Google's services. Who knows how many days YTM has before it's axed and replaced with something else.

> So what exactly is the rationale to pay for Apple Music?

Googles absolute failure to provide family plans for people using Google-apps/Gsuite as their family domain and accounts. You have to buy individual subscriptions to everyone.

It’s literally not an even an option.

> So what exactly is the rationale to pay for Apple Music?

For $20 my wife and I both get Apple Music, Apple TV+ (several shows we enjoy on there), 200GB Cloud Storage, and subscription access to a bunch of video games.

2 subscriptions to YouTube Music by itself would cost us the same $20, with none of the other benefits (and it has a muuuuch lousier selection of stuff I like, at least – plus a lot of the user-uploaded content has audio quality on par with some 96khz mp3 I'd have gotten off of napster two decades ago, whereas Apple's increasingly streaming lossless)

Youtube Music has a family plan for $15/m for 5 users and all users also get YT Premium (nee Red). It's a way better deal.

Ehhhhh there's just the 2 of us, so with none of the other benefits, which to me are worth $5, it's not an interesting deal. Plus neither of us spend any time on YouTube so that whole "Premium" ad-free thing is just meaningless access to absolute junk content.

> 2 subscriptions to YouTube Music by itself would cost us the same $20

FYI: There's a family plan... ~$18 for 5 people in the household. And no ads on YT!

I was a Google Play Music user on iOS. I switched to Apple Music after Play moved to Youtube Music. Compared to Google Play Music, I found the entire experience to be worse in Youtube Music and got zero benefit from the switch. After using Youtube Music for a few months I did a 3 month trial for Apple Music and just never went back.

Also does Youtube Music premium remove Youtube ads? That was a thing with Google Play Music for years, but I thought they removed the benefit with the switch? Looking at the subscription page [1], they only mention ad-free music.

[1]: https://music.youtube.com/music_premium/musicfeed

Eddy Cue should be fired for allowing Spotify to reach such critical mass. Music and playlists is such a sticky ecosystem that people don't just up and switch services at a whim. The 381 million users that Spotify accumulated over the years will never switch to another platform. Apple lost so many years with trying to spin Beats into something that it wasn't, rewriting clients, and putting out garbage like "Your Station".

Their Music clients are also still far away from what I‘d expect from a Trillion dollar company.

I actually like the iOS Music app (though their queue system isn't as intuitive as Google Play Music/YouTube Music) but their webapp and Mac app are hot garbage.

I recall seeing an article that said the Mac app was being rewritten in the new macOS betas.

The iOS and Android apps are both kinda okay, but the web, Mac and Windows ones just suck.

The redesigned iOS & Mac apps are a pile of shit and are a significant downgrade from the earlier "iPod" app and iTunes. Yes it turns out it's possible to do something even worse than iTunes.

I actually disagree here, iTunes music is DRM free so users still have it without the subscription service, and the music streaming services all have most of the tracks unlike video streaming so there's no moat to be built. Bad for Apple, good for consumers.

Strong statements. I just cancelled Spotify and will likely go to another provider when I choose to get a music streaming sub back.

I canceled my Spotify subscription for YouTube music. People will leave Spotify if they continue hurting their UX trying to mesh music and podcasts.

One player is missing on this table, the biggest one: YouTube. Not Music, just YouTube. They're beating all others in play counts by a magnitude.

That's what I use 99% of the time though perhaps I should check out what YouTube Music is about.

Edit: Checked it out and some of the songs in my playlists are grayed out in Music perhaps because it thinks those are non-music videos but nonetheless it looks inferior for my purposes.

I have a huge and old MP3 library that is an amalgamation of my CDs, and some of my parent's CDs too. I think it's about two or three months of classical music. I suspect that many HN readers also have similar stories.

None of this will show up in a market survey like this.

I have recently decided to try Apple Music as apart of trial of Apple One trial (not likely to go beyond that) my biggest gripe with it is the usability on any platform outside of iDevice/Mac. It seems to be a 'pleasant enough' experience on my iPhone/ATV, but once I transition to my PC for work. A place where I would listen to music for a lot of my day. The PC client is trash, they have a semi capable web client, but it was just feeling Apple Music lite.

