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Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

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Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#171

Post by dexterdog »

tomjen3 wrote: post #137
danieltillett wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason to think that this market is a winner take all? The labels will do anything to prevent another Apple arising including backing any upstart that wants to challenge the big players. When you are just a middle man it is hard to create a monopoly.

You need to have all, or almost all music, for people to sign up with you. I wouldn't be a paying spotify customer if it wasn't because they had almost all the music I wanted. What we really need are a change to copyright laws that requires a mandatory uniform-fee-only streaming license for all music, tv and movies.

But they don't have all and never will. That's why I will never pay them. For me, I already have all.

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#172

Post by jacquesm »

halflings wrote: post #159
jacquesm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note that the founders interests are aligned with the early employees, they are all taking an equal haircut. I disagree. The founders definitely have an important stake in the outcome but they stand to get very wealthy if it works out and early employees will - in most cases - make back a premium on the lower wages they took because of stock options (which you should never do) and the extra hours they put in to mak…

Re:taking lower lages. I'm pretty sure early Spotify employees had no idea it would become this big AND have pretty good wages as it is right now. It doesn't mean that they don't care about their share in the company (obviously, after spending 5 years of your life at a company, you want your share of the cake) but it's unfair to conclude that they only have their stocks, a lot of the early employees either left the c…

Spotify is already an exception in many ways, so it would have been nice to see the employees that stuck with it this long have a really nice payday. Doesn't look like it from where I'm sitting though, this feels like a Hail Mary pass.

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#173

Post by dexterdog »

jasode wrote: post #163
f_allwein wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still waiting for competition to affect prices. Eg I would be happy to pay 5$/month for limited, ad free access to Spotify/ whatever, but 10$ seems excessive. Given that we may indeed pay this for the rest of our lifes, it's strange nobody seems to mind the cost.

>Still waiting for competition to affect prices. Eg I would be happy to pay 5$/month for limited, ad free access to Spotify/ whatever, but 10$ seems excessive. No competitor can offer $5/month unless the service is positioned as a loss leader. The overwhelming costs for streaming music is the licensing and royalties of music content . In other words, if Spotify paid their programmers half the market rate salaries to…

Then there's a problem. There is no reason music should cost more our even close to what video costs.

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#174

Post by diskcat »

thirdsun wrote: post #158
f_allwein wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still waiting for competition to affect prices. Eg I would be happy to pay 5$/month for limited, ad free access to Spotify/ whatever, but 10$ seems excessive. Given that we may indeed pay this for the rest of our lifes, it's strange nobody seems to mind the cost.

As someone who buys a lot of music, this attitude seems very alien to me - 10 bucks for a very large collection? It's an insane deal - so good that hardly any artist can live off it. Don't get me wrong - I'm not a fan of streaming services and prefer to own my music (a large part of which isn't available for streaming anyway) but for most people this is an incredibly fair deal.

>and prefer to own my music

unless you wrote it and played it you don't 'own' any music.

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#175

Post by 00deadbeef »

criley2 wrote: post #56
philliphaydon wrote: post #50

Spotify waste so much money on their employees, who effectively do very little. I know a designer who has been there 2 years, basically sits in meetings and gets sent to different countries, and has added nothing to their portfolio. Yet gets reviews and raises and bonuses... Then there's all the parties they host for their employees, etc. It's not a company I would invest in if I had any money to begin with. Also tha…

The modern desktop app is at a point where it's pretty solid, but I still miss that old 0.80.x branch or whatever the final non-chromium verison was. But you know what? Google doesn't have a desktop app for Google Music. Amazon doesn't have a desktop app for Amazon Prime. Apple doesn't have a desktop version... so yeah, despite the fact that Spotify's only-one-in-the-business desktop app isn't perfect, it does exist.…

I'm still using 0.9.7 on my Mac. I've deliberately broken its self-updating so I can keep it. If they ever do anything that stops this client from working they lose me as a customer. This is one of the last versions that have the old interface. The new all-black version is hideous and I hate using it. There's a massive thread on their forums full of people that hate it. I can't believe, with the amount of funding they have, that they can't spare the dev hours to build a few themes: light, dark, and somewhere in between.

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#176

Post by ssharp »

JonnieCache wrote: post #169
thirdsun wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, got it - I use streaming in addition to buying my music, mostly as a preview hub. Maybe you stopped buying music that frequently at some point, but since I easily buy 10 albums a month the price for streaming and comfortable previewing is a fair share of that budget.

