Parental controls too. My kids wandered into some explicit user generated content, but any controls are now only available to the most expensive family plan. Deleted the account and moved to Apple Music which offers parental controls in iOS settings as part of the normal plan.
I have a more expensive family plan, it just went up to £20 a month. Spotify is still forcing adverts down my throat though and we're planning how to migrate back to self-hosted.
wouldn't it be easier to download whatever your kids like to listen to and have them listen to it offline?
i know i'm not the target for those services that i wouldn't use in a million years, but i just wonder sometimes if Spotify or Apple Music actually provide any convenience or value at all
?? apple gave computers to schools because children are the easiest targets for eventual customers, even from an evil corporation mindset you shouldn't be creating a barrier to children's access
Spotify is still cheaper for two people with the Duo plan. Add the Jam functionality and shared playlists for social events (since about everyone has Spotify already). And then add stuff like a Linux desktop app with MPRIS command support and Spotify Connect for portable speakers.
At that point I notice the Spotify moat is actually quite substantial in my use case and switching to another service is pretty much out of the question.
As a part-time working musician I also wonder about this because they aren’t very artist-friendly, either.
Their discovery-specific algos/UX are ok, but I think becoming the global de-facto music/audio-specific social network is their biggest moat. It’s been so tough to replicate that apple/google/amazon have yet to make much of a dent despite spotify’s actively hostile UX and practices.
Edited to add: Music generes and fandoms have always been tribes and spotify was the first to capitalize on that aspect of music culture. Other companies approached their products in a “building a “digital CD-vinyl collection” kinda way, but there are few network effects in that.
Youtube Music’s greatest strength is its greatest weakness: integration with Youtube. That means the videos you like become part of your music profile even if your reasons for liking them unrelated to the music. It messes up your profile quickly.
YouTube music has a lot of music that would never be able to put on Spotify. A lot of one-off punk albums from the 80s, DJ / house music sets, B-sides, live recordings etc.
Services like Spotify will probably be around forever unless there’s easy ways to migrate playlists and “loved/liked” songs between platforms.
1st world problems, but I’m paying for Apple Music since my running playlists are on there (Spotify didn’t support offline on Apple Watch at the time) and most of my other playlists are on Spotify. I’ll probably pay for both forever for lack of time to consolidate.
I forget the service now, and I'm reluctant to advertise anyway, but it's fairly common for third parties to glue the APIs together. Deezer directly partnered with one of these services, but I found them independently beforehand
playlists age. you'll be surprised how easy it is to build those things back up again on youtube. spotify's "moat" isnt as big as it thinks it is and i hope they get a sharp wakeup call.
I wasn't thinking of streaming services, but communities and websites. Also, Bandcamp (which does have streaming but I don't think of it as that primarily)
If both of these options exist and Spotify still grows in subscribers each quarter probably it has the best product for a larger share of potential consumers?
That's how some products exist even with competitors price dumping against them.
It’s still a good option, maybe not the best. No ads on youtube in and off its self is worth it. Especially when you have kids and you don't want them blasted with every ad under the sun every few minutes.
I hate how it gets normal to join some service just to see it becoming worse and worse, or just more expensive.
How is this model still something CEOs go for? Is it because there are enough people stupid enough to keep on paying to make up for those who are leaving?
I wonder if there is a science of that sweet spot where it's still worth to lose people and keep on making more profits from quarter to quarter.
This is a pest. I am one of those who recently turned pirate again for my favorite shows because of this behavior, and I'm teaching all my less IT capable friends how to do it too.
If you are a paid user you still have access to lyrics, if you are on the free subscription you lost access to it (lyrics also have licencing costs, it costs money to display lyrics to users).
So if you were a paying customer nothing has changed.
Free users already have to suffer through advertisements while the artists get ridiculous amounts of money.
As I wrote below: I doubt many people will start paying if they don't have access to lyrics. It is just another power move to make the "free" alternative worse for those who can't or won't afford the paid version.
Check the financial reports, Q1 2024 has just been released a week ago: ads don't pay much for Spotify, free users are mostly subsidised because it's a conversion funnel for people to try the service and become a premium subscriber.
Makes sense to not pay licencing costs for lyrics as well on top of music for free users, they don't bring enough revenue.
It's free, you can't expect to have all the features that cost money per user to be provided.
It's been squeezed more and more exactly because it doesn't pay enough. The best ads revenue would be to have as little as possible ads for the maximum amount of revenue, the opposite is counterproductive after a threshold (which is quite low).
Also if you mean more ads like in podcasts, those are mostly inserted by the shows themselves rather than Spotify, for most of the ads in podcasts Spotify is not earning anything.
> It is not free. People pay with their data and their stolen attention.
Ads on Spotify are much more similar to radio ads than the stuff done by Meta, and Google.
Are radio ads stealing attention? How should radios support themselves if the listener doesn't pay anything monetarily? Same for Spotify's free tier...
