5 ms·

Spotify has me and all I know spending 9x12=108 per year on just music. If anyone expected any of us to ever spend more than this, they are very wrong. Even if

Spotify has me and all I know spending 9x12=108 per year on just music. If anyone expected any of us to ever spend more than this, they are very wrong. Even if we go back to the golden days of CD sales, I doubt the average consumer spent more than this, but I might be terribly wrong. I'm sure I wouldn't.

nicpottier 12y ago
Agreed, I finally admitted last year that I was tired of maintaining my own MP3 library and that $9/mo was a fair enough price to listen to whomever I want. But ya, that sure seems like that should be fair enough and profitable enough for the artists I listen to, so if Spotify isn't doing a good job of making sure that is the case then I hope someone else arrives on the scene who does. After all, switching costs are now incredibly low for us as consumers and that is where I want my money going.
- pjc50 12y ago
  What I suspect happens is that most Spotify consumers are undiscerning and use it as either a radio substitute or for playing whatever their friends are listening to (which is going to be "Top 40" almost by definition). So like everything else it's profitable for the big acts and not for anyone else.
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  > Agreed, I finally admitted last year that I was tired of maintaining my own MP3 library. If a subscription service could get me out of that chore, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But the music I listen to is crazy all over the place, and if the service doesn't have even one of the songs I want, then it's worthless. Even if I can upload mp3s, now I'm back to maintaining an mp3 library. If I switch services, I have to either pull out my mp3s or hold on to them, and if I'm holding on to them, why not hold on to all of them.
  - joshstrange 12y ago
    I'm hitting this point right now. After years of maintaining an mp3 collection I jumped ship to Spotify to try it out and loved it. It was great that I no longer had to spend any time to get access to the music I loved. Also community playlists were awesome (Especially the Top X Hit playlists that were updated monthly). Spotify even supported Last.FM, I was in heaven... Until Spotify didn't have that 1 song, or that 1 cd, or that 1 artist. That coupled with CONSTANTLY turning explicit music on my playlists to the "clean"/"radio edit" versions pissed me off to no end (I know why this is happening and I find it completely unacceptable). For the last few months I've been using SoundCloud (Still paying for Spotify for every now and then or when a friend requests a song) for mashups (which are nowhere to be found on Spotify) but the SoundCloud iPhone is shit. It looks nice but whenever iOS knocks it out of memory it forgets where you were were and takes you back to the home screen (Which for long mashups sucks a lot). Furthermore it seems WAY more finicky with network connections than Spotify was. I have to turn off Wifi when I get in my car (from home -> work and from work -> home) because if I don't then SC will try to load over Wifi and I drive out of range almost immediately. Then I have to kill the app and re-launch (and re-navigate to where I was) before it will use my LTE connection. Also the mobile app doesn't scrobble to last.fm (neither does the website but I have chrome extentions for that). I decided, literally a couple hours ago, that I was sick of this and decided to go back to maintaining my own music collection. I've got to do some research on how best to do this (Subsonic or similar on my home server and an iPhone/OS X that let's me stream+cache and scrobble to last.fm) but I believe it will all pay off in the end. I've found that all of these services (Netflix/Hulu/Spotify/Rdio/etc) are great for getting started but that all comes at a cost and it WILL bite you in the ass one day.
    - vinceguidry 12y ago
      I've got some plans. Right now I've got all my music on Google Play, having moved it from iTunes last year, which was painful, but not too bad. I eventually want to write some Ruby software that will hold all the metadata in a sqlite database replicated to Dropbox. That way I know what the tracks are. I'll seed the DB, hopefully by hooking into a Google Play API that hopefully exists. Then I want to grab all the files and put them on S3 or something and store the links in the db. Then it's a front-end problem, I'll need a command line interface and then one day I'll make a GUI. I could also find tracks that exist only, say, on YouTube, and store links to those too. Then I'll be able to use it as a music player and store no music on my local machine. Then the biggest pain in the ass becomes syncing to my portable devices, which is the only reason I haven't done this yet. I would hate to have to maintain two libraries at the same time. So I have to think my way through that. Though I'm sure I could write a syncer that would work much better than Google Play's, I haven't bothered to sit down to do it yet.
tpeaton 12y ago
Same. I went from spending $0 on recorded music to $15 a month (Spotify family plan so my gf and I can use it simultaneously).
dublinben 12y ago
The average consumer only spends $48 on recorded music per year.[0] At $100+ per year, services like Spotify are much more expensive for all but the most prolific music collector. [0]http://recode.net/2014/03/18/the-price-of-music/ http://recode.net/2014/03/18/the-price-of-music/
- danieldk 12y ago
  But only one quarter of the users is a subscriber: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/12/spotify-60m-users-15m-subscribers http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/12/spotify-60... Suppose that the average price for subscribers is $7.50 (since students get discounts and they are probably a large chunk of subscribers). That's (12 * 7.50) / 4 = $22.50 Suddenly that $48 starts to look pretty good.
  - ghaff 12y ago
    Yeah, but you probably shouldn't assume that Spotify is the only money they spend. Just because someone has a Spotify subscription (and thus has demonstrated a willingness to spend money on music), they might buy at least the odd track and/or also subscribe to other streaming in some form on other services, e.g. as part of Amazon Prime. And OTOH, unpaid Spotify subscribers will in some cases be unpaid precisely because they get their music from other sources (streaming, paid, "free"). Of course, music revenue has declined overall in any case.
- megaman821 12y ago
  Thanks for that link. I always assumed that the music subscription services charged more than what the average consumer pays for music in a year. It appears that the artists aren't getting paid enough because there are not enough subscribers. And there are not enough subscribers because the price is too high for the average music consumer. So lowering the price $5/month might actually drastically increase the artist pay.

