Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M paid subscribers | Hacker News Reader

Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M paid subscribers

theverge.com

171 pointsLunarAurora258 comments

I was a Spotify subscriber for about a decade (I was successfully hooked by their discounted college student rates), but I switched back to my own music curation recently: I noticed that Spotify would consistently "rabbithole" me into the same ~150 songs, most of which I didn't even like. They would also frequently lack small artists or independent labels, so I ended up having two media libraries anyways.

I switched over to Navidrome[1] as a self-hosted solution about a year ago, and I've been extremely happy with it (especially since it exposes a Subsonic-compatible API that most clients know how to use). The only thing I really miss is the mobile client experience: Spotify handled periodic disconnects (like on public transit) very gracefully, while no Subsonic clients that I've tried do so nearly as well.

[1]: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

are you me?

I've been using my navidrome instance for the past 6 months (on those free oracle machines), and I can't be more happy about it, specially with android app thing. Seedbox provides fresh stream heh of new music I'm actually interestd on

what do people mean when they say spotify rabbitholes them? My new music from spotify is either from manually clicking links of related artists to artists I like, or clicking stuff from the release radar of new content released every week. Where are you getting these stale recs?

This is just speculation on my part, but I've wondered if it's because of listening patterns: I tend to listen to entire albums at once and did most of my discovery on Spotify by starting "radios" from songs or albums. Spotify would then rabbithole me on those even when refreshed; they'd slowly converge on the same set of songs, unless I moved to a completely different genre (and even then I'd sometimes end up with playlists with all kinds of discordant stuff mashed together).

I got fed up when I looked up while working and realized that I had listened to Circles by Dag Nasty[1] like 8 times in a single day. I used to like that song, but now I can't listen to it anymore!

I've switched to Last.fm, Bandcamp, and my friends (bless them) for discovery.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyx4JeyMJE0

Discover, artist radio, auto-playlists after playing a single song, etc. Pretty much everything in the app is a terrible recommendation.

I find it works brilliantly for me and always find new stuff. What styles do you favour? FWIW, I started my Spotify era with things like Chemical Brothers, RJD2, etc but then have a lot of very different genre mixed in besides that (anything from black metal to pop). I'm always surprised when others have a bad experience with Spotify as a discovery tool.

I like to find a new genera of music and if I like the song I will choose the radio option. Spotify says "Get a collection of songs based on any artist, album, playlist, or song, with Spotify Radio." but in my experience the radio playlist is not (only) based on the song I'm playing because it also mixes in a bunch of recently played songs that are normally unrelated to the song genera I'm listening to.

That's the thing about Spotify's (and other music streaming services) recommendation engines: they're terrible DJs.

It puts completely unrelated songs together in the same mix, be it because of different genre, mood, energy. Only human-curated playlists and albums are good to play-and-forget; but at that point why do I need Spotify at all?

I pay Youtube begrudgingly to avoid ads, I might as well use their music service which has the exact same problem, rather than paying Spotify on top.

This looks cool and I like the idea of going back to having my own collection, but what are you doing for discovery now? I'm really tired of the same ~150 songs spotify really thinks that I like.

I have three main sources of discovery now:

1. Last.fm: I've been scrobbling for years, and Last.fm is weirdly good about giving me recommendations I enjoy. I'd say ~80% of its "personalized homepage" recommendations hit the mark for me; I like that most are linked to YouTube so I can quickly confirm whether they're a good fit.

2. Bandcamp: I try to buy most my music via Bandcamp, and I use artists that I like to discover similar music/bands that they like. Subjectively this feels a little less fruitful than Last.fm, but it's definitely more expansive.

3. Social recommendations: I run a server that multiple friends use and upload to, and they tell me when they've added something new that they think I'll like. I also listen to an Internet radio stream run by friends, and I go to a lot of local shows.

By ratio, I think I probably get 50% of my new music through Last.fm, and then 25% each through Bandcamp and my social sphere.

Don't take this in the wrong way, but how do you find last.fm usable anymore? Do you run noscript on it? Do you pay for it? I haven't been able to go there in like 5 years since they injected a billion ads and made your personal scrobble history practically unusable (you have to pay to search it????).

This thread has prompted me to export my history to csv since that's the only way I track what I listen to and I struggle a lot to remember the names of albums I like so I really want to be able to group & sort by playcount, and I miss the old last.fm so very, very, very much. But I absolutely will not pay for a site that ate my data for years and now holds it hostage (especially when I myself am the product).

No offense taken! I use uBlock and whatever else I have in my browser, plus I block a lot of things at the DNS level. So far that's left it moderately usable; the only part I really interact with is the index page, though, and occasionally checking my own profile to make sure I'm still scrobbling.

I love the idea of sharing a backend music server. I should give that a try!

Thanks for the idea.

Just wanted to chime in and recommend Rate Your Music [1] as well. Really great way to dive into different genres and artists.

[1]: https://rateyourmusic.com/

RateYourMusic is a great site. It's also an infinite rabbithole to waste endless amounts of time. By the way, did you know it has a film section too?

It depends what music you like, but at the end of the year every year, a lot of people with very different tastes post their favorite of the previous years $yourVerySpecificFavoriteGenre.

For me, this is video game music. My absolute favorite blog for this is "Press A," [0] which is hosted on a broader music blog called "A Closer Listen," but in addition to their post, I also simply do a search of "best video game music of $previousYear" every January and typically find about 20-30 different recommendations, which I sample on youtube and then get what I want of that. This past year seems to have been particularly stunning, so far I've listened to Kena: Bridge of Spirits, TUNIC, Elden Ring, and Sable, all of them utterly fantastic (Elden Ring actually being the weakest of the list). Pretty sure Kena will prove to be my favorite of the year, but I think it'll take me months to get through everything, simply because I haven't wanted to move on from anything yet.

Some previous lesser-known favorites include Sayonara Wild Hearts, Stellaris, and Spiritfarer.

[0] https://acloserlisten.com/2022/12/12/press-a-2022-the-years-...

Fun fact: SEO spam and AI-driven search seems to have made "Press A" a completely un-googleable term at this point. Seems to correct me to Wordpress no matter what I do, even using quotes, and then ignores A as a glue word.

It occurs to me that finding this blog would be a good test for a search engine.

I searched *Press A* in Kagi and it shows that website at the top for me

https://wtf.roflcopter.fr/pics/o4jKTW7y/C6N4W6W5.png

Wow thank you sir for introducing me to these Jems. See no algorithm will come close to understanding such intricate cultural details.

No problem, I was hoping someone would share my love of semi-obscure or very obscure video game music! As a bonus, check out the Songs of Supergiant Games 10th Anniversary Orchestral Collection (NOT the original soundtracks, this is much higher quality) :)

Were you using Discover Weekly or similar? I've found Spotify helped me create a massive list of songs I really liked. My liked list is up over 2,000 and Discover Weekly will usually unearth another 10+ great options without fail each week, and similar with song or artist radio.

Wonder if it's preferred genres or something that happens with a certain playlist size?

(One of my gripes is that the shuffle on long lists isn't very good, but I solved that by splitting my main list into a few sub-playlists and then using shuffle on those.)

My discover weekly used to be great, but at some point it broke and started suggesting me finnish, dutch and german music. Despite me always skipping them in the discover weekly.

same here. i had much better results years ago but recently i think ive been getting someone elses discover weekly by mistake because there is hardly anything on it that i like

I often favour music without lyrics because it's less distracting in an office environment, so music by international artists doesn't bother me at all - might even be preferable. More interesting for my kids to hear international influences if we're listening in the car too.