One thing with Spotify is that I appreciate the effort across all platforms (well, at least the ones I've used)

iTunes on Windows feels like they stopped working on it back in 2008 and now have some interns trying to support it.

I am long term bearish on Spotify, and if I could isolate Apples music business or Amazons, I would take the following trade all day:

long (aapl music)(amzn music)(youtube music), short Spotify.

Their recommendation engine is just not that good. Youtube Music has a far superior one.

I agree on the recommendation piece, but Apple’s playlist and library management is atrocious, especially on desktop. Why can’t I drag-and-drop music into a playlist in the sidebar? Apple Music also feels (to me, at least) much slower than Spotify. Most likely this is due to the more aggressive client-side caching that Spotify does, but it’s worth the trade-off, in my opinion.

These are solvable problems for Apple, though. They need to more cleanly separate the legacy iTunes Store and pay-per-song UX from the Apple Music streaming paradigm. Maybe even have separate apps for them.

The most frustrating thing in Apple Music for me is that it's album-centric. I can't just say "put this artist in my library". No, I have to put every individual album, EP, and single that I want.

I just switched from Spotify to AM and that really frustrated me, too. They’re just trying to keep your library like a real world library, I guess.

Side note: I abandoned spotify simply because of this design change: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/AutoPlay-Option-...

Can’t toggle off autoplay in some circumstances! Totally unacceptable.

I still don't understand how a business can be unprofitable for 16 years. At one point don't you say, "whelp, this isn't going to work"?

https://www.barrons.com/articles/spotify-has-finally-found-a...

Oh nice. They are getting close! Still unprofitable, but maybe year seventeen is the sweet spot.

All I have to say to that is that I'd lend you my Spotify shares to complete the trade.

Would be interesting to see this broken down by region - Spotify is very dominant in the UK in my experience for example, but not sure if there will be pockets / countries where it swings the other way.

Personally I find Apple Music just a bit clinical, and it's just not as universal (for instance Spotify works just as well on a PC as a Mac - iTunes for Windows though? ugh).

I’m an indie artist and here’s the avg split on my plays per week:

Spotify: 25,000

Apple Music: 600

… Not trying to make a statement— just sharing cause it’s interesting!

How much do you make from each of those services?

Since the big topic of discussion on HN has been how much artist make from those streams, can you give us a ballpark figure of how much you get from each service?

Am i the only tidal user left?

Nope! I'm a happy Tidal customer.

It seems like the kinds of people using Tidal either jumped to Bandcamp or just download all their music.

Surprised they are so small. I use Tidal and I'm very happy with it. I switched after Spotify gave a ton of money to the podcast moron Joe Rogan and haven't looked back since (in addition to it being problematic to give money to someone like Joe Rogan, I also dislike how they are trying to own podcasts).

I do wish I were able to use my Tidal iPhone app as a remote like Spotify can and that their AI suggestions would improve (Spotify has become really good here).

I wondered the same thing. I use tidal and think that it is good.

I made the switch last September from Spotify back to Apple Music.

1 reason and 1 reason only. Lossless. Why Spotify still doesn't offer this as an option is beyond me. I get that its a small amount of people who care but still why not offer it? I would pay a little more to use their service.

I've been trying to use Apple Music with their web client and it's astonishingly slow. I can't understand how it could be so bad.

Yeah it's not good. I've only used a handful of times and every single time it just stopped playing in the middle of a song for no reason. It also sucks that they can't be bothered to create apps for anything other than their own stuff and Android. I can use Amazon music or Spoify with my Garmin Watch but not Apple Music.

I think you can still use iTunes on Windows.

You know, I used to care about lossless but more and more the proof has been stacking on that MP3 compression is an amazing technology and I just don't have the ears to discern. I would love to know how you do in this test: https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...

For me, it was enough to prove that lossy is good enough for everyday listening.