> It's been squeezed more and more exactly because it doesn't pay enough.
Not enough for whom? The investors or the customers?
We know it's for the investors who need more and more, but Spotify is a limited service. It offers music, lyrics and podcasts. You can't generate more and more money without making the service shitty if you don't plan to expand into some other service or media, but this is not what is happening here. The only thing you get more of is ads while getting less service for it.
> Also if you mean more ads like in podcasts, those are mostly inserted by the shows themselves rather than Spotify
I can't even blame them. They barely get any money from Spotify, but they still have to be there because they're being held hostage in a quasi monopoly situation.
> Are radio ads stealing attention? How should radios support themselves if the listener doesn't pay anything monetarily?
With paying customers of course.
The fact remains: it's not free and yes it is the same with radio, however I have more, easy choice. Just switch the station. No need to click links somebody else send you because they want you to listen to their music, for example.
FYI: there are also public broadcasters. Quite a many in less greedy countries.
(not the poster, just someone earnest explicating at length)
There's an odd dissonant quality to reading a broad-based lament* about "joining a service" and it "getting worse", in response to Spotify putting lyrics behind a paywall.
I get it, I subscribe to the lament.
It's just hard to imagine complaining about it in the context of using something in trial mode, for free, and the change being song lyrics are paywalled.
* Again, I lament this as well, but the language is sort of over-the-top and obviously unethical in a way that makes it seems more like its mocking people who lament this.
"I hate" "becoming worse and worse"
"How is this model still something CEOs go for?" "there are enough people stupid enough to keep on paying" "worth to lose people and keep on making more profits from quarter to quarter." "This is a pest." "I turned pirate again" "I'm teaching all my friends how to do it too."
The language is the result of an utter frustration and sheer anger with the whole business model. Why can't we have nice things anymore? It worked so well, but it seems like they can't squeeze enough out of us customers, and it has to be more and more every year.
I went from pirate to paid because it was all there and I wanted to be able to give to the authors and artists without having to put discs on my shelf. Now I somehow not only don't care anymore, I feel like I just want to do the opposite thing. I'm on bandcamp now for music, but I just don't care about movies/TV shows. Honestly, at this point I feel insulted by this model. I'd be ashamed to admit that I pay for x-services to watch my TV shows.
> It's just hard to imagine complaining about it in the context of using something in trial mode, for free, and the change being song lyrics aren't accessible.
Don't those "free" users still have to endure advertisements? It isn't free then. It is stealing their attention as a price now they're just getting less for the "same" (is it the same? didn't the amount of ads rise?) price.
> I went from pirate to paid because it was all there and I wanted to be able to give to the authors and artists without having to put discs on my shelf.
This circles back and begs the question: you need to stop giving to artists, because free users can't see lyrics, because Spotify is trying to nudge more people to go paid & give to artists?
Rest is a bit too much for my bird brain, morning coffee is wearing off, 3 PM EST :( (ex. I can't add anything to the idea free is paid because ads, so removing lyrics for free users with ads means its making the paid service worse, so it justifies dropping the previous ethical stance of paying to get artists money, in favor of pirating)
> This circles back and begs the question: you need to stop giving to artists, because free users can't see lyrics, because Spotify is trying to nudge more people to go paid & give to artists?
I'm sure this marketing argument works well with some of the customers as cover up for greed.
Meanwhile, in reality, nobody will start paying just because there are no more lyrics. It's just another thing they hit them with to make the "free" version unattractive.
Maybe it works on the bases of shame with the younger population, where your friends can see the lyrics right away, while you have to google them. Like the colors on chat bubbles thing in the US. I don't know.
> with the whole business model. Why can't we have nice things anymore?
Because to have music you have to get a license from rights holders, and pay for it.
Because to have lyrics you have to get a license from rights holders, and pay for it.
Because to have videos you have to get a license from rights holders, and pay for it.
Because to have your app working on some surfaces (think desktop vs phone vs speakers vs TVs vs cars vs...) you have to get a different license from rights holders, and pay for it.
Because if you want to synchronize or show together some, or all, of the audio/video/lyrics/subtitles/etc. you have to get a different license from rights holders, and pay for it.
Disclaimer: I work at Spotify, and it annoys me to no end that these questions are never directed at the people who actually demand all this money: the rights holders.
The only thing that is fixed about your employers' greed is that it has no end.
Spotify pays "$0.003-$0.005 per stream. Artists can expect around $400 for every 100,000 streams."
This is disgusting since you know they HAVE to be on your platform, but there is no money to be made there. The IMMENSE share goes to Spotify.
So please...spare me that shift of blame. The only thing that would change if the license holders would demand less is that Spotify would make EVEN MORE, and you know it. No customer would get a discount or something like that. People know that. You can't lie to us.
And that makes them irrelevant? Negligible? Insubstantial?