nicpottier 12y ago

Agreed, I finally admitted last year that I was tired of maintaining my own MP3 library and that $9/mo was a fair enough price to listen to whomever I want. But ya, that sure seems like that should be fair enough and profitable enough for the artists I listen to, so if Spotify isn't doing a good job of making sure that is the case then I hope someone else arrives on the scene who does. After all, switching costs are now incredibly low for us as consumers and that is where I want my money going.

pjc50 12y ago
What I suspect happens is that most Spotify consumers are undiscerning and use it as either a radio substitute or for playing whatever their friends are listening to (which is going to be "Top 40" almost by definition). So like everything else it's profitable for the big acts and not for anyone else.
vinceguidry 12y ago
> Agreed, I finally admitted last year that I was tired of maintaining my own MP3 library. If a subscription service could get me out of that chore, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But the music I listen to is crazy all over the place, and if the service doesn't have even one of the songs I want, then it's worthless. Even if I can upload mp3s, now I'm back to maintaining an mp3 library. If I switch services, I have to either pull out my mp3s or hold on to them, and if I'm holding on to them, why not hold on to all of them.
- joshstrange 12y ago
  I'm hitting this point right now. After years of maintaining an mp3 collection I jumped ship to Spotify to try it out and loved it. It was great that I no longer had to spend any time to get access to the music I loved. Also community playlists were awesome (Especially the Top X Hit playlists that were updated monthly). Spotify even supported Last.FM, I was in heaven... Until Spotify didn't have that 1 song, or that 1 cd, or that 1 artist. That coupled with CONSTANTLY turning explicit music on my playlists to the "clean"/"radio edit" versions pissed me off to no end (I know why this is happening and I find it completely unacceptable). For the last few months I've been using SoundCloud (Still paying for Spotify for every now and then or when a friend requests a song) for mashups (which are nowhere to be found on Spotify) but the SoundCloud iPhone is shit. It looks nice but whenever iOS knocks it out of memory it forgets where you were were and takes you back to the home screen (Which for long mashups sucks a lot). Furthermore it seems WAY more finicky with network connections than Spotify was. I have to turn off Wifi when I get in my car (from home -> work and from work -> home) because if I don't then SC will try to load over Wifi and I drive out of range almost immediately. Then I have to kill the app and re-launch (and re-navigate to where I was) before it will use my LTE connection. Also the mobile app doesn't scrobble to last.fm (neither does the website but I have chrome extentions for that). I decided, literally a couple hours ago, that I was sick of this and decided to go back to maintaining my own music collection. I've got to do some research on how best to do this (Subsonic or similar on my home server and an iPhone/OS X that let's me stream+cache and scrobble to last.fm) but I believe it will all pay off in the end. I've found that all of these services (Netflix/Hulu/Spotify/Rdio/etc) are great for getting started but that all comes at a cost and it WILL bite you in the ass one day.
  - vinceguidry 12y ago
    I've got some plans. Right now I've got all my music on Google Play, having moved it from iTunes last year, which was painful, but not too bad. I eventually want to write some Ruby software that will hold all the metadata in a sqlite database replicated to Dropbox. That way I know what the tracks are. I'll seed the DB, hopefully by hooking into a Google Play API that hopefully exists. Then I want to grab all the files and put them on S3 or something and store the links in the db. Then it's a front-end problem, I'll need a command line interface and then one day I'll make a GUI. I could also find tracks that exist only, say, on YouTube, and store links to those too. Then I'll be able to use it as a music player and store no music on my local machine. Then the biggest pain in the ass becomes syncing to my portable devices, which is the only reason I haven't done this yet. I would hate to have to maintain two libraries at the same time. So I have to think my way through that. Though I'm sure I could write a syncer that would work much better than Google Play's, I haven't bothered to sit down to do it yet.

tpeaton 12y ago

Same. I went from spending $0 on recorded music to $15 a month (Spotify family plan so my gf and I can use it simultaneously).

dublinben 12y ago

The average consumer only spends $48 on recorded music per year.[0] At $100+ per year, services like Spotify are much more expensive for all but the most prolific music collector. [0]http://recode.net/2014/03/18/the-price-of-music/ http://recode.net/2014/03/18/the-price-of-music/

danieldk 12y ago
But only one quarter of the users is a subscriber: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/12/spotify-60m-users-15m-subscribers http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/12/spotify-60... Suppose that the average price for subscribers is $7.50 (since students get discounts and they are probably a large chunk of subscribers). That's (12 * 7.50) / 4 = $22.50 Suddenly that $48 starts to look pretty good.
- ghaff 12y ago
  Yeah, but you probably shouldn't assume that Spotify is the only money they spend. Just because someone has a Spotify subscription (and thus has demonstrated a willingness to spend money on music), they might buy at least the odd track and/or also subscribe to other streaming in some form on other services, e.g. as part of Amazon Prime. And OTOH, unpaid Spotify subscribers will in some cases be unpaid precisely because they get their music from other sources (streaming, paid, "free"). Of course, music revenue has declined overall in any case.
megaman821 12y ago
Thanks for that link. I always assumed that the music subscription services charged more than what the average consumer pays for music in a year. It appears that the artists aren't getting paid enough because there are not enough subscribers. And there are not enough subscribers because the price is too high for the average music consumer. So lowering the price $5/month might actually drastically increase the artist pay.