That was interesting. I listen mostly to classical and had no trouble whatsoever with the Mozart track, the difference was clear. The other tracks I was forced to guess and, strangely, got all wrong answers!

Compressed classical music annoys me to no end, although for a long time I couldn’t tell why. Then I found out, the problem is the artifacts, which you may not be aware of but they do affect your emotional response.

This page has an amazing description of the issues: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/what-data-compressio...

Do you notice the difference between lossless and 320kbits/s ogg vorbis ?

I am using a music streaming service which is totally free and offers me genres without any subscription lock-in. Additionally it doesn't track my listening habits and thus enables me to discover new music as I am not in a listening bubble.

I like that streaming service a lot

The radio?

Yes ...

Apple Music comes "free" with my phone service, and I use it sometimes. YouTube Premium is a must for me, and it comes with YouTube Music, which I use very occasionally. Yet I still subscribe to, and overwhelmingly use Spotify. It just seems much more organized and discoverable than the other two services. Also I don't make personal playlists because I enjoy listening to unknown music interspersed with my favorites, and Spotify seems to be the best at giving me the right mixture of that.

There are some music genres that Spotify is somewhat deficient in compared with Apple, but it's been getting better in that respect little by little.

Correct me if I'm wrong: the first and second ones in market share aren't the most interesting part. What's insightful is that Amazon is at third. Spotify is a pure player in the space and with it's years of growth it makes sense to be #1. Apple, while not a pure player as Spotify, has a good share of the mobile devices market and smartwatch, and that and music go hand in hand. Amazon? To Amazon music is just another thing in their miryad of things, and they're still at the top.

Amazon Music is a throw-in on Prime, so technically I "have" it as a subscriber to Prime, but I've literally never used it.

Of all of the players in this space, it's not clear to me that Amazon's "subscriber share" reflects anything at all considering that it's not something you subscribe to on its own and not generally considered a major benefit of the subscription it's included in. Would be interesting to see what the actual usage statistics look like.

I'm a prime user and wasn't even aware of Amazon music.

I'm guessing that when Alexa plays music it counts as an Amazon music user.

Pandora isn't on the list, but I am unsure they are global. When they were purchased by Sirius I wanted to move to a Sirius subscription, but found out they would not port over your Music Genome Project information over. You would have to train it again. No other service has a feature that works so well.

We keep it just for that reason.

I have used Pandora over VPN for like 10 years but decided to just drop it because it's not worth the hassle of getting the US app on iPhones anymore. They have the coming soon page for Germany up since 2014 and still nothing. I miss it.

I still miss Rdio.

Spotify is missing Spatial Audio that both Apple Music and Amazon Music supports. I might switch to Apple Music because I don't like how pushy Spotify has become with their podcast agenda and not supporting Spatial Audio.

I don't see YouTube Music mentioned anywhere in the report?

"YouTube Music was the only Western DSP to increase global market share during this the period. YouTube Music particularly resonates among Gen Z and younger Millennials, which should have alarm bells ringing for Spotify, as their core base of Millennial subscribers from the 2010s in the West are now beginning to age."

It's also in the chart.

I dread the day when iTunes stops letting you buy DRM-free music. I don't know anywhere else I can do that easily (and is the only Apple service I use).

Nowadays I tend to use bandcamp.com over iTunes for purchased music. It tends to only have smaller artists on there but they also sell flac/wav, which I like better than buying compressed music (I listen to things compressed but if I'm buying it I want it future-proof).

I haven't used it myself yet but 7digital sells FLAC and MP3/M4A of many releases: https://us.7digital.com/

Spotify's song radio feature is killer for me. I've found so many great new (very niche) artists. Of course royalties can always be better.

"Other 10%" seems weird... are there really (at least) 10 more music services that captured 1 or less percent of the market?

There are a lot of services which are region specific

I switched back to Apple Music because of Joe Rogan's deal with Spotify, but I recognize that this is likely a niche reason.

Deezer is awesome. The HiFi subscription has a lot of content at FLAC quality.

Kind of sucks that if you build any really successful app on iOS then Apple will come in and force their way into your market and have deep analytics on your own app when doing so. Spotify->Apple Music, Netflix -> Apple TV+, Peloton-> Apple Fitness.

