innovate its product features
What. It’s meant to stream music. Tf do you mean?
The bad Ai dj. The car thing they rolled back. The new logo that’s the same as the old one, but now border. The cache that causes you to hear the same ten songs multiple times in a week.
the playlist saved for offline playback that will still try to connect to the internet for like 30 seconds when you open it while actually offline. the Discover Weekly playlist that will serve you the song that you’ve marked as “not interested” over and over and over and
The UI that gets progressively worse with each update, ruining what was perfectly fine before. The attempts to create the audio focused equivalent of TikTok.
The way shuffle constantly shuts itself off even when set within the settings to be the default. The shitty Smart Shuffle that adds in songs that break up my playlists terribly. The way it plays the same song again the first time you enable shuffle and hit next.
Yall are noting not even the reason why I went to Apple Music: no ability to actually consistently sync an offline library across devices, your own files.
I use Tidal and get annoyed because the shuffle clearly has a recency bias to it, and it keeps trying to recommend show tunes to me in my Daily Discovery, and the suggested albums for me has become considerably worse since the last update, but everything i hear about what Spotify has been doing has made me glad i switched over a couple years ago.
The cache part pisses me off. I’m fucking paying you to stream me music. Not the same fucking shit over and over and over again.
I really don’t get it. Users have been begging for a true random shuffle for years. It’s not a hard thing to implement.
True random shuffle would be a terrible idea. No one wants the same track showing up multiple times in a row, which would not be uncommon in true random shuffle.
I disagree that that’s what it means, IMO “shuffle” explicitly means each track exactly once. Pedantry aside, what I meant was a truly randomized order when you shuffle a playlist. It’s a major critique of Spotify among users and has been for a very long time.
I think the idea is that the play order for the entire playlist is shuffled on each loop, so you play all songs in one order, then it shuffles, and you play all songs again but in a different order.
If anything, they’ve taken features away from people lately. The quality is still shit. Lossless is still nowhere to be seen. Free users are losing options too. Yet they’re making record profits, and jacking up the price
Spotify actually doesn’t make that much profit, if any.
But the record labels are major shareholders and definitely influence the pricing structure. Spotify is essentially a marketing frontend for the record industry.
I am literally looking at their financial report for 2024 Q1 and it shows a profit.
They’re reporting 1.00 billion in gross profit as of Q1 2024 so yeah, they make money. It’s kind of impossible to compare much though since they’re the only freestanding music competitor that’s popular.
The closest comparison I can make is using Apples reported figures of making around $9.2 billion in revenue for its 93 million user base.
Meanwhile Spotify is making around 2.63 billion in revenue for its near 3x subscriber base estimated around 240 million. So I wouldn’t say they’re not making money, but maybe you can see why they think they can squeeze a lot more. Best to just unsubscribe honestly, they’ll keep doing this
So they’re leaving a lot of money on the table and getting criticized for their greed? I’m not sure how that’s a coherent position.
This is why they have record profits. They attack at both ends. Strip features, increase prices.
AI generated music based off your likes and listening. It lines up with his statements. There was no innovation here. The same as every “disruptor” technology that just cheapified everything and one it was ubiquitous attempt to remove the core of the business.
They did add audiobooks.
Though the interface for audiobooks sucks, so I hope they improve it.
The last thing I ever wanted from Spotify was audiobooks or podcasts. We’ve had excellent apps available for several years already, we don’t need half assed bloat added to (very poorly) replicate the same features
The part is what drives me mad. Podcasts and audiobooks are not that hard to do properly. You could very easily separate them into distinct apps or at least a special tab that acts like a proper player. Instead audiobooks are basically albums.
There’s a shuffle button.
On an audiobook.
Yup this is what irks me most. I don’t think of audio books and music in the same context. Why the fuck are they mashing them together? Wrapped includes podcasts…
It’s the dumb goal of tech bros to create an “everything app” that does everything you want.
Without podcasts I am not sure I’d still use Spotify
Why not use a free/cheap pocketing app designed for it specifically? All the podcast apps I’ve tried are far better than spotify. UI-wise at least.
Their podcast and audiobook integration has been so sloppy.
So now that Tidal has moved its Hi-Fi tier price down to match Apple’s wtf is Spotify doing? Charging more than the competition, paying artists less, and not even offering lossless?
Spotify is less vulnerable to customer churn compared to TV/movie streaming services, as users are less likely to switch music streaming providers due to the hassle of rebuilding playlists and losing personalized recommendations.
