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

• h2odragon 4y ago
  > [by 1957] the club had 687,652 members and had sold 7 million records https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_House 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"
  • DrThunder 4y ago
    How is 687k similar to 200m?
    • pictur 4y ago
      It seems appropriate when considered in terms of history.
    • bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      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
      • jwestbury 4y ago
        200m, not 2m.
      • nindalf 4y ago
        How did you parse 200m as "2 million"? It's actually "200 million".
    • h2odragon 4y ago
      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?
• josefresco 4y ago
  > 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?
  • atdrummond 4y ago
    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.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    I wonder how bad the service will become once they're expected to be profitable.
• nonstopdev 4y ago
  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.
  • oneoff786 4y ago
    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.
• rchaud 4y ago
  15 years as a business, 200 million subscribers globally, cumulative losses in the billions, zero profit. How does the CEO keep his job?
  • odiroot 4y ago
    Possibly because major labels have invested too much into it, to just let it go.
    • rchaud 4y ago
      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.
      • Daz1 4y ago
        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.
  • Gwypaas 4y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify
    • rom-antics 4y ago
      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.
      • makestuff 4y ago
• anonymouswacker 4y ago
  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?
  • corytheboyd 4y ago
    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.
    • slondr 4y ago
      Isn’t that where lidarr comes in?
  • corobo 4y ago
    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
  • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    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.
• jccalhoun 4y ago
  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.
  • tommica 4y ago
    I'm excited for their audiobook solution, whenever it comes out.
  • Version467 4y ago
    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.
    • jccalhoun 4y ago
      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.
      • Version467 4y ago
        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).
• redleggedfrog 4y ago
  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
  • aendruk 4y ago
    Even with a paid subscription, the iOS app is disgustingly adversarial and spams me with popup and banner ads every time I use it.
  • Euphorbium 4y ago
    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.
  • albrewer 4y ago
    I haven't tried it, but maybe spotify-tui[0] would solve your problem? [0] https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui
• corytheboyd 4y ago
  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 :)
  • samcat116 4y ago
    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.
    • corytheboyd 4y ago
      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.
      • samcat116 4y ago
        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.
    • 4y ago
• hardwaregeek 4y ago
  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.
  • yywwbbn 4y ago
    I guess you just have to be better than the competition. And Apple Music is even worse according to some
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • bearjaws 4y ago
      Let's not even talk about YouTube Music...
      • alzoid 4y ago
        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.
  • pc86 4y ago
    "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?
    • hardwaregeek 4y ago
• derstander 4y ago
  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?
  • dmitriid 4y ago
    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.
    • nebula8804 4y ago
      Wasn't Tidal some sort of semi-industry attempt at dethroning Spotify?
      • dmitriid 4y ago
        Yeah, I had Tidal in my mind, but was too lazy to check it :)
• prmoustache 4y ago
  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 :)
• theFletch 4y ago
  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.
  • scruple 4y ago
    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.
  • dopeboy 4y ago
    Same. Isn't their churn ridiculously low?
• taylodl 4y ago
  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.
  • piva00 4y ago
    > 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.
    • wyclif 4y ago
      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.
  • toiletfuneral 4y ago
    [dead]
  • justgregthings 4y ago
• mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  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."
  • nebula8804 4y ago
    The analogy does not work because they are losing money.
    • wyre 4y ago
      Their founder/CEO is still a billionaire despite they’ve never made profits.
      • anderber 4y ago
        Due to their stock, right?
  • scarface74 4y ago
    Well, don’t blame Spotify for that. They aren’t actually raking in millions (or anything in profit) they are losing money.
• nzoschke 4y ago
  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/ 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.
  • marcofatica 4y ago
    is the 100 song limit imposed by spotify or is that a product decision
    • nzoschke 4y ago
      Product decision. A classic jukebox can only have 100 albums. Constraints are powerful.
• yehudalouis 4y ago
  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.
  • Avamander 4y ago
    There's no HomePod support either, also quite annoying.
    • yehudalouis 4y ago
      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. :)
      • threeseed 4y ago
        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.
  • kalleboo 4y ago
    This happens to me with other music apps so I always assumed it was an Apple limitation
• consumer451 4y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
  • persedes 4y ago
    Oh wow, haven't heard from Flahbulb in a loooong time.
    • ioseph 4y ago
      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.
  • schoolornot 4y ago
    Artists don't really have a say.
  • Herbstluft 4y ago
    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.
• LunarAurora 4y ago
  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
• penciltwirler 4y ago
  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.
  • MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    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?
    • gerash 4y ago
      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.
  • potatochup 4y ago
    Fwiw, android+firefox+ublock origin works great for no ads on YouTube.
    • LeoPanthera 4y ago
      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.
• pwinnski 4y ago
  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.
• bobobob420 4y ago
  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.
• kderbyma 4y ago
  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.
• superb-owl 4y ago
  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.
  • fargoth 4y ago
    what genres do you listen to, and have you ever been unable to find something you were looking for?
  • LeoPanthera 4y ago
    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 https://youtu.be/pRjsu9-Vznc Tidal HiFi isn't lossless either: https://goldensound.audio/2021/11/29/tidal-hifi-is-not-lossless/ 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.
  • gverrilla 4y ago
    > 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..
    • LanternLight83 4y ago
      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.
  • threeseed 4y ago
    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.
• musictubes 4y ago
  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.
  • chrischen 4y ago
    Spotify does have recommendation powered automatic playlists.
  • celestialcheese 4y ago
    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.
    • evan_ 4y ago
      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.
    • mshake2 4y ago
      You've made it sound horrifying, but I can't find a fault with it.
• woodruffw 4y ago
  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 https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome
  • el_sinchi 4y ago
    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
  • spywaregorilla 4y ago
    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?
    • woodruffw 4y ago
      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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyx4JeyMJE0
• sorenjan 4y ago
  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?
  • BbzzbB 4y ago
    38% of their revenue is not a lot of money and not worth bothering with?
    • sorenjan 4y ago
      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.
      • BbzzbB 4y ago
        My bad, on mobile the "2" was cut off with the line break before "717", didn't notice it nearly $3B not about $700M.
  • phphphphp 4y ago
    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.
• throwawy2123 4y ago
  [dead]
• crossroadsguy 4y ago
  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.
  • nerbert 4y ago
    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.
• Semaphor 4y ago
  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/ https://bandcamp.com/ [1]: https://nagelfestmusic.com/shop/ https://nagelfestmusic.com/shop/ [2]: https://jellyfin.org/ https://jellyfin.org/ [3]: https://www.navidrome.org/ https://www.navidrome.org/ [4]: https://www.mediamonkey.com/ https://www.mediamonkey.com/
  • woodruffw 4y ago
    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 https://github.com/jeffvli/sonixd
    • Semaphor 4y ago
      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 ;)
  • vanilla_nut 4y ago
    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.
    • Semaphor 4y ago
      Yes, but I have to do "Replace all metadata" for "Refresh mode", kinda annoying :/
• xkgt 4y ago
  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.
• browningstreet 4y ago
  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.
• drno123 4y ago
  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.
• dylanwenzlau 4y ago
  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?"
• jwr 4y ago
  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.
  • PcChip 4y ago
    Roon and Qobuz are all I need to be happy!
    • jwr 4y ago
      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")
• loige 4y ago
  And yet... The layoffs...
• rob81777 4y ago
  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.
• Moldoteck 4y ago
  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
• segmondy 4y ago
  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.
• jononomo 4y ago
  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.