Spotify has been doomed from the start | Hacker News Reader

Spotify has been doomed from the start

pando.com

47 pointsprostoalex58 comments

Related to this - If European IT companies continue to lose against their bigger US competitors, the Europeans will start protecting themselves. Indeed this is what is happening right now with EU anti-trusting (remember Obama said "they can't compete").

Spotify and SoundCloud are some of the European IT stories at the moment, if they are both slaughtered by Apple, that will not go well for trade negotiations. Additionally, like the Chinese, Europeans are getting increasingly weary of reliance of US made hardware.

Upshot: Spotify and SoundCloud failing will give more fuel to EU protectionists and will in the long run curb the reach of US tech multinationals.

"Continue to lose"

Really.

"Indeed this is what is happening right now with EU anti-trusting"

No. Read up on what anti-trust laws are. The US has them too.

"Additionally, like the Chinese, Europeans are getting increasingly weary of reliance of US made hardware"

The NSA tinkering with certain US-made hardware is not really helping sales.

The US and China both have the "unfair" advantage of a big homogenous market. I think that's the main reason you don't see a Microsoft, Google or Facebook in Europe. For example Spotify, headquartered in Stockholm, initially had a domestic market of 9 million people. Spotify is growing fast, but again, not enough engineers would move to Stockholm to sustain a Google. There's a language and culture barrier between EU countries that just don't exist in the US.

Yes. I happen to think Europe actually has somewhat better human capital than the US, though the US has a clear institutional advantage (more homogeneous market, different politics, etc.) which trumps everything else.

I was once a part of a medium sized European start-up that was bought by a large US company. Even though everyone got rich off the acquisition, we came to view this as a failure. If we didn't agree to be bought, we knew we would be out spent/marketed by the much larger (though much more clumsy) US company.

At the end of the day, the Europeans will not consign themselves to US dominance (and the Chinese certainly won't). The EU moves slowly, but there are clear signs the past few years that it is moving to curb US tech multinationals in order to nurture domestic alternatives. While I support free trade in principle, I think this is a good development for Europe.

Sure, the EU could get all huffy, but starting a trade war over that when they are a huge net exporter to the US would be extremely stupid. Maybe even too stupid for them.

> Indeed this is what is happening right now with EU anti-trusting (remember Obama said "they can't compete").

Perhaps you have to look at the outcome of the proceedings of the last ten years and you will see that this is wrong

"Spotify and SoundCloud are some of the European IT stories at the moment, if they are both slaughtered by Apple, that will not go well for trade negotiations."

Oh please, like anyone doing trade negotiations would give a shit. Do you think those people have even heard about soundcloud? They haven't.

How did this sentence make it into the article: "In turn, the $41 million people who pay to use services like Spotify was $1.6 billion."? It doesn't even read properly.

(I think they mean "In turn, the 41 million people who pay to use services like Spotify generated $1.6 billion").

In my view, the real problem is the music labels. Hopefully the future lies with smaller and less malevolent labels, or even no labels at all.

Meanwhile at Spotify HQ:

"OK guys — it's been more than a couple of months since we scrapped features that people like. Let's spin the wheel of misfortune, shall we?"

"Maybe we should hold more talks about how awesome our processes are, and how agile we've become — all the while letting our core product languish and not listen to our customers needs."

"Hey, could you take a look at this? I've spent all weekend creating a better version of the playlist-view. It uses twice the amount of padding from before. Maybe this encourages more in-depth listening, since you have to scroll a lot more. What do you think? It's nice, right? Perhaps we should also require the users to click and drag the scrollbar?"

(I love Spotify though. I just wish they put a little more effort into their applications — or at least made it customisable so I could make semi-permanent fixes myself. The only meaningful feature they have shipped that has impacted me the last two years is detection of duplicates in a playlist. Like seriously, what are you guys doing?)

"Check out this prototype where I got rid of the time labels on either end of the scrub bar! I never look at those numbers, and thus I'm sure our millions of users never do either."

"Let's user test it first."

...

"All right, results show everyone missed the numbers."

"Oh, ok. We'll flash them onscreen momentarily then which should make everyone happy."

"Ship it!"

I don't have premium so I can't test how good it is but I believe you can use a third party client like the free and open source Clementine [ https://www.clementine-player.org/ ] with a paid membership of spotify.

I was very excited to try Clementine after spotting this, but having done so, I'm afraid I'd recommend using the Spotify client over this. Unfortunately, the UI is dreadful and it misses integration with some more recent additions to Spotify (e.g. My Music).