I just checked my Discover Weekly for this week to see if maybe it had gone downhill, and fav'ed about 20+ out of 30. I think it must just work very well for the styles I like.

Weird. I usually call it "Discover Weakly" or "Discover Meekly" because it's usually about every 3rd week that I find a new artist.

I like all sorts of Americana but Spotify loves to feed me blues. I'm not all that in to "blues".

I bought a car and started using XM now. Most of our Spotify usage was choosing a popular playlist and letting it run rather than curating our own playlists or playing a particular song that we wanted to hear. For this type of listening, a radio like experience is actually better, and XM radio does a better job at variety and rotation than Clear Channel, which is optimized for ads and always running the biggest hits. It surprised me because I had thought XM was a dead product.

I've heard this from other people, including my parents! Sirius XM seemingly does a good job of curating in a way that audiences appreciate.

I only have ever had XM when it came with the car for a year intro period. Seriously the best "I just want tunes" radio!

I feel like pointing out that radio has a lot to add to this conversation.

Not just for pop, but for discovery of new music.

The quality varies regionally of course, so YMMV. But with internet access being ubiquitous, the choice of stations has never been wider.

Where do you get the music?

I buy a lot of music on Bandcamp and at shows. Other stuff (older stuff) I buy at thrift and music stores (there are many where I live). I also started out with a large library due to CDs that were handed down to me.

Soulseek is good if you wish to sail the seas, Bandcamp for indie musicians getting paid fairly.

"Spotify would consistently "rabbithole" me into the same ~150 songs, most of which I didn't even like."

They do that because their fake top/featured/popular now playlists are crafted by major record labels and other influential people/companies in the music industry. Those 150 songs are what they wanna push right now and what are at least remotely close to your taste. The trick is to find custom and good quality playlists made by others.

I listen to a lot of thrash metal and I just found "New thrash 2022+ only" playlist (or something like that) and it's full of awesome small never-heard bands that have only 50-5000 listeners per month. I would have never discovered any of them if I just followed the algorithm.

What I've found is that the trick with Spotify is to listen to the user-curated playlists, not the Spotify-created playlists. I've discovered a lot more music, and a wider variety of music, that way.

> I noticed that Spotify would consistently "rabbithole" me into the same ~150 songs

I’ve noticed Apple Music doing this too. It used to not do it: discovered some wonderful music by saying “Play some music” and it would suggest new songs

Now, same small set of songs. Is there a way to force it to change? Like a different prompt

Just a theory, but I bet they (and Spotify) are sticking to songs that cost them less per play, when you get stuck on a group like this

There is no song that costs more. Labels are paid by the amount of streams they get in total. The distribution of money is made by the labels.

I wonder if the streaming services considered favoring longer songs to save on per stream fees.

Doesn't everyone just say "Play me one of the songs that someone else on the same CDN edge node recently listened to"? :)

It wouldn't save fees, because what Spotify does is allocate a percentage of their income to pay artists, and that's it. So whichever way this income is allocated, they are paying the same amount of money anyway.

clear the cache on the mobile client, Spotify may be caching songs locally to save on bandwidth.

Hype Machine is also still great for discovery.

Funny thing, I did the same thing (used Jellyfin for several years, then Navidrome for probably a year) and now moved back to Spotify. I think the discovery of music in self-hosted apps is worse. I like to listen albums mostly but I always happened to listen to the same handful of albums, only because those were the first on my mind. I think Navidrome's smart playlists have potential though. Did you come up with a good way to rotate the music?

I am fond of setting my "album" tab in Sonixd/Finamp to "random" sort. I just refresh or scroll until I see something interesting.

I also use last.fm (still) for recommendations. I've been scrobbling there for over a decade and I still get decent recommendations. Add in recommendations from friends and I far prefer the experience to algorithmic discovery.

If Spotify invested a bit in client UI improvements like making album listening easier (they push playlists far too much for my liking) and fixing the buried "offline" and "private listening" switches, I could be tempted back. Maybe.

I've never used streaming services and likely never will for the reasons often raised in these threads.

I've gone completely digital in my collection and store this as named and tagged files in a folder, backed up in the usual way.

I don't listen to the collection directly, I use the Mixx dj software to create "mixtape" files which are what I play on a phone or at home. I name the mix files by date and genre and just copy a bunch around as needed. Sometimes it's just a whole album played through, sometimes I actually giving mixing tracks a go where appropriate. It's fun, they work offline, but it takes a bunch of time. I consider it a hobby, but it's generally time spent listening rather than noodling with software so there's that.

When I was a kid I used to make the mixtapes recording onto actual tape from the radio. It's basically th same.

Where's the music coming from? Do you own the music files or are you simply replacing legal music with just not paying for it?

This was asked and answered in multiple other subthreads.

Spotify UI sucks and they’ve gone completely Netflix in terms of recommendation dark pattern and yeah in general bad UI.

But the best selection of Hindi/Urdu songs, especially the old ones, is on Spotify by a margin. Apple Music is awful at this — a lot of songs, even ultra famous ones, are available only as shitty “covers” by seemingly random people. So I tolerate Spotify UX. Every few months I’d pay for Spotify a month or two (they keep throwing trials or cheap “X months at Y” offers) and then get frustrated again and come back to their ad-supported music listening.

But I always keep my 700-800 songs on my phone. And once in a while update the offline library with newly found/liked songs.

I have to disagree about the UI. Once you know the flows, it's super easy to get it to do the most repeatitive tasks (add to queue & launch radio for me). I absolutely prefer Spotify's UI over Apple Music and Youtube Music.

I grew tired of Spotify's repetitiveness (I suspect their recommendation algorithm prioritizes what is already cached on your device, to save bandwidth), of their terrible treatment of classical music (impossible to see full track titles), of their peddling of stuff I don't want (exclusive podcasts on a closed platform) and of the never-arriving Hi-Fi version.

So I re-ripped all my CDs and started a Roon subscription. Huge improvement, and the integrated album reviews are an incredible value, especially for jazz.

One thing about Roon which many people miss while complaining about paying for a subscription is that Roon's goals are aligned with the users. I pay them for providing a good experience of listening to my music. They don't have to peddle their own exclusive podcasts, optimize algorithms that feed me cheap stuff, all they get paid for is user experience. I'm quite happy with this arrangement.

The music industry should be worried, though. I almost forgot about my CDs, since Spotify worked so well. But now I took the time to re-rip all of them, which took quite a bit of time and effort. And if people have their own music collections, they might look for other (ahem) sources of music to fill their collection.

Roon and Qobuz are all I need to be happy!

Well, Qobuz pretends I don't exist and doesn't want to take my money, so that is out of the picture. ("QOBUZ IS NOT YET AVAILABLE IN YOUR COUNTRY")

I think it's interesting that they have 295 million ad-supported monthly active users, which accounts for a revenue of only 449 million euros in Q4, compared to the 2 717 million euros from their 205 million premium users. That means each ad-supported user is only worth around €1.52 per quarter, or around 50.7 cents per month. That's not a lot of money, so why even bother? Why not limit the free accounts in other ways to get an even bigger difference to the premium accounts, and remove ads completely? And why are Netflix adding an ad-supported tier when there's so little money to make from those users?

38% of their revenue is not a lot of money and not worth bothering with?

I think it's closer to 14%, no? 449 million out of 3166 million total.