It's common in streaming (that is anything you can think of: music, video, audiobooks) to pay 60-70% of revenue for licenses for content alone (that is, before taxes, before payroll, before infra costs etc.). You're more than welcome to try and start your own music service on those terms and see how far you can get with free/cheap offering.
> Spotify pays "$0.003-$0.005 per stream. Artists can expect around $400 for every 100,000 streams."
Spotify pays the rights holders. Who in turn pay artists. I've never seen the fake outrage directed at Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment.
You're now outraged at Spotify for lyrics, but I don't see it directed at Musicxmatch and other lyrics providers who charge for lyrics.
> People know that. You can't lie to us.
To "know that" you'd first have to know more than zero about streaming, licensing etc.
Seeing that you don't even know who actually pays the artists...
> And that makes them irrelevant? Negligible? Insubstantial?
The context? Did you pay attention? The prices are rising, the service is getting worse. You know...the topic.
> You're more than welcome to try and start your own music service on those terms and see how far you can get with free/cheap offering.
There are alternatives which somehow manage not only to provide a proper service, they even offer FLAC DOWNLOADS. Can you imagine that? Give it a try: https://bandcamp.com/
> Spotify pays the rights holders. Who in turn pay artists. I've never seen the fake outrage directed at Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment.
What is this derailing? Why should I rage on them? Do they own Spotify? Are you from the marketing department because I barely see the topic with all that smoke and mirrors here.
> To "know that" you'd first have to know more than zero about streaming, licensing etc.
Serving this level of arrogance after that cheap derailment show is hilarious.
You, however, still fail to move away the spotlight from that hilariously small amount of money you pay. It's not even a secret. You can google it up.
You work for a greedy example of a service which needs to die.
> Instead, the company told TechCrunch simply that Spotify’s features can vary over time, between markets and across devices.
I hate it. I recently tried to find out how to sort my liked songs by genre. Turns it, this feature has been released over 3 years ago [0], but hasn't made it to Europe yet.
It just seems too hard to resist the kind of money that forces you into the feature death spiral that Spotify has entered, that Dropbox is deep, deeeep into and that thousands of others have descended in.
What do these companies have in common? Venture capital? Genuine question.
After they came out with the Car Thing[1], I realized there may be a loose cannon over there at Spotify, and not in a fun, creative way, but in a "greenlights harebrained nonsense" way, like Netflix's "Qwikster" near-debacle.
CarThing made sense for the US market at the time (a huge owership of old cars with barely a radio), but along the way other things interfered (I don't know how much of this is public, but time, money, licensing, regulations etc. pick any combination of those). The result was much less than it could've been, sadly. It was a quaint little device.
Spotify on CarPlay is great, the only thing that perpetually pisses me off (maybe an apple thing?) is that lists of items (playlists, podcasts, etc) are truncated in carplay, presumably as a safety thing? I then have to pick up my phone while driving, get into the spotify app on phone to find the playlist I want, which is obviously far more dangerous to do while driving than if the full list of items was just displayed in CarPlay.
It could also be due to UI itself. Carplay is a weird thing with restrictions on how you build it, what elements are allowed, where and how they can be placed etc. And that intersects/conflicts with the design and the need to show information and so on :)
yesterday it got me through that rabbit hole of link to some ... I don't even know what it was really, some kind of focus group maybe? Like, wtf just play the music.
I spent a year subscribing to each streaming platform, Spotify, Youtube Music, Tidal, and a few others, in search of an adequate replacement for Google Play Music.
For me, Apple Music is simply the best. No clutter, no ads, no podcasts being forced in your face. It has the best recommendations I've seen, much better than Spotify.
I have no problem with this change itself - the free version of Spotify is barely more than a trial anyway. They probably pay substantial licensing fees, so I totally get it.
But the way they generally behave towards their (paying) users irks me so much - not even a hint of respect. This general attitude (leading to progressive worsening of the product) eventually made me jump ship to Tidal, which also has its annoyances, but is at least consistent with them and doesn't randomly shuffle shit around every week.
I have no love for Spotify or their business model (I am a "buy CDs/MP3s" kinda person), but frankly I think paywalling lyrics, parent controls, offline downloads, audio quality, etc... makes a lot of sense, and I think it's a lot more sustainable (and personally ethical) than advertising.
I much prefer companies have a degraded free tier than try to squeeze dollars out of a free tier by disregarding user privacy and selling to data brokers.
> but frankly I think paywalling lyrics, parent controls, offline downloads, audio quality, etc... makes a lot of sense, and I think it's a lot more sustainable (and personally ethical) than advertising.
Disclaimer: I work at Spotify
We'd love to give all of that to you for free, or nearly for free. Almost everything you mention or want has a price tag attached to it by rights holders: Spotify has to pay for almost everything.
Just to be clear, I take no issue with charging for these features. My qualms with Spotify have more to do with (1) advertising/user data as a major revenue stream and (2) I much rather "own" than "rent" my music.
