Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it
theverge.com
theverge.com
I've no idea what source they switched it to, but there's a lot of obscure songs which makes it a lot less fun.
Like: They could just buy a controlling stake, let it run by the original team and just add some cross promo to their main product.
When a large fund has exited a successful public company, they will use their influence on the public company to convince the successful entity to purchase the failed ones.
This is a way to keep the machine going at the expense of the investors in the public company (they are holding the bag now anyway), and this way you always have a positive track record as a fund.
Sometimes, when influence is not enough, purchases can involve kickbacks to members of the board to make sure they are convinced that it's the right choice to do.
Why would a fund have any influence on a public company that it does not own shares of?
1) Some individuals may retain significant amount of voting rights, that is not proportional to their shareholding interest.
Of course they shouldn't be accused of breach of their fiduciary duties, nor get a claim of waste of corporate assets.
The people casting the votes during corporate actions are not necessarily the ones who hold the shares.
When you are board member in company A, and your friend is in company B. You can help him with A, and he is going to help you with B.
Sometimes founders don't get the exit that they expected, and such arrangements are a good way to get extra money.
Board members may consider themselves underpaid as well.
We won't give you debt financing if you don't use part of that money to purchase our other company on the other side.
I may sue you for sexual harassment if you don't convince the board to attribute me additional RSUs.
This is why some acquisitions are total non-sense or over-priced, the same way that some employees are simply overpaid for no reasons other than being close to the board.
You see the same mechanisms with governments purchasing useless businesses.
A less extreme example than an acquisition that still gives you an idea of misalignment of interests between shareholders and board members, you can see in a video here:
https://www.quimbee.com/cases/espinoza-v-zuckerberg (the video is actually cool and easy to understand)
"We now grant RSUs to new directors who aren't Facebook investors or employees" ...
Just one example among many.
I like this topic, because it pushes you to do better due diligence on public companies, as some companies are really wasting company money, that it could feel intentional.
I wish I'd taken a screenshot or done a video tour of my setup before it shut down. The Cluetrain Manifesto/Intertwingularity days were so full of open endless possibility & fun. Spotify did so so so well, had such an interesting capable Javascript extension system built in to the app... then we're one of the first people to pack up & leave the party. I was shocked.
Every time I use it now, my inner voice is saying “get the fuck out of my way” to the UX itself.
What are they optimizing for?
Raise the prices if they need to, but don't try and have a subscription + "whatever ad bucks we can make" model.
Get to hang out with a friend who’s a former Spotify employee tomorrow so this will be a likely topic of discussion
Discovery via their radio used to be great. Whenever I tried it more recently it was kind of awful. I've switched off of Spotify many times over the past few years, only to regrettably come back and be disappointed again.
I wish Apple would just make a proper cross platform Apple Music client, then I could switch in peace. All the other alternatives lack some of the more obscure artists I listen to regularly. And while I try to purchase as much as I can, not everything is available digitally and I don't really want to import CDs from the other side of the world.
Even YouTube?
Jesus Christ Spotify. Is there anybody working there who actually likes music anymore? No I don’t want to listen to the fucking Gillian Flynn novel.
Wonder why they seemed to have never prodded me about this? Rather that than (as already mentioned) prodding me about new releases from literally-who artists (to me). ;)
I agree in general about their UX, though; it's part of the general enshittification, these companies always trying to squeeze us for more attention. The constant change has its own friction. And tt feels especially egregious on something as personal as our music.
Probably engagement. The more clicks, the better.
I've switched to Tidal. It pushes some ads too, but not nearly as badly. The discovery algorithm is slightly worse but pretty close. Most importantly it doesn't keep playing the same 3 songs (at least it's more like 30).
The one thing I want Spotify to do well is algorithmic discovery. The Discover Weekly playlist is the only thing that keeps me on the service, and yet they make it more and more difficult to find. The position on the home screen is entirely random and unpredictable. The only reliable way to find it is by using the search feature.
Then I finally found something and saw that not only was it not included in my subscription, but the cost was higher than buying the hardcover on Amazon.
It amazed me with the fact that even after creating a radio from a single song, I got exactly what I wanted to hear (including new songs).
It's a shame that it's not available in Europe.
I started using Spotify after Google killed Google Music. I find it totally egregious. My playlists feel hidden from me. Search is infuriating. The path to a full album is many clicks away. Even finding albums vs singles vs EPs is tough. In fact the app seems to discourage full-album listening. The recommendations for me have so far been totally completely underwhelming. And I'm constantly having Joe Rogan shoved in my face, not to mention a whole host of other stuff I have zero interest in.