How much does each of those ad-supported users cost each month? Those 295 million users account for as much revenue as 34 million premium users, but they probably cost a lot, not to mention that the ad sales and ad infrastructure isn't free either.

My bad, on mobile the "2" was cut off with the line break before "717", didn't notice it nearly $3B not about $700M.

A break-even user is a low-risk opportunity to upsell in future and it’s the long term ability to starve your competitors of an audience. If Spotify cut-off ad-supported users today, another service would scoop them up which poses a risk to Spotify: what if the competitor discovers how to convert those free users to paid?

There’s complex dynamics at play when offering services to consumers that aren’t necessarily reflected in the numbers. For example, Netflix may believe they’ve reached a point where an advertisement-supported plan won’t cannibalise their higher value subscriptions and therefore now is the right time to do this when maybe it wasn’t right a few years ago.

Consumer behaviour is constantly changing, companies have to keep up with it (and even anticipate it) lest they fall out of favour.

I don't pretend to know anything about the intricacies of consumer behavior or service pricing, but I think it would be interesting to see what would happen with a different model. Instead of offering an ad supported free tier, you could have a free tier without ads, but other limitations like only shuffle, a time limit each day, no brand new releases, or similar. Then the no ads thing can be a benefit to other ad supported services, but if you want to listen to music all day you have to pay for premium.

I'm sure smarter people than me have found this model worse than what's already used, I just hate ads and was surprised at the low value they seem to generate. And all those ad-supported users must generate plenty of streams that means payments to the record companies.

> but other limitations like only shuffle,

They do this for free users on mobile.

Hulu makes more per user on their ad tier than their ad free tier. If their ad tied is successful, cannibalizing users isn’t a bad thing.

Perhaps it is more about ensuring advert supported competitors do not have an uncontested market. Better that Spotify gets a little bit of money, and that users that find Spotify via existing marketing, do not have to go elsewhere, which could result in a competitor growing into a sizable threat.

A huge percent of the premium users likely started as free accounts, or heard about Spotify from someone with a free account, etc. It also gives more bargaining power, listener data, mind share.

Even if they lost money per free account, it’s worth it.

And after all of these years they still aren’t profitable.

So their strategy doesn’t seem to be doing to well.

Haven't you heard? In startup land you don't need to be profitable as long as you're famous. All you need is investors to keep that runway going. Line goes up!

I recently cancelled myself. it was the only service I used for a while, but they started to annoy me with their podcasting focus and suggested content started to get a bit weaker IMO. it used to be a great discovery tool, and I would frequently listen to the provide discover streams, but something started to change and it seemed to be a lot more 'pay to play' and they were suggesting a lot more ad content.

Of all my paid subscriptions for media, Spotify is the stickiest. I use it probably 10x my next most used subscription service and I bet I'm not alone in this.

I have a family of 5, so we have quite a few streaming services but I don't really use them. I might watch 2 hours in an average month. But Spotify? I broke 40,000 minutes last year, according to that Wrapped deal. I absolutely hate the app, it breaks or behaves in weird / poor ways on a daily basis, but I suffer through it because despite the oddities it's so useful.

Same. Isn't their churn ridiculously low?

And somehow they did it with the absolute worst client you can imagine. The UI is excellent at getting you not to use it. I would pay for a subscription if they actually put some effort into a native application for Windows instead of Elecron or whatever crap web tech they built it on.

Until then my CD rips will stay.

edit: tips to rips

Even with a paid subscription, the iOS app is disgustingly adversarial and spams me with popup and banner ads every time I use it.

Some time many years ago I managed to complain about some issue on windows client, that they officially admitted that windows client is not supported, meaning that they are not going to fix windows client issues.

I haven't tried it, but maybe spotify-tui[0] would solve your problem?

[0] https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui

Love spotify, but I have always wondered about what seems to be an intentional choice re: their iOS client.

Certain actions related to the speakers/mic outside of the app itself cause music to stop playing, and be unrecoverable unless I reopen the app and tap play.

For example, if I am listening to Spotify, open iMessage, and accidentally hit the dictation icon, I now have to go into Spotify to start playing the music again. If I drag the hidden iOS control pane down, it says no music is paused, so I can't start playing it from there again.

Sounds small, but is super frustrating.

There's no HomePod support either, also quite annoying.

There is. Open the app, play a song. Tap the little Speaker button in the bottom right, near the scrub bar, Airplay & Bluetooth, select your HomePod. :)

They are talking about Homepod Siri support.

It's one of the many examples of Spotify complaining about Apple, then when they are given APIs they can't be bothered to implement them in their apps.

This happens to me with other music apps so I always assumed it was an Apple limitation

Benn Jordan, aka The Flashbulb, made a recent video titled: "Why Spotify Will Ultimately Fail"

(Because they are screwing artists, on whom they depend to generate streamable content.)

As an example, he made 3x on Bandcamp vs Spotify for the same album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU

Oh wow, haven't heard from Flahbulb in a loooong time.

Highly recommend his channel if you're interested in music production, I particularly enjoyed his tutorial on programming Dexed (a fantastic soft DX7 clonee).

Music wise, I miss his earlier stuff.

Artists don't really have a say.

The only artists that benefit from Spotify are the top of the top, as in Beyoncé/Lady Gaga level.

I always suspected that the falloff is pretty steep as soon as you step away from let's say the top n artists at a time.

This confirms this suspicion again.

I'd go as far as say that piracy is much better for artists due to the lack of dark patterns (which funnel more people to fewer artists). And once you visit a show or buy a piece of merch you have given an artist more money than Spotify listening alone ever would have, and it is not even close.

People complaining about losing connections while streaming offline. People complaining about perpetual subscriptions. You know what doesn't have that problem? Owning your music.

When the music is owned by you and on your device then you can play it anywhere, anytime, regardless of network connection and you don't have to keep paying for it in order to continue listening to it.

Owning also allows you to slow down your intake of new music - which is actually a good thing. It takes a while to really get into an album and savor all the details and really get to know the album. And you get to keep that album forever at no additional cost!

That's my $0.02 anyway.

> Owning also allows you to slow down your intake of new music - which is actually a good thing. It takes a while to really get into an album and savor all the details and really get to know the album. And you get to keep that album forever at no additional cost!

This makes absolutely no sense to my music listening habits, for example.

It's a nice take, for your personal experience with music. On the other side: I listen to a lot of recommendations from friends, I listen to discover a lot of new music that I can then buy to use for DJing. I like to listen music to discover new genres, new fusions of genres and to find new artists I might enjoy.

I won't ever buy an album from each one of those artists, it's not financially possible.

Not sure why listening to a very broad spectrum of music is such a bad thing in your view. Good albums will be digested as albums, some other music can just be appreciated as single pieces, no need to keep listening to whole albums that aren't really that good.

Since the advent of Spotify and other streaming services, I listen to a much greater variety of music. And it's music that I never would have heard if had to pay per song or album.

I've discovered so many genres I didn't even know existed thanks to Spotify.

Rock on! We started Music Of A People -https://musicofapeople.com.

Anyone can clone it and put there own songs on there and host their own online music player with deep links and playlist functionality et cetera.

We're going to build software for musicians/managers/agents/labels who believe in public domain music.

DRM music sucks. It's strictly inferior, end of story. Listening to the same digital bits over and over again isn't the essence of music anyway. Music is best experienced live. True musicians get this, and we think we start flocking to the new model: make digital files all public domain then monetize via concerts, vinyl records, merch and other physical things.

Do you hear the people sing?

