Algorithm for Your Personal Rhythm – Beats Music Enters Online Streaming Market | Hacker News Reader

Algorithm for Your Personal Rhythm – Beats Music Enters Online Streaming Market

nytimes.com

15 pointsk-mcgrady5 comments

Anecdotally, most of my family and friends are casual listeners who prefer Pandora and traditional radio to decide for them what to hear next.

Spotify and Beats Music are for big music fans like myself who want to hear a specific song or playlist from their favorites. But there's a much smaller market for big music fans. If Beats can make a play for the Pandora/iTunes Radio audience they have a chance. Otherwise they have to prove they are better than Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, etc. for hardcore listeners.

I don't use it directly, but I have benefited from friends who exchange playlists on Spotify. Pandora let's users share channels, but I think the explicit selection model is a better fit for that kind of music aficionado.

No free version is definitely an interesting decision. If they market it as heavily as it sounds like they will and they can convince normal people to pay for this like they would cable or phone service it would be a game changer for the music industry whether it is significantly different in features from Spotify or not.

I think Spotify has the mindshare largely because of the free version, and it's going to be difficult to overcome that.

That being said, I've been using Beats' predecessor Mog for over a year now and I like the interface and the known good sound quality (Spotify wasn't the first to have a 320k library). If Beats is easier to use on mobile than Spotify, it could make a dent.

The integration angle though -- that's where players like Pandora have an edge with apps on Apple TV, smart TVs, etc.

>> "I think Spotify has the mindshare largely because of the free version, and it's going to be difficult to overcome that."

Very true, but Beats managed to convince a lot of people to spend ridiculous amounts of money on headphones. If they can work the same marketing magic behind this I see it doing very well.

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