Apple Music only has significant usage because of their anti competitive behavior.

All apps on the App Store have to go through rigorous review and are restricted to Apples discretion in being granted access to OS features while Apple themselves use undocumented features to compete as a platform.

Try hooking up AirPods to your iPhone and do nothing else. The Lock Screen changes to have an Apple Music player with a random song you may have never listened to.

This, even if you were listening to another song on YouTube Music or any other music app as your last played audio.

On more than one occasion, I’ve accidentally played some idiotic pop song that Apple Music pushes into this experience while commuting with AirPods and noise cancellation on while holding the phone firmly grasped in my hand.

It’s ridiculous how many of these little UX tricks they adopt that boost the metrics of their internal products while openly denying the competition access to the same.

I just tried this and my lock screen shows me 4 thumbnails that I know are my most played songs/playlists but the main app and play button are the video that I most recently watched (and paused) in firefox. I know when I listen to postcasts using Overcast (since I like their UI better than Apple's), it shows up in the lock screen. This is reliable for me. It also becomes the default thing to play if I hook up to my CarPlay. So I don't think these are necessarily anti-competitive practices—it may just be you are hitting a weird bug or edge case.

A "Weird bug or edge case" is rarely the case with these upsells. There's a lot of marketing and research budget that goes into designing these flows and equally tonnes of data behind observing the behavior.

That precisely is my point. The behavior on my end is strange as well where it happens at times i'm commuting and other times, when the phone is still, nothing. Where can i go and switch this off in settings for Apple Music short of killing the app and uninstalling?

Isn't it strange that all app behavior and interaction with the OS for apps that aren't owned by Apple need to be predictable and controlled through standard settings while Apple Music has hidden access to over ride these behaviors?

I can write paragraphs about similar behavior on the News app and other upsell services. When a platform can directly push apps without competition to your device that they don't need to compete with anyone for installs for, that is one thing, having access to undocumented APIs is another, having the ability to plow all revenue from their apps right back in without the 30% cut or other restrictive practices they impose on their direct competitors is yet another.

Either there should be transparency or there should be restrictions on the way internal Apple apps are allowed to compete in the marketplace. A random product manager at Cupertino should not have more power and clout over what apps get pushed to my phone without consent or dialogs and upsells get thrown in the UX compared to what is possible for public apps to do.

Oh come on. You're describing a behavior that makes no sense—of course it's a bug. The whole point of that widget on the lock screen is to show you the last thing you paused so that you can continue listening to it. It's not there to push random ads.

That is not the official line. The whole point of that widget on the lock screen is to perform behavior that is not codified in OS settings or available directly to __ANY__ external developer outside of Apple.

When a "Bug" seems to oddly fit in favor of a native OS's paid feature uptake, call me skeptical when i don't think it is a "Mistake", i mean what are the odds that Apple Music launches, the team is under pressure to deliver subscriber numbers and suddenly this behavior shows up?

The whole approach to Software companies where ridiculous behavior like this are tolerated in recommendation engines in feed or in OS level features that are anti competitive by nature and dismissed as a "Transient bug" by people who should know better is not right.

Try hooking up AirPods to your iPhone and do nothing else. The Lock Screen changes to have an Apple Music player with a random song you may have never listened to.

Just tried it and had a different experience. The lock screen showed the last thing I was listening to last night: The SiriusXM app.

It's funny because this sometimes catches me by surprise. I'll go to sleep listening to Sirius. Then I'll get into the car 18 hours later, and when the phone auto-connects to the car radio, it suddenly starts playing 40's Junction when I'm merging into traffic.

Happens all the time, but I'm still surprised every time it does.

The is actually kind of annoying behavior. My work's phone system emails me voicemails as a sime email with a wav file attached (why wav? arent we 30 years past that for spoken text?). When I tap the wav file to listen to it, fine, but then I get in my car and it fires up and plays that voicemail.

Have you tried deleting Apple Music from your iPhone? Should solve all your issues...

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