Genuinely hate going to concerts would rather listen to my "digital bits" over and over again. I guess I don't get the "essence of music"

I mean I listen to digital music all the time (right now included). There's a time in a place for the "essence" :)

200M paid subscribers, and artists are paid a pittance.

It's kind of the economy in a nutshell: "be the middleman, not the person creating."

The analogy does not work because they are losing money.

Their founder/CEO is still a billionaire despite they’ve never made profits.

Due to their stock, right?

Well, don’t blame Spotify for that. They aren’t actually raking in millions (or anything in profit) they are losing money.

> [by 1957] the club had 687,652 members and had sold 7 million records

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_House

They weren't a "streaming service," I guess, but I think there's still similarity. I wonder how they'd compare in "proportion of available market"

How is 687k similar to 200m?

It seems appropriate when considered in terms of history.

well they're both numbers, in different points of time, so representing each a percentage of American population and of World population.

2 million is what, about .02% world population (nearly 8 billion), and 687k is probably about the same of 1957 world population, which was just under 3 billion right?

on edit: since tired and had to talk to doctor I wrote 2 million when should be 200 million, so 2% approx

200m, not 2m.

How did you parse 200m as "2 million"? It's actually "200 million".

Based on "world population" estimates, 1957 and 2020, spotify's reach is ~100x what columbia house had then, when it could be fairly said to have been hitting its stride. Which makes me wonder, is the market really that much bigger now? or might it be easier to be optimistic in the user numbers when there's no physical items being shipped around?

How long can Spotify lose money? It isn’t clear to me how they could ever make money as long as they depend on other’s IP.

Does Spotify have radio stations like Apple Music does? DJs having creative control and not having ads makes for good listening.

Spotify does have recommendation powered automatic playlists.

Forever.

With Spotify's subscriber base, the rights holders will never let them die. Universal, Warner, Sony, etc will adjust royalties up and down while still keeping the catalogue healthy enough to keep the blood pumping so they can continue their perfect leech, and never kill the host.

The podcast business was a shot at breaking this cycle, but it's unclear if it's actually working. If they make too much from podcasting, I don't see why the big 3 rights holders wouldn't just raise their rates to take them back to break-even.

They just dumped a bunch of shows off their live-streaming platform if that gives you any hints about the health of their podcast ecosystem.

You've made it sound horrifying, but I can't find a fault with it.

Spotify changed the behavior of the whole world w.r.t music.

They made an experience so much better and easier than buying or pirating music, and collect $10 / person / month forever for it.

They also made the platform developer and human friendly. I was able to build a totally custom UX with offline listening capabilities for my app:

https://www.getjukelab.com/

Their model, service and platform is not without flaws but thanks to Spotify, me and my friends get to legally enjoy more music day in and day out than ever before.

Thanks, and keep taking my money.

is the 100 song limit imposed by spotify or is that a product decision

Product decision. A classic jukebox can only have 100 albums. Constraints are powerful.

What's everyone's opinion on youtube music? You pay $11.99/month for YouTube Premium, you get both ad-free youtube (important on mobile), as well as music. Whereas Spotify is $9.99/month, but you only get music and podcasts. Granted Spotify has a much bigger library.

I obviously understand the principal of being frugal for the sake of being frugal regardless of how much money you have, but the average HackerNews frequent user has to have an income between $100k-$500k/yr or a net worth of $500k-$2.5m, right?

At that level, does $50/mo vs $150/mo in paid subscriptions register as a blip on the radar?

I say that as somebody who has Hulu, YouTube Premium, SoundCloud, Apple Music, Spotify, Netflix, Peacock, SiriusXM, HBO max, Roku CBS, ESPN+, Roku Discovery (and that's just what I could find jotted down from a statement)

I just don't comprehend the idea of "tweaking" something that's $100/yr. Obviously less fortunate people need to. But then how many of them tweak their $100/yr subscriptions and immediately go to Starbucks for a $7 drink right after?

If you can save $100/yr then why not but I agree all these penny pinching efforts are usually nothing but noise.

All those gains will easily be lost if you book your plane tickets two days late and have to pay $200 more.

Fwiw, android+firefox+ublock origin works great for no ads on YouTube.

Sure if you want the awful UX of a browser

You're hurting the creator just as much as you are YouTube. At least when you pay for Premium, some of that money goes to the creator of the video, and they get more than they would have done had you watched the video with ads.

I used Google Music from it launched until when it was shut down. Then I decided that I'd rather use a service where music streaming was their main business model and not just a side project or hobby that could get shut down at any point. So I left Google and switched to Spotify.

I also have issues with Apple music competing with other services while Apple owns not just the platform but also forces its competitors to use them for distribution and payment, but that's a separate issue.

Same here. When Google Music was finally sunsetted, I switched to Spotify. I actually ended up keeping both subscriptions. YouTube premium and Spotify.

I loath any kind of ads.

How does Apple “force” competitors to use them for payments when Spotify hasn’t had an in app purchase option for years?

Spotify has a much bigger library than YouTube Music? Hmm... Much as I love Spotify, it's always been at a disadvantage. The way I see it: on YouTube, content is "available by default" due to Content ID and the DMCA safe harbor, whereas on Spotify, content is "unavailable by default."

I do this. While YouTube Music is just okay, the issue with paying for ad-free YouTube videos is more content creators are doing sponsored videos. So, the majority of YouTube's videos are laden with these sponsored ads and this severely degrades the ad-free experience.

Ad free until you start watching the videos.

I use YouTube music and so far so good. For me there hasn't been a song I liked that was on Sporify but not on YT.

I watch a lot of yt and ad removal is worth my time. In fact their price used to be $9.99 and I found it surprising people would subscribe to any other service.

The only other service that piques my interest is Apple Music with Dolby Atmos but I still prefer yt ad removal over Dolby Atmos given the fact that you need a compatible speaker and music for it to work

"Granted Spotify has a much bigger library" - i dont think this is true.

I do the family plan and youtube ad free is the best, i do my music discovery via youtube and youtube music does an okay job.

I'm a Spotify subscriber. every week I listen to a song I would never have found anywhere else, not even apple music, amazon music or youtube. I don't let them currate music for me. I usually listen to artists, then find playlists that other's have made, and listen and discover other artists, and if I find an artist I like, I listen to more of their stuff and then build out my own playlists.

I never got into spotify because it was missing too many smaller artists back then. They are on there now, but I went back to buying music. On bandcamp [0] if possible, Amazon otherwise, and CDs as a last resort [1]. Recently put it all on my home server running jellyfin [2] (tried navidrome [3], but the interface was even worse), though mostly I still play it via network share on my desktop music player MediaMonkey [4]

[0]: https://bandcamp.com/

[1]: https://nagelfestmusic.com/shop/

[2]: https://jellyfin.org/

[3]: https://www.navidrome.org/

[4]: https://www.mediamonkey.com/

FWIW, I've enjoyed using Sonixd[1] as a Navidrome client: it's very polished and Spotify-esque in design (which may be a pro or a con for you).

[1]: https://github.com/jeffvli/sonixd

Heard of it, but haven’t gotten around to it. But it works just as well for Jellyfin. Not actually sure I need a desktop interface, as I prefer MediaMonkey anyway, and I have Jellyfin installed for videos as well. Navidrome just annoyed me because of their treatment of genres as 3rd class citizens ;)

Does MediaMonkey allow you to edit album, artist, and song metadata for your Jellyfin library? Metadata curation is the only thing I've had trouble with in more than a year of Jellyfin usage: seems like the only way to edit certain fields, like song ordering, is through a giant cloud of dialog boxes.