There are services for transferring playlists
yes but often there are some mixups… which is a PITA for those of us with ~10K+ songs
Would you happen to have one to recommend to switch from Spotify to apple music? I’m thinking about moving but my playlists are keeping me from leaving.
I predict in a few months, they will put their API behind a paid tier.
Data takeouts are non-optional under the GDPR, so I would be very surprised if that happens.
And as long as people keep subscribing to them, they’ll March right along collecting that sweet money.
Spotify has over 200mill paying subscribers and over 600mill total I believe. They an afford the peel off unfortunately.
From what I can tell Tidal won’t even publish their subscribers so it must be pretty small.
Spotify Premium in practice has new benefits!
More specifically: Lyrics that they took away from regular users some time ago.
They fucked it up for premium users too, though, since they’ve done that. Half the songs that I knew to have lyrics either no longer have them, or they constantly “fail to load.”
The average person: Spotify sucks and is making me hate them even more
Shareholders seeing layoffs followed by AI replacements for those workers and then repeated price hikes: 🤑
The myth of capitalism is that it improves things for the consumer. It’s very obvious that it only improves, at best, the next quarter’s returns for the investor. Once that husk of a company stops “line going up,” the money goes elsewhere and we repeat.
If the line can’t go up through creation it’ll go up through destruction.
It worked differently before speech was considered money. Or I like to tell myself that.
It worked differently before because the information network was orders of magnitude slower and data was expensive as Pope shit.
Nowadays, the information is almost instant and everything is interconnected and data storage is cheap so we got big data with people paid solely to boil that down to algorithms that squeeze money as much as possible from customers.
Just look at all the streaming services that makes you pay more if you don’t want ads and they resell your data. Triple dipping baby
The myth of capitalism is that it improves things for the consumer
So you don’t think your life is better than someone from the 16th century?
I’m so tired of this nonsense argument, is capitalism your God to which you give credit for every human accomplishment? How did capitalism help to raise the Russian serfs to the status of a world superpower? It didn’t… How did capitalism help Russia get to space before the United States? How did capitalism help human life improve before the 16th century?
I wonder what you even think capitalism is. I wonder if you comprehend that technological advancement, markets, money, and trade aren’t synonymous with it.
You love democracy but when it comes to matters of economic decisions you are bootlicking the petite dictators that control every aspect of your economic life. You are employed by people whose means of acquiring wealth is to skim off the top of what you’re producing and steal it from you but you are too busy making eye contact while you suck them off that you don’t see their hand in your pocket.
The world is burning and there’s plastic in your balls because of capitalism, you are such a good submissive little peasant.
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Honestly €56 million in profit seems small for an operation as massive as Spotify that has so throughly saturated the market. That does not make it excusable at all. I’m just surprised to see that number.
I’m sure there’s tons they’ve made that their accountants have managed to classify as something other than “profit,” so they don’t have to pay taxes on it
First reasonable response I’ve gotten lol
Who cares what the “company” does when, as CEO, you rake almost $400 MILLION a year
https://mywage.ca/salary/celebrity-salary/daniel-ek
PS: and this is while receiving “no salary” (which they sell as if they were running a charity and meager $1.4 million in “other” compensation
I mean I understand there are a lot of caveats to that statement. Like I said, just kind of a surprising number. A company as massive as Spotify can have its revenue shift 10 of millions easily within a year, which means with a little nudge they could easily become unprofitable.
It would be like, I don’t know, realizing after you’ve paid all of your bills and groceries everything you have $300 at the end of the month. Not a lot of wiggle room. This isn’t sympathy and the stakes aren’t the same lol, I’m just saying their margins are not as high as I would have suspected.
A cursory search shows me competing figures - 7000+ and 15000+ employees. Both are very, very large numbers. Id have guessed they make hundreds of millions a year, not mid-8 figures. That’s probably what their payroll runs for 3-6mo.
Profit is AFTER they pay their CEO and other suit’s
Yes I am aware.
But is that net or gross?
If it’s profit it’s net by definition. Gross can’t be profit. You’re thinking of revenue. Gross is total revenue before any costs deducted.
You may need to realign your usage of phrases. Their 2024 Q1 financial statement has a line for “gross profit” and “net income/(loss) attributable to the owners of the parent.”
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IIRC this means the family plan costs more than 3 individual plans did like 3 years ago. If not more than it saves you like $.50 in comparison. I would try and look it up but Google search has also turned to shit so I don’t feel like dealing with it.
The Internet just isn’t fun anymore.
After watching how similar business practices torched Twitter, I think this dude is underestimating the general public’s commitment to just sail the high seas.
Apple Music pays multiple times more to artists than Spotify.