We all get used to different paradigms, but Spotify feels like a particularly bad (and constantly shifting) case. If it was all I knew, I might think differently.
I used to be loyal to Spotify because it was decent and they were in the music business specifically. Now I'm on YouTube Music and going to cancel Spotify paid.
Personally I think Spotify is great and it works really well for me, the only thing I really don't like is the podcast push. While it's not as bad as it used to be, I wish I could toggle it off or banish it to some separate part of the app.
It's anecdotes, sure, but I do not experience these issues with the App or the Website.
You can Up/Down Vote on your "Radio" stations - but not your custom playlists (which makes sense).
Pandora offers custom playlists, offline listing, unlimited skips of radio, no ads on radio, "hit" playlits (curated by Pandora and other users) and more. It's radio/discovery algorithm is what kept me with Pandora, but all these features make it on-par with Spotify.
however i've found that the mixes introduce me to recommendations that I like at roughly the same rate as Discover Weekly.
What are you listening to for such good recommendations? Is the the automatic "Mix" playlists it creates?
Because on YT video it's like:
You picked Rammstein? Sure, here is your next video with classical music, because you were listening to it last week.
They'd love it if you listened to podcasts. If you have to listen to music they want to convince you to listen to something unpopular they can license for cheap. That's why the push Discover stuff so hard.
any guesses?
In the end though, I don't think it matters. The majority of users will stay. Switching platforms means losing your friends, your familiarity, and your time.
the simple answer is that people copy. there are too many infinite permutations to incentivize reinventing the wheel.
a newer example being how ChatGPT simply showed people what product market fit is, various people and organizations had similar AI products and just didn't know that's what would hit. Google was sitting on one for years earlier its engineers were too busy getting finessed by it. Suddenly Google sees "oh, thats what we can do with it" and now Bard is out.
Its the same with UX patterns.
I had to skip without guessing to the end and then see today’s answer. I never heard that song in my life, nor ever heard of the artist. Connecting Heardle to my Spotify profile would make a more fun game.
Usually we would get the answer in a single try, because it happened to be a song we knew by heart, or we wouldn't get it at all because we didn't know the artist/it was just not in a genre to which we regularly listen/the song was an obscure hit or one hit wonder before our time
Perhaps it would have been better as 'guess the artist' and give you 5 second clips from decreasingly obscure songs
Was it just an acquihire all along?
Hopefully someone who has access to the C suite at Spotify can leak the actual answer here (I’m sure they will get right on that). For future reference just Google “x acquires y” if you want to attempt to get any insight about “what x planned to do with y after acquiring”.
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2022-07-12/spotify-to-acquire-m...
> “We are always looking for innovative and playful ways to enhance music discovery and help artists reach new fans,” commented Jeremy Erlich, Global Head of Music, Spotify. “Heardle has proven to be a really fun way to connect millions of fans with songs they know and love and with new songs . . . and a way to compete with their friends as to who has the best musical knowledge. Since its debut, the game has quickly built a loyal following, and it aligns with our plans to deepen interactivity across the Spotify ecosystem.”
The official statement seems consistent with what was reported in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35570998
In other words, they tried to retool the tech toward an additional value proposition for both users and artists. The result failed to meet a quality bar, and therefore it was decided to axe the project.
I guess it is not worth to keep it on life suport with a skeleton crew just fixing bugs (if even needed)? But then why buy it in the first place?
Embrace and extinguish?
It's a product that should, and perhaps could in a more bullish market, have grown their subscriber base while adding value to their core product.
Clearly they didn't get the numbers they wanted/needed and if everyone else is cutting right now, this is something that seems reasonable to cut from their expenses.
The concept of the game sounds cool though as a customer of the company itself however I didn't know about it.
Also I wouldn't put it past them to push features of the game directly into the Spotify app in the future. (Maybe they already have, I don't know).
This is what happens when businesses follow and chase short-term hype cycles and end up wasting time and money in the end. The return on investment of this acquired startup is exactly $0.
Facebook on the other hand with the Instagram acquisition gave returns into the tens of billions of dollars.
negative, far below zero.
Instagram has to be an all-time steal for what they paid for it. They also own What's App, a juggernaut in its own right.
Facebook's acquisition of Oculus was reasonable. It does remain to be seen if they can truly harness it or not.