Yes, but I have to do "Replace all metadata" for "Refresh mode", kinda annoying :/

I switched to Tidal and haven’t looked back.

The UI is on par with Spotify, they focus on hi-fi audio, and way more money goes to the artists.

what genres do you listen to, and have you ever been unable to find something you were looking for?

I can't forgive Tidal for their promotion of MQA, nothing more than a scam to fleece audiophiles who don't know better out of their money.

MQA isn't lossless and distorts audio: https://youtu.be/pRjsu9-Vznc

Tidal HiFi isn't lossless either: https://goldensound.audio/2021/11/29/tidal-hifi-is-not-lossl...

I don't think any of the streaming services are particularly friendly to artists either, but Apple Music pays more to the artist than Spotify does, and includes (real) lossless audio at no extra cost. For now, they've got my dollar.

> The UI is on par with Spotify.

Is there such a thing as hi-fi podcasts they are pushing on you? Or do you mean they are really trying to make you hear the Best Hi-fi 2022 playlist by some random? No, they must have some kind of official podcast to push, I'm sure..

I'm not sure what you mean? They've always been known for a focus on higher fidelity audio, and podcasts weren't really brought up.

Apple Music is a better choice than Tidal and far better than Spotify.

They offer $0.010/stream versus $0.003-$0.005 for Spotify and $0.013 for Tidal.

Also offers the best quality audio with lossless up to 24-bit/192Hz without using MQA.

> Apple Music is a better choice than Tidal and far better than Spotify.

Only if you're on an iPhone.

It has 100m downloads on Android and 4.0 rating.

Versus a 4.1 rating for Tidal.

Having tried Apple Music, Deezer, Spotify, Amazon, Tidal, Soundcloud, and Qobuz, I can tell you that Apple Music doesn't have the best UI or features. It's a nice service, don't get me wrong. Top 3 for sure.

Also, the ratings on the Play Store aren't the best indicator of a great app. On the front page of Apple Music there's a 5 star review saying how Chromecast doesn't work. Which is why I prefer to just try all the apps myself.

You can't be sure what they're paying. For Apple I've seen $0.0056, $0.01, $0.008, and $0.006. The only consistency is that Napster, Tidal, and Amazon Unlimited (Not Prime) are always among the top payers and Spotify at the bottom in the West.

P.S.: Qobuz might be the best one, paying $0.04, on par with Peloton - or $0.03 if you adjust based on Peloton's reduction since then - while being cheaper than Tidal.

As in that bad? Besides they haven’t been able to figure Apple Login out. In recent many months they’re the only ones where Apple Login just doesn’t work.

At least Apple login is an option.

Last time I used Tidal there was no Google login which I found ludicrous in a modern service.

I have a somewhat biased opinion since I work in ML close to people building recommender systems at Netflix, but I think Tidal is a great showcase of the pros and cons of algorithmically curated content VS human curated. Tidal playlists are mostly human-curated and excellent. However it does not scale: it does not cover the long tail of wide ranges and nuances of musical preferences, nor does it cover such preferences over a large range of time. Their recommendation engine is orders of magnitude worse than Spotify's one. On the other hand, I also find that Spotify sometimes pushes algorithmic curation too far: one example of that is when they used to force an algorithmically-driven order of songs when playing an album instead of a linear order (until Adele complained loudly). I think there's a balance here: Spotify could benefit from some human-curated playlists that don't only cover mainstream genres, but Tidal should definitely invest into their recommendation engine which is really subpar, especially so because a much smaller user-base makes this problem harder to solve well.

I love that Tidal has folders to better organize playlists. Spotify doesn't. So to me, in some ways, Tidal is much better.

Spotify has folders. I have been using them for years:

https://support.spotify.com/us/article/playlist-folders/

Good to know, thanks.

> they focus on hi-fi audio

IIRC high quality on Spotify is Vorbis at 320kbps. If you can tell the difference between that and lossless, I'm impressed.

On normal headphones probably not.

But with a decent DAC/Amplifier it's very easy to hear the benefits of lossless especially with well mastered sources at higher qualities e.g. 24-bit/192kHz.

One thing I really liked about Tidal was how detailed the credits for the albums are. It's very useful for Jazz fans in particular I think to look at who was a sideman on an album and who else they played with.

Same here. The sound quality difference is kind of astonishing. I wasn't expecting there to be any difference, but it's so noticable that one must wonder what Spotify is doing to "round out" their sound so much.

15 years as a business, 200 million subscribers globally, cumulative losses in the billions, zero profit.

How does the CEO keep his job?

Possibly because major labels have invested too much into it, to just let it go.

If Spotify goes, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, Deezer and other regional services will take their markets. They are not differentiated at all except for their podcasts.

Whoever can design the best music discovery algorithm paired with manually curated playlists will come out on top eventually. At the moment Spotify is ahead on both of those points.

How would you lower the 70% to increase Spotify's profits?

> It distributes approximately 70% of its total revenue to rights holders (often record labels), who then pay artists based on individual agreements.[12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify

This is probably why they're shoving podcasts down everyone's throats. I don't expect the plan will succeed, because if it does the labels will just squeeze them for more money. But at least they're trying.

The main executive in charge of bringing on podcast left during the layoffs earlier this month. So I would be willing to bet they are not seeing the ROI they expected.

They're trying to destroy the podcast environment by building a walled garden and not competing by building a good player. It's horrible, I hope they fail.

I would stop giving tens of millions of dollars to podcast personalities to start.

They lost $250 million this quarter. Those podcast deals are minor in the grand scheme of losing money.

Then whats the value add? There is nothing unique to Spotify.

To me, its the opposite of value-add. I've seen this play out with Amazon.They keep adding all these services that I do not value and I have to use Prime. Then they keep raising the rate of prime. How about you provide me a base service (item delivery) and keep your music streaming, video streaming, etc as something else.

In that case, seems like their only other option is to raise rates slower but they are still required to raise the rates because they are not making money and not growing. Raising rates and not adding new features will likely reverse their growth. How would you feel if there were price hikes yet nothing has changed or improved? Again there is no real value add in your scenario so the customers can jump to a competing service and suffer no real loss. The podcasts are clearly helping to solve growing problem and thats at least a little bit better than not making money AND not growing.

The value they have is music recommendation and spotify wrapped. Apple recently added their karaoke mode.Tidal has great quality. There are plenty of new music related features that they can add. I, as a consumer, sign up for music streaming to stream music. I don't value a podcast moat, so I use a competing service that is more inline with my needs.

Plenty of services are rising their prices and lowering their offerings (HBO, I am looking at you). Which is also trash, and I am allowed to make value judgements on those as well.

If you love podcasts, and need your Joe Rogan, then spotify is for you.

Sadly, Spotify is both hurting the podcast ecosystem AND a crappy podcast player -- much worse than PocketCasts, OverCast, or even Apple Podcasts if I'm being honest.

It's like the executives decided to force podcasts into a music player. All the podcast value adds like gap trimming, adjustable playback speed, slight rewind on restarts that last longer than a few seconds... they've omitted.

And follow that up with a couple of hundred million to FC Barcelona...!

That still gives them $3 billion to run the business and turn a profit. Seems like that should be doable.

That's because the major labels recognized they had Spotify over a barrel. The bulk of that revenue isn't going to the artists.