> make semi-permanent fixes myself

You could always use libspotify.

I could also just download all my music and use any music player that I want — point is I don't want to spend a lot of time maintaining a music library nor do I want to write my own god damn player.

I just want to fix the details about the Spotify client that I don't like. It's all js/css so why the fuck can't I? I can do anything I want with Atom, why not Spotify?

Tidal was the first promise of a decent competitor to Spotify and I jumped immediately. Spotify has had so many requests for features that they have completely ignored and consistently made their ux worse across every device for the two...maybe three years I've been a paying customer.

A feature request to prefer explicit over clean and vice versa when possible has been on their request board for nearly two of those. For a long time it was difficult to even select or search for the version you wanted.

They ignore their customers, break their UI, fail to optimize for conversions to paying customers, how could they expect to be profitable?

So far I've been extremely happy with Tidal. It's gotten quickly better and I'm excited to see how the artist based model plays out. It's odd to me that the author laments the plight of the starving and ignored artists while calling Tidal a joke. Their stated mission is to improve the landscape for artists, they have a real opportunity to build on top of and change the indie scene and I think they'll take it.

I'd argue that Rdio is a pretty good product. On Android, Google Play is very good. Both predate Tidal by a wide margin.

A bit of poor analysis in my view. While I have no doubt Apple Music will be popular in the long run (as new handsets become available), I saw very little in Apple's offering that was differentiated from Spotify. Pricing and features were more or less identical except for 3 months free (please correct me if I missed something).

Anecdotal, I've heard no excitement from any of my normal Apple-obsessed friends about using the new service. I find streaming music apps to more sticky than I had anticipated - people have their playlists/history - and they don't want to lose this. My wife was a user of MOG (one of the few), then of Beats post-purchase. She hates the Beats interface/app, but she will not change to another service. Spotify has another important sticky factor - the desktop app - which allows you to play back both what is on your hard drive with the streaming music.

This is not to say Spotify isn't doomed long term - they have, in my opinion, a fairly unsustainable business model that continues to exist only because of VC funding. They need to create a more multi-stream business - just working with the labels will put them into the ground. My guess is that they continue to evolve into a more complete media platform, and that they sign artists directly to get to a real margin.

But to say that Apple will crush them reminds me of the whole Netflix/Blockbuster comparison. Now Blockbuster was no Apple - but everyone thought that they, as the incumbent, would crush Netflix. That didn't happen - because Netflix was there first and Blockbuster launched a very me-too competitor. Spotify is also focused on winning this - it's all they have - whereas Apple Music is a tiny part of Apple as a whole.

Now, this could also play out like Google Maps - I believe Apple Maps now crushes GM in terms of usage - so Spotify will likely have trouble going forward if Apple Music is installed by default on every handset.

"I believe Apple Maps now crushes GM in terms of usage"

That's a bold claim. Are there any sources on this?

Apple Maps is used a lot more than Google Maps on iOS.

It is the advantage of being the integrated application in the operating system.

There is no way to make Google Maps/or any other application the default one on iOS and any map link goes to Apple Maps

I suspect Apple's claim is true on iOS devices. It's a good example of marketing spin.

"Apple's claim"? I see no claim in this thread that Apple made such a claim.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9714686

It's a top 10 app, ahead of Spotify, Uber, and even Apple's Find my iPhone. I'm only one datapoint, but I almost never use Apple Maps. (I'd love to see if my behavior is an outlier) Many apps are hip to this, and will give the option when they integrate.

It's an old article - I can't imagine this has improved as Apple has rolled out new handsets/OS versions. My wife didn't even realize there was a difference - and I expect that is quite common.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/11/apple-maps...

"But a year on, a total of 35m iPhone owners in the US used Apple's maps during September 2013, according to ComScore, compared to a total of 58.7m Google Maps users across the iPhone and Android base.

Of those, about 6m used Google Maps on the iPhone, according to calculations by the Guardian based on figures from ComScore. That includes 2m iPhone users who have not or cannot upgrade to iOS 6, according to data from MixPanel."

Now, that's comScore data and since I've worked in that industry and I can tell you that the data is sampled and therefore could be off by a factor - but that, combined with what Apple said at WWDC makes it more likely that Apple's data is right.

I believe Apple Maps now crushes GM in terms of usage

Out of genuine curiosity, any source for that? Do you mean crushes Google Maps on Apple phones? Or overall?