Tidal pays multiple times more than Apple.
You can influence things with your wallet.
Tidal pays multiple times more than Apple.
On paper. But in practice…
On February 27, 2016, Yesh Music, LLC and John Emanuele from the band The American Dollar launched a $5 million class-action lawsuit that claimed Tidal had to compensate the band for any of the royalty payments accrued from the streaming of the band’s 116 copyrighted songs. The suit also accused Tidal of using faulty numbers to payout artists while also having undercut these same individuals by 35%. A response from Tidal stated that they were indeed fully up to date on all royalties for the group and had removed said intellectual property from their servers.
Hollywood accounting and pirate profiteering undercut what artists would normally be paid.
You can influence things with your wallet.
You can influence how you feel about your consumer habits, but capitalists are still going to capitalize.
If you can, and they have it on there, buy your favorite albums on Bandcamp, then they are yours forever
I thought that Bandcamp was shutdown?
I dont think so? As far as I can tell, my account still works and I bought an album there the other day.
It looks like the company has been sold around a few times in the last few years and i think its gotten worse, but I honestly cant tell lol
For anyone out there, I recommend giving Tidal a shot and for podcasts, I recommend a FOSS app called AntennaPod. This is the combo I use myself, I’ve been using Tidal for a bit over two years now and just recently switched to AntennaPod.
Round #451 of telling people to stop using Spotify and consider one of the many, better alternatives.
I mean they do have one good thing going for them: you can separate the art from the more controversial artists, because you know for sure the artist isn’t getting a damn thing from spotify
You should list some.
What are some alternatives? I’ve heard Tidal is one of the better ones. I’m not necessarily opposed to piracy/ripping my CD collection + self-hosted streaming, but if I can pay someone else for the convenience I’d rather do that.
Do any services have a comparable family plan too?
I would suggest anyone bothered by this to look into xManager.
Kind of love and hate that their website doesn’t explicitly say what it does. Like, if you can’t figure it out, you probably shouldn’t do it, even their GitHub is a bit dodgy on what the software is for, you can figure it out, but it’s never explicitly stated what it’s specifically meant for. “We help you install old versions of the app who must not be named” kinda bullshit.
So is there an alternative that’s comparable? I am done with their price increases.
I assume Apple Music?
https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/best-music-streaming-service-subscription
Not really. They all cost about the same amount. In that article is right around $11 across the board.
I got Tidal since I read they pay artists a bigger share per track played.
I like it’s hight quality audio but don’t like it’s suggestions much. I did discover a few good songs but mostly I build my own playlist. To discover music I prefer to start playlist based on a song I like rather than their suggestions but it’s not perfect.
Depends on if you care about making set playlists. That’s the feature that generally costs more - Pandora is like $5 a month without that option, and $11 with it. I only listen in the car and don’t care about picking exactly what songs are on my stations, so I have the cheaper one, but for other people, that wouldn’t cut it.
I have never understood playlists as a ‘feature’ of these ‘services’. If someone wants that, why the hell don’t people just download the music and make local playlists? But the entire idea behind playlists has always baffled me - ‘yes I want to listen to the same songs in the same order every time I select this’ bro you’ve just made a mixtape from the 80s. And paid for the privilege. Good job.
For me the one and only appeal of any of these ‘services’ is to take what I currently like, blend like 3% of ‘similar songs/artists’ that I likely don’t know about, and get the hell out of the way otherwise. I’ve never had a decent experience with ‘let’s throw random shit at you and pray you like some of it’ ‘discovery’ systems. I don’t care what is popular with the masses, I don’t care what your ‘djs’ have ‘curated’, I don’t want to listen to your reinvention of radio, I don’t want to listen to someone talk between tracks, I don’t want to even be aware of talk show ‘radio’ oh my christ. Just give me fucking music, that I like, with a hint of weird. I give you my imported data from X prior service, I give you my entire last.fm data, I cannot make it any easier for you to do this. Just, do, it.
deep breathing
Sorry, I went to a place there. After like 20 years you’d think someone would get the formula right.
Counterpoint, I love the Spotify Discover Weekly feature. I’ve found some great gems. As for random playlists, I like to find lists that other people have made based on different genres I may be in the mode to listen to. Finding and downloading songs, to me, is way more inconvenient than using Spotify.
A “subscriber consent to renew on price increase” law would go a long way
I hope people just switch to something else or start self-hosting their own music.
Plexamp is better than any other music app I’ve tried.
Finamp for anyone using Jellyfin https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp
Remember: Stealing from big, evil corporations is morally correct.