Indie artists are probably the worst off, making something like $0.003 per stream. So a modestly successful independent artist with 100,000 monthly listeners is making $300/month or $3600 a year. So why do they bother? Well, you get mixed in with more notable acts so maybe someone googles you and finds your bandcamp, where you can capture 80% of the revenue. I know artists who made more money selling cassettes on bandcamp in one month than they did on Spotify the whole year.

Benn Jordan (makes music as The Flashbulb) on YouTube just made a video about this. One of his recent albums made more money in its first weekend on bandcamp than a promoted album did on Spotify in a month.

I have no idea. Perhaps use its enormous market share to negotiate lower fees? Or pay more podcasters and turn it into satellite radio 2.0, which is what appears to be happening.

Either way it shouldn't take a decade fo figure out, they are not curing disease or developing spacecraft. How did Tower Records and HMV do it? They didnt have Spotify's monopoly position and had to compete against Walmart and Best Buy.

>How did Tower Records and HMV do it? They didnt have Spotify's monopoly position and had to compete against Walmart and Best Buy.

Probably forcing people to buy 15-20$ cds when all people wanted was that one 99 cent song.

The old music business thrived on vinyl then 8 track then cassettes then CDs.

$15 in 1985 is about $40 adjusted for inflation and they convinced people to buy the same music multiple times. To even find that music you liked enough to buy multiple times too you probably bought 5 albums that you thought sucked.

I can remember as a kid in the 80s too that my father and all his friends easily had 500+ vinyl albums on display in their homes. Then those started collecting dust as they bought hundreds of cds.

It is just so different now. Imagine spending $40 bucks for 10 songs and have no idea if you will even like them. That is a totally different racket.

What would happen overnight if Spotify and record labels broke up?

Spotify would lose a huge portion of its userbase (nearly all) surely

but more interestingly, record labels lose that revenue (which I'm guessing has to be one of their main sources of income for their finished product: the artist's music)

How is Spotify not able to negotiate a deal better than 70% given that leverage?

It would take a couple minutes for those Spotify users to change to apple/google/Amazon/tidal/whatever for their music wants/needs.

The computers and software that delivers the music is the commodity with no moat, the music is copyrighted and the record label is the only place to get it from.

By investors listening to what the two goals are:

- 1b subscribers - after THAT: 10% profit margin

Look, spotify is still growing fast. They aim for 20% MAU growth YoY, and they are actually achieving it: they added 23M new MAU between Q2 and Q3 last year, around 40% of those new users were premium subscribers. New numbers for Q4 will be released today.

They are still trying to capture the whole market. After doing that they will flick the lever to profitability over growth. The current goals are set for 2030. Only if Ek deviates from the growth trajectory too much he will be dropped as CEO.

> After doing that they will flick the lever to profitability over growth.

I can't tell is this is sarcasm ... it's sarcasm right? There is no "lever to profitability".

I can’t tell if this is sarcasm … it’s sarcasm right? Based on the entire history of startups, you truly don’t believe that companies can focus on user growth or profitability, and those directions have different levers?

Why do you call Spotify a startup? It was founded over 15 years ago. Hundreds of thousands of companies have come and gone during this time.

Is it because they aren't profitable just yet? How many more years are you willing to wait?

How could there not be? Fire all the people who were working on growth.

Why not? You don’t think they could eek out an additional 70 cents per month per customer if they wanted to focus on that right now?

"Hi marketing department! You're losing 50% of staff and 80% of advertising budget!"

bam, growth -> profitability!

Is that info in the prospectus?

Very interesting, they’re doing the Uber model essentially

> Is that info in the prospectus?

Ek clearly communicated this during the Q2 2022 call.

That's on $12B in revenue, 4% churn, and having reformed one of the oldest, entrenched industries ever. I know nothing about the guy, but can you agree that's a remarkable achievement?

He keeps his job because he's promising that once an inflection point is reached, you become more aggressive about turning a profit. It's both your and mine guess on what that could be, but I think starting that procedure with a 200M paid subscriber base isn't the worst idea.

Does anyone have a feel for why the big three music labels haven’t developed their own music streaming services similar to how large film studios have? I’m certainly not complaining, mind you; it’s nice to be able to listen to a lot of music in one place.

Is music just less vertically integrated? E.g., music publishers don’t own radio stations whereas film and tv publishers typically own tv stations?

Unlike Movies and TV, music has a much longer long tail.

People care less about availability of old(er) titles on a video streaming service. That's why Netflix is still chugging along, mostly powered by new content alone.

With music it's more complex. While most users are covered by 10k songs or so, you still need to have your Pink Floyds and Beatles and Rolling Stones and Grateful Deads and Luis Armstrongs and... And neither of the Big Three has all of them.

But I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to get into the streaming game.

Wasn't Tidal some sort of semi-industry attempt at dethroning Spotify?

Yeah, I had Tidal in my mind, but was too lazy to check it :)

I finally cancelled Spotify but still get Apple Music and YouTube Music bundled into other things I pay for.

I could probably cancel Apple Music and just pay Apple for storage. It bothers me to carry that cost, but honestly, the cost is a super negligible line item in my budget.

I want to cancel it out of spite, but Tim won’t notice.

I wish any of the music services made interfaces for their music enthusiasts, and not the carrying capacity of hundreds of millions of casual kid gets.

I’ve also noticed, now that I’m in my early 50s, the amount of time I spend researching, reading about, and following music enthusiasts is out of proportion to the amount of any kind of music additions my library has seen in the last half decade or more.

Music is a hobby, and far more than listening to it.

Are there any metrics how much an average Spotify user generates for profit and where they turn as a loss?

With a fixed monthly fee, how much listening each month does it take before your customers are unprofitable for you similar to the Netflix problem.

I believe the fees get rationed out according to your listening. They don’t pay anything more if you listen to a song 10x vs 1000x. I’m not sure off the top of my head if that’s user level proportions or aggregate.

I have been a Spotify premium subscriber for about two years, and just 4-5 days ago, I canceled my premium subscription and went back to the ad-supported version.

Sheesh, the ad-supported version is miserable to use.

It feels to me like Spotify would rather just harass me to the point of driving me off the platform altogether rather than permit me to be a non-premium user.

And their strategy might work because I will probably sign up for premium again just because the non-premium version is so miserable.

When I used the non-premium version a few years ago, it was nowhere near this bad. I can't stand it now.

Spotify was never profitable. If their business model was good it would become profitable years ago. This way, lije many startups, it is basically a Ponzi scheme where the sucker will be investors after IPO.

I just cancelled my Duo subscription yesterday. It doesn't make sense to pay for a terrible UX, lacking basic features that even free software has. I feel the apps haven't moved past MVP and they resolutely refuse to improve.

I have been wanting to cancel the subscription for months now but just got around to do it. I wonder what percentage of the current subscribers want to get rid of the subscription but simply couldn't bring themselves to do so.

Used spotify for about 4y... but canceled subscription because of YT premium and inflation. There is no point in having 2 music streaming services. Yes, yt music has worse ux and at least for me recommendations are worse, but after migrating my library with a script, I'm just listening to my saved songs. Too bad can't cancel my yt subscription because I watch YT on my TV and casting to it is super convenient

Technically, wasn't napster the first? I mean you could start listening to the mp3s before the download finished so it looks like streaming to me :)

They're underpaying artists relative to every other streaming service, so it's no wonder they're able to draw the most users.

Spotify doesn't fit my conceptual model for streaming music, but my daughter loves it and has her own account rather than use my family Apple Music account. Primarily I think it's social--seventh graders are all about free Spotify accounts.

