I'm also unsure of any innovation Spotify has made in the world of music.
Some searching has led me to the end of year recaps and a lot about advertising. Guess France will miss out.
Some searching has led me to the end of year recaps and a lot about advertising. Guess France will miss out.
They also have a really nice API, which has admittedly been getting more and more locked down, but to claim it was not innovative, especially at the time, is farcical. All this without even mentioning, as other posters have, their effect on legitimizing music streaming. Also, and each user has anecdotally different experiences here, their music recommendations for me are top notch. I've discovered just so, so many pieces of great music through their service.
A private collection and a player like Clementine is so much nicer. It's not like Spotify has everything, anyway. Not even original versions of songs if anyone released an arbitrarily bad remaster.
Piracy is a costing problem and Spotify’s solution is “keep costs to the consumer low and money in our pockets by keeping it out of the artists’ hands”. Piracy was also the leverage they originally had on the labels (better to collect 5 cents than nothing, right?) before network effect and inertia took over.
They didn’t kill piracy, they co-opted it.
The reason Spotify was able to out-compete piracy (which is ostensibly free) is because it provided a substantially better experience to users. I’m sure the artists don’t get a great deal out of it, but it seems weird to blame that on streaming. Artists losing out to big business has been the entire model of the music industry since forever.
In any case, even if you think Spotify is fundamentally evil, and their innovations are extremely harmful, that doesn’t take anything away from how innovative they were. Which is very, very innovative. They completely changed the whole music industry world wide.
> They didn’t kill piracy, they co-opted it.
Trying to claim that one company licensing a music catalog, and then selling it to consumers is “piracy” is a terrible take, and just makes you look like you have some weird and extreme views on this topic.
Spotify cleaned up the legalities of it, but they weren't (and still are not) innovating.
Spotify was the first streaming service to let you listen to any type of music from any place in the world. The only place to do that before them was YouTube but this was before you could listen to YouTube videos in audio format.
Spotify has best in class discoverability with generative playlists and recommendations for any type of music. You can find Spotify generative playlist for the most niche music genres.
I uploaded a single electronic music track on Spotify 10 years ago without using a label or advertising it other than to a few friends on FB and it has 100k plays. The same song on YouTube has a few 100 plays.
Again if you just use Spotify to listen to popular music then yeah it will definitely feel like it not much compared to anything else, but if you listen to a lot of music and different types of music there is no match to Spotify.