During the WWDC keynote, Apple claimed that Apple Maps had 3.5x the usage of "the next most used mapping app" (probably Google Maps), for whatever that's worth.

On iOS, not globally

I'm actually surprised their lead is that small - maybe transit directions will stop people using Google maps on iOS though. I wonder if that's the preinstalled app the most people would replace if they could though.

Since this is from WWDC, they probably counted every Apple Maps API call and compared that to GM app uses for over 5 minutes.

It's WWDC, its the keynote, its full with outrageous statistics like the many performance claims.

Gotta admire their spin on "one fifth of our users went to the trouble of replacing a core OS feature"

How do you get ton one fifth of our users? Just trying to understand your math.

Assumed that Google Maps plus Apple Maps usage ~= 100% iOS users.

1 + 3.5 = 4.5

1 / 4.5 = 22.2%

It would cost six people $14.99 per month for Apples music service.

14.99/6 would be $2.5 per month for a single person.

Spotify has something similar up to four people, but it won't even come remotely close to the same pricing.

Pricing is not identical for groups.

For Apple it's not exactly "groups", unless you want your friends having access to your credit card to buy apps on the store.

> I saw very little in Apple's offering that was differentiated from Spotify

There is one big difference: Apple Music will be available in my country.

Apple's ability to launch 100 countries (as stated in WWDC) within a year is probably their biggest strong point. Combine that with the three months free usage, I'm more than sure all my non-tech friends will at least be trying it out once it is available.

Great point - that is definitely a key difference and one that opens a huge number of markets if they can pull it off.

It is so hard to know what these services are actually for when they start out as a replacement for physical media. Products like Spotify are just an iteration of technology that started with records and evolved into tapes, CDs, IPods etc. But is that actually what we want? Do we want our tape player to recommend music, and have a social network?

I have had accounts on at least a dozen different streaming/download services, but the place I go back to time and time again is YouTube. Not only does it have the "official" music but also live recordings and endless amateur stuff. I have offline media, but I only really use it when I have to suffer extended time without internet.

The tone of the article is horrible. Does the behemoth, errr, Apple care to outcompete spotify or soundcloud? I though apple's strategy is just to provide more content for their devices

Maybe Apple is using it as a decoy to draw attention away from the Apple watch.

It's funny though since Apple said "Hey Apple Records in England we want to name our company Apple oh no we'll never be involved in selling any music" is getting more involved in music each decade.

The author of this article appears to be unaware that the major record companies have a significant stake in Spotify[1]. Of course they're not going to support any attempts to undercut the market.

[1] http://www.swedishwire.com/jobs/680-record-labels-part-owner...

It's obvious that this analysis is shallow by the failure to mention Google Play.

Don't have a particular opinion on the merits of these services, only that leaving out Google makes the analysis incomplete.

I noticed that, too. I've obviously not got the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google Play wasn't number two to Spotify right now in terms of subscribers. To not mention it at all is a strange oversight.

Apple IMO has never really understood the social dynamics of the internet, let alone "social networking." The company they bought to incorporate into their music service (Beats) has the executive DNA of the major label music entertainment business, which time and again has failed to understand why and how people share and enjoy music.

Not long after Beats bought streaming service Mog, they laid off the big data engineers building the "related things you might like" features in favor of marketing-driven genre-based playlists built by internal "experts." They killed one of the best features of Mog which was the ability to have the player continue to play music you were likely to enjoy when your song or album or playlist reached the end. Instead, the music just stops. It was a noticeable shift from an individual- personality-driven music experience to a top-down, father-knows-best experience.

My hunch is that Google/Youtube streams more music than any other dedicated service, and that's almost by accident.

I have no idea how these past moves will play into Apple's new service, but I wouldn't be naming anyone a victor quite yet.

I think Doomed is a strong word... Apple has lost this war over and over again (remember Itunes Ping anyone). They also seem a bit out of touch with focus of on mainstream artists, curated content and one-way "social networking". Apple's coffers and integrated payment system makes them a very dangerous adversary but no competitor has the reach, inventory and ecosystem that Spotify currently enjoys.

That being said I think the writing is on the wall. Spotify is too juicy a strategic asset to not be snatched up, it's just a matter of time and price. It'd put my money on Google buying it within a year for a hefty price.

It's a pity because I'd rather see Spotify as an independent service rather than platform leverage. If Spotify becomes a de facto monopoly in a walled garden under Apple or Google it is we who are doomed. Better for the music labels to own a part of Spotify (and perhaps demand more ownership) than handing over control.