I think spotify's issue is that for many people like me there isn't enough reason to pay for it. So their options are putting stuff behind a pay wall or putting in more ads? I'm not going to listen to podcasts through spotify even if they ahve exclusives I would actually care about. And if the ads get too irritating I'll go to somewhere else.

I'm excited for their audiobook solution, whenever it comes out.

What do you mean there's not enough reason to pay for it? I haven't used the free version of Spotify in years but iirc it doesn't allow you to pick specific songs from albums/playlists, only shuffle, and it plays ads between songs.

That sounds like an awful experience. Both for listening to music recreationally and for aiding concentration while working.

If the free version works for you that's totally fine, I'm just astonished that someone would think that Spotify Premium isn't worth the money.

On the free version you can play any song you want. There might be a limit but I just searched for a song and played it to be sure. There are commercials but it isn't between every song and overall seems to be fewer than on radio.

Thanks for correcting me, I didn't know that. I can see limited use cases where the free version works fine then (i.e. as a replacement for a car radio).

> Spotify did post an operating loss of €231 million (around $250 million) in this quarter. But that’s not a huge departure from the company’s past performance, given it has tended to prioritize growth over turning a profit on a quarterly basis.

They're still growing but when and how does Spotify turn on the profit spigot?

They never will. I’ve been in this space and it’s designed so that any margin eventually gets consumed by the labels or one of their associated rights groups. They have regulatory capture and will utilize government to run you out of business if you don’t comply with their fees for their library.

I wonder how bad the service will become once they're expected to be profitable.

Why is everyone so obsessed with how much artists are getting paid? Artists mainly make money from concerts merch etc not song plays. Most artists publish their music to youtube. Youtube is free. Artists want people to hear their music. The argument about how much spotify pays artists is overblown.

It's so disheartening to see news like this. I just recently switched to Spotify to try it as my primary music service for the first time, and it has such a fundamental flaw with multiple devices not being supported that it feels like a prank. My family using my home devices interrupts my laptop music and they won't even allow me to pay to fix it, I would need to create a whole new account that doesn't have all my saved settings. My friend who has used spotify a long time said he made a new account in his dog's name to get around this. Really??? On top of that, the radio is still only built for basic short term listeners because it only plays the top 50 songs over and over, even in niche genres like symphonic power metal (as opposed to, say, electronic music as a whole). It's disheartening because our world economy somehow perpetuates so much of the wrong things that are trivial to fix if one genuinely asks "is this a good experience?"

Spotify's shuffle is so bad, the algorithm keeps pushing me to listen to the same songs in my playlist. Compared to foobar2000's shuffle options it's an absolute downgrade.

It is going to move past the 500m monthly users this year, And the first thing I'm thinking about is DATA DATA DATA.

So if AI models move past certain thresholds with data quantity (assuming similar "quality") why is going from 100m in 2016 to 500m in 2023 does not seem to have a big impact on recommendation quality ? This is not an objective assessment of course, just the impression I get around.

IMO Spotify could easily get a lot more data points by simply giving users features they always wanted. The simplest I can think of now is that pandora-style thumb up/down

And yet... The layoffs...

Stereotypical HN comment, but ugh how is Spotify so successful with such a terrible product. The app claimed to have downloaded my songs but when I tried to play them offline, it didn't work at all. If you're playing a podcast and lose connection, you can't pause the damn podcast. I literally had to close the app to stop it. Sometimes you just get a "can't play this song" error. I'm amazed that a product this mature still has bugs this terrible.

I guess you just have to be better than the competition. And Apple Music is even worse according to some

Let's not even talk about YouTube Music...

I switched to YT music and like it better than Spotify. The main thing I find is YT recommends better related music to what I am currently listening to. I found Spotify was playing the exact same songs all the time. Plus you get ad free YouTube which is a nice bonus.

"Sometimes you get an error" isn't exactly a damning critique of the product.

I've seen the podcast pausing issue before, didn't realize it was due to connection instability. I wonder what's happening on the technical side that causes that? Perhaps some remote endpoint call to stop streaming the audio results in an error which kills the entire operation?

That's fair but it happens _all_ the damn time. You can't play any music. Which is like...the purpose of the app.

How long has this been happening for you?

I've put my head through a few walls (trees?) because of this. I do a lot of motorcycling and hiking, both of which entail a lot of time with no service.

I swear the hoops you have to go through to get it to play songs offline. Never mind that sometimes it just deletes you offline connection without any notice.

With google play music I never had issues. I could randomly toggle airplane mode and it would never skip a beat. Spotify however needs you to toggle offline mode and restart the app a few times before it decides it can play offline.

Absolutely infuriating.

Spotify is a particularly terrible podcast client. It's fine for music, most of the time, IME

I tried switching to Apple Music because they threw me a good deal and god it was awful compared to Spotify. No way to manage a queue for some reason on the mobile app, you can only play a song next or stop the current song. iTunes on windows is fucking traaaaash I cannot believe they ship it and call it acceptable. Every search and navigation action takes many seconds, and you have to do a lot of navigation. I have symmetrical gigabit internet. Maybe it's better on MacOS, but that's not the desktop I use for music listening.

Spotify has their client completely, perfectly nailed. It is fast and works about the same everywhere. Period? That's it, it's not like the bar is even that high lol. I tried Tidal a few months back as well and it just wasn't ready yet.

Edit: So I've been told Apple Music does have a queue management UI, my bad, will leave my false rant out of shame. There is also a preview build of an iTunes replacement. I wanted to like Apple Music because it costs the same as Spotify and at least offers lossless playback on some tracks (I like to think I can tell the difference in my studio setup). And they don't give Joe Rogan a bunch of money, not keen on that guy. I'll revisit it in a year :)

You can 100% edit the queue on the mobile app, its the three line icon in the bottom right of the now playing screen. Theres also a new dedicated Apple Music app for Windows to replace the awful iTunes.

Well fuck me for never finding both of those lol. The first thing is my fault for just not discovering that feature, but how the heck was I supposed to know about Apple Music, they told me to download iTunes when I signed up. Sigh.

Its in Preview as of a few weeks ago, so not really on you at all. Its pretty decent though, but I'd say Spotify still has them beat in terms of UX.

> Theres also a new dedicated Apple Music app for Windows to replace the awful iTunes.

Urgh. At least "awful" iTunes lets me manually move tracks over into the Podcasts section, which is perfect for managing my collection of various radio comedy show.

Looking at the precedent on native Macs, post-splitup that'll no longer be possible, so thanks for nothing…

I have never understood the complaints about Apple Music, it does what I need it to do.

As far as no way to manage a queue, it very much does have this option. If you have multiple songs in your up next there is the "hamburger" button next to each and you can move it around. And then when you add a song you have "play next" and "play last". If you add mutiple "play nexts" they all go into your queue, last in first out. The opposite is true for "play last".

As far as the speed goes, I have never experienced that. It searches as you type and it is very quick for me.

I have to close and reopen it at least once a day because it just completely breaks. A few common issues:

- Songs won't play. - Buttons become completely unresponsive. - The search won't take any input (can't type in the box) - Songs take 5+ seconds to start playing. - I get a mysterious "you are not authorized to play this song" message.

All I want to do is find and play music, and manage playlists. It's utter trash.

sounds like you’re using the android app while the person above uses ios?

No, MacOS

"you are not authorized to play this song"

I get this probably 25% of the times I try to play any song at all.