Yeah, spotify is not a great deal if you're just using it instead of your CD collection. OTOH you can listen to hundreds of dollars worth of new music in a day if you want to, with no risk. If you pick something on a whim that turns out not to be good, just move on to the next album or artist. It's like going to a record fair with an unlimited budget, and a truck to carry your finds home in. There is a never-ending s…

I was an on and off subscriber to Rhapsody in the mid/late 2000's but was generally turned off by the idea of not owning my music because getting Rhapsody music onto a portable device meant having to pay more per month as well as using whatever terrible devices supported it at the time. Also, you would not get access to all of Rhapsody on the device, just whatever you chose to sync. So even though I would occasionally use Rhapsody, mostly as a radio/discovery tool, I was still buying music the old-fashioned way, either on iTunes, CDs, or pirating via Oink.

Once smart phones came around and data plans approached a level where streaming music wouldn't explode your bill, I think streaming became a no-brainer. It still took me two years of having Spotify before I realized I could throw away all my old CD's that were eating up space, but once I reached that point, the value of streaming, at least to me, was pretty clear.

Sure, there are gaps in the music, but I think for most people, those gaps don't exist. And even for the layperson replacing their CD collection, having a Spotify/Apple Music/etc. account means having access to their music on any device, anywhere they go. Duplicating that kind of access with a CD collection is difficult.

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#177

Post by marbletiles »

rplnt wrote: post #157
staticelf wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Groove (xbox music) has a desktop app and it runs a lot better than Spotifys. Also Tidal has a desktop app that also runs better.

You are not tied to the Spotify official app if you are a paying customer. There are alternatives.

Oh yeah? Any good ones?

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#178

Post by staticelf »

thirdsun wrote: post #156
staticelf wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A key feature that made me switch from Rdio was that if I searched for an Artist I could not play it's most popular songs. It just played albums. All the features you listed is nothing compared to that basic functionality.

I disagree. Sure, people value different things, but I'd rate that functionality as a pretty minor feature. As a compromise rdio highlighted popular songs within an album. Artist stations with the slider set to focus on the current artist (only?) might have achieved the same results too, I guess. So, it's not as if it couldn't be done. The almost complete absence of social features however, that's a big one in my opi…

Funny how people are different. It was big for me, since I stopped paying them money just because of that missing feature.

Personally, I think the less social features, the better.

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#179

Post by ssharp »

dexterdog wrote: post #173
jasode wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Still waiting for competition to affect prices. Eg I would be happy to pay 5$/month for limited, ad free access to Spotify/ whatever, but 10$ seems excessive. No competitor can offer $5/month unless the service is positioned as a loss leader. The overwhelming costs for streaming music is the licensing and royalties of music content . In other words, if Spotify paid their programmers half the market rate salaries to…

Then there's a problem. There is no reason music should cost more our even close to what video costs.

Are you comparing the price of Spotify to the price of Netflix? If so, it's not a remotely fair comparison. The percent of mainstream music Spotify doesn't have is miniscule to the amount of mainstream video Netflix lacks. Take Netflix and add in the cost of premium movie channels -- HBO, Starz, Showtime, etc. and you start approaching a modern catalog comparable to Spotify.

Your monthly fees are now approaching $100 per month. However, you're still left with three gaps -- old movies, recently released DVDs, and movies in theaters. Considering all this, plus Sean Parker's idea to start renting new releases for 24 hours costs $50 per movie, it's pretty fair to say that Spotify is significantly cheaper than the equivalent in videos.

Re: Spotify raises $1B in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

#180

Post by staticelf »

rplnt wrote: post #157
staticelf wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Groove (xbox music) has a desktop app and it runs a lot better than Spotifys. Also Tidal has a desktop app that also runs better.

You are not tied to the Spotify official app if you are a paying customer. There are alternatives.

Or I can simply pay for basically any other service that does the same job without facebook (even though I have an old account), without social features, without a shitty client that drains computer resources in mysterious ways.

But finally, an app that doesn't require me to share my pictures with them. That was the spike in the coffin for me. I really enjoyed Spotify when it was new, but their clients has just been lowering in quality ever since beta.

Honestly, I think the beta client was way better than the client today.

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