Ping was a complete failure but apart from that, what else? iTunes was their only other attempt in the "war" and it absolutely dominated.

Regarding reach, inventory and ecosystem - I think Spotify should be very worried by Apple. The iTunes library is one of the biggest and it seems that most of it is available for streaming. Apple Music will be coming preinstalled on all iOS devices (with three months of the service for free) and, to top it all off, it'll be available on Android too. I'd be very concerned if I were Spotify.

What's more, iOS users tend to be some of the more valuable customers, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a higher portion of Spotify Premium subscribers on iOS than other platforms. I suspect that Spotify Premium memberships will take a big hit after it launches. I know I'll be leaving for it.

To me, Spotify is a perfect example of the power of a good UI (or rather, how damaging a poor UI can be). I have subscribed to Spotify since pretty much the beginning - for years and years - and yet I am completely disloyal to them. I can't think of any other company, besides utility companies and such, where I haven't become somewhat fond of them having been a customer for so long. I can't stand Spotify. Whilst the service is great, the UI is awful and the apps are slow, don't feel native and are annoying to use. That's why, having only seen screenshots of Apple Music, I know I'll be switching to it from day one. A good user interface is king.

(In case anyone brings it up, I've tried many competitors to Spotify, including Rdio, and haven't been able to find anything better. Rdio looked promising but their Mac app is actually even worse.)

MOG was actually pretty fantastic until Beats made them totally re-engineer and add their idiotic "I am riding a Moose at a Roller derby and feeling childish" mad libd garbage. Now that Apple's gonna run that shop and probably toss out 90% of the ultra goofy garbage (playlists and favored artists were heavily de-emphasized), maybe I'll switch back.

Hadn't heard of MOG, although I had heard of Beats Music, but unfortunately neither were available in the UK.

I see a lot of hate for the Spotify UI and on desktop & web I think it's kinda justified just because they've flip & flopped so much and remove/added/changed features constantly.

The Iphone & Ipad client I actually think is pretty well designed and I'm not sure where the hate is coming from, would be interesting if you could go into more detail

Best example I have is the whole navigation structure (this is on iPhone). Let's say you were listening to a playlist and then you went into an artist, maybe a related artist from there and played a song (basically, you've gone pretty deep). You now decide to search for a song and play that. In order to do that, you need to hit the back button repeatedly until the hamburger icon appears. Then, you can search and listen to the track you wanted. If you want to return to where you were previously, you need to hit the back button repeatedly until you get the hamburger, then redo every step you took to get there.

How is this fixable? Really easily! It's built-in! There's a UITabBarController that is used in many apps, such as iTunes, for this exact purpose. You can switch between sections of an app without losing your place in each section.

Ah that's a good point, thanks! Consistent navigation is the crux of many apps. Though with the phone version i find 99% of my use is either listening to my playlists or searching & placing specific song, so I seldom hit all those use cases that I do on the desktop version. I can imagine it being quite poor at those edge cases however.

Try making a playlist on the iPhone app with 15 songs. Maybe you mistakenly added two songs — try deleting those.

Just try it. You'll understand.

I don't know on iOS, but in the Android app is fairly evident and easy

> iTunes was their only other attempt in the "war" and it absolutely dominated.

iTunes appeared when there was nothing, there was no "war" in that time

Spotify has nailed the social aspect of music sharing/collaborative playlist creation through its great Facebook integration (at least here in Norway where "everyone" uses Spotify).

From what I've seen of Apple Music it seems like they haven't bothered with the social aspect at all. Is it even possible to share what you're listening to and collaborate on playlists?

That may not be a big deal for some people, but I'm pretty confident that at least my group of friends won't switch to a streaming service where collabrating on playlists isn't super easy (or even possible).

Pando, they are always funny

It might be the subscriber model. Consumer would loose their access to music and would have to restart from scratch with another service (favorites, playlists) and maybe buy special hardware (Apple Music?).

An audio CD has a longer term value, legal backup are possible, it can be resold, it has a higher audio quality and the musician ears more too.

Hindsight always seems to be 20/20

Apple is not Spotify's problems. The labels are. The labels have all the control. They'll squeeze out all profits from that company.

Apple Music is not a problem because it is for Apple users. They won't be able to help themselves, it'll be centered around their eco-system. There are a lot non-Apple users. There are a lot of Apple haters (I got annoyed last week when they restricted streaming of their keynote to Apple devices - seriously).

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