On my iPhone 14 pro.

Especially discouraging since iTunes was a great app more than a decade ago.

Agreed! Loved using iTunes with my music library back in the pre-streaming days. I'll admit I was also instantly sold on streaming as the replacement to it, though it took a while for Spotify to build up their licensing game (remember when The Beatles didn't exist on streaming services?)

iTunes has never been a great app IMO. I also switched from JRiver Media Center years ago because it became more and more difficult to use it to manage an iPod.

Though, to be honest, these days--after I finally got my music library somewhat cleaned up a couple years ago--I mostly just use streaming and don't bother with curating my library much.

Maybe greater than it is now but WinAmp, Foobar2K, and VLC were all better than iTunes a decade ago.

My only complaint about Spotify is they don't have offer a lossless quality stream. I have a $10k speaker / amp set up that kicks ass, but I can't play tracks from Spotify.

Yeah that's really what pushed me enough to switch as well. Not a $10k setup but it gets closer every day haha... Tidal exists but didn't have much of a catalog last I tried it. Apple Music will totally work fine once the desktop app is replaced, so I guess we just wait.

I bought my equipment from a music store that was shutting down, so I got my $10k equipment for $4800!

I currently use Amazon Music for my high quality streaming but the app is horrible.

Damn that is the deal of a lifetime! I gotta look out more for deals like that

It really was the deal of a life time. Owner was retiring. They were only open for a few hours on Saturdays the last few months of operations. The closer you could hold out to buy, the better deal you got. I even talked them down a grand! I hope you get a chance one day

I have a Chi-fi $160 setup and Spotify is noticeably worse. Almost no sound stage, noise floor on old recordings is absurd. "The Chain" by Fleetwood Mac and "Listen to the Music" by The Doobie Brothers are two of the most noticeably songs for me.

Hi-Fi setups are getting cheaper and cheaper thanks to China, I think most of the "audiophile" thing will soon be mainstream (for example, I've always mocked audiophiles online and now here I am; I always discover some friend that has bought VX earphones; I made my girlfriend listen to some songs on my setup, and now she's considering buying some entry-level equipment too - and she was the kind of person that just used any $5~10 earphones -, etc). Spotify is probably missing a big opportunity here.

I urge you to ABX it. Spotify's highest bitrate (320kbit/s) is perceptually lossless. Probably the high bitrate as well, since they seem to use Ogg Vorbis.

It’s the source material, not the codec. Some albums sound vastly better on say Apple Music, regardless of lossless or lossy encoding. It’s almost like Spotify have older, inferior masters that they’ve never updated.

You’re right that it’s not the technology. I’ve released a few albums, and they sound virtually indistinguishable across various services since they’re from the same master files.

I've done some, really there are subtle differences in a file from the same mix in a lossless vs lossy, but sure, you can't notice it if you're not really paying close attention.

But Spotify problem is not the use of lossy 320kpbs compression, they're probably not using good source material or just upscaling 128/192 to 320. Their quality is worse than a pure lossless stream properly compressed to 320.

Yes that's what led me to switch to Deezer which has a large lossless library. Unfortunately while their recommendation engine beats Spotify's (at least for me) their app leaves something to be desired. Being able to use the app to control the desktop is one of Spotify's niceties that Deezer has yet to match.

I'd bet money you couldn't tell the difference in a blind test

I don’t use Apple Music on windows so can’t argue with the bad client experience, but Spotify isn’t exactly perfect either. To me the issue with iTunes and Spotify is the fact that to be a viable business the streaming model is going to squeeze all artists into making a between 1-2 grand for a million streams if they are that lucky. Tidal promises more money but once the realize those economics don’t work and get large enough they will follow suit.

What has happened is also an unprecedented breach of contract for older artists out there without streaming provisions in their contracts. I only know of a handful of instances where the artists have addressed this but I know of at least 1 example of a major label contract that specifically says “in the case of unforeseen circumstances (streaming, mind beaming, any new unavailable technology) the artist will split the proceeds 50/50. This same artist is not getting 50% of the revenue and is in fact getting the same (awful) deal as everyone else. [0]

What Spotify/Apple Music/Tidal have done is create the same hierarchy that existed in the days of physical media where they pour money into the top1% of artists and have effectively made everyone else much worse off. [1]

Anyone can make and release music today but it was hardly democratized. They same forces in the record industry have figured out how to screw streaming up in their favor now too.

[0]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/black-sheep-files-class-actio...

[1] https://youtu.be/gDfNRWsMRsU

The 200 million subscribers of Spotify are subsidizing things like Joe Rogans 100 million contract and some of the a lister musicians as part of their 360 deal.

> They same forces in the record industry have figured out how to screw streaming up in their favor now too.

That force is simply the economics of a winner take all market, especially where the product is a luxury good that people can do without. The record labels do not earn huge profit margins either.

Interoperability between spotify clients is trash, and has been for years. All of them have entirely different functions and controlling one from the other works only like 15% of the time.

Same here, I tried Apple Music for the last 3 months because I got it for free, and it’s soooo bad. Just this afternoon, it crashed like 3 times when changing song. Just that, I skipped a song and it crashed. The UI also becomes irresponsive whenever a song is loading. The other day I tried to add a song to my playlist and it just refused to do it without any error message. I probably lost some songs because of that, believing I added them to my playlist but it failed to add them.

Also the recommendations are a joke. Apple Music is utterly incapable of making good recommendations. It also strongly believes that because I’m French, every single playlist should contain 50% of French songs.

Spotify’s UI is really not good, but Apple Music is worst in class. I could go on and on for an hour about what’s wrong with Apple Music.

The apex tech companies are spinning up a lot of music/movie/game/etc. divisions to capture eyeballs and put up a wedge against entertainment. They're mostly not great.

Google Play Music, a product Google killed, was a fantastic music service. It had incredible customization, great discovery, and worked with a wide variety of 3rd party clients. They killed it and replaced it with the utter garbage that is YouTube Music. I still can't fathom why.

I'm sure Spotify is the best of the streaming clients (I use it constantly,) but the playback experience is still worse than any of the mid-2000's players. Even Windows iTunes was better.

What was the difference? I don’t really have any complaints but also never experienced this era.

iTunes (or any other player) could display hundreds or thousands of songs in a single playlist and would happily sort them or filter them instantly based on tags or whatever. Spotify, everything is lazy-loaded and I frequently get random elements just failing to load, or the entire player even crashes (like, at least every other month.)

And, I know I say thousands but I get this sort of behavior in Spotify when I've only got like ~50 songs in a playlist. And of course it can only do rudimentary sorting/filtering based on tags.

I have my gripes with Spotify (I hate how they emphasize the cover albums rather than the titles, makes it really difficult to navigate IMO), but yes they are leagues above Apple Music.

Make that 199,999,999 paid subscribers, as I am leaving Spotify, and completely ditching the eternal subscription models. Who's with me? Can we get a post now about setting up Lidarr and making your own Plexamp server for family and friends?

Not comparable to Spotify, because you effectively need to illegally download the entire known music library to self host? It would definitely be the better experience, Plexamp is great, but it's not even really comparable to streaming services like Spotify, whom you effectively are leasing rights to songs through.

Isn’t that where lidarr comes in?

Nah. I like being able to hear that something exists, search for it, and play it. I'd still have a Netflix account too if they had the same experience

As for the post.. go for it mate

Sorry - staying with streaming. I've discovered and been able to legitimately listen to so many great smaller artists with these services that I never would have otherwise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com