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The clock is ticking for Spotify

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#81

Post by notatoad »

zpr wrote: post #63
ivraatiems wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The music industry doesn't need to ruin Spotify. It's ruining itself. Its support is abysmal, its apps are bug-riddled and get worse with every update, and it's consistently doing boneheaded "pivot" moves (like mandatory Facebook login a couple years back, "version 1.0" of the desktop app more recently), and so on. It's squandering the good faith and great library it has.

I agree. Never cared much for the UI, and always found it too buggy to keep using. At my old job, we used it for office tunes, and it was often showing the wrong song that was playing, (so you never knew what you were listening to unless you used something like SoundHound), and going to previous or next tracks was inconsistent, so you might not get back to the last song ever again. Pardon my ignorance but why is Goog…

I recently switched from Google Music to Spotify because the Google music app was so bad. Buggy, slow, and just kinda hard to use. Spotify has its quirks, but it's a million times better.

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#82

Post by dexterdog »

madebysquares wrote: post #8
sydd wrote: post #4

I think Spotify will die in 5-10 years, but not because of royalty fee woes. We will not go back to the "buy a song for $1" model of the early 2000s. But it will die because of the moonopolistic and anti-competitive practices of the popular OSes: Apple preinstalls Apple Music, Google Play music, and Microsoft Groove (all 3 clones of Spotify). This agressive, monopolistic behaviour will kill Spotify, just like MS riva…

This is becoming my biggest annoyance with streaming services. The integration with your OS(iOS or android) makes it a much more attractive option when using those devices. My second biggest annoyance is the increasing trend of "artist exclusives" if you pay a monthly fee and your favorite artist are giving exclusives to the other services I'm less inclined to continue using that service(Spotify) because I don't get…

Piracy is always better in terms of content. I know they should not be giving everything away for free, but as soon as there are more than two silos (or a world where the combination of any two silos compares to the offering you get with piracy) then piracy will be superior and hopefully force the industry to offer something better.

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#83

Post by ZenoArrow »

laurentdc wrote: post #12

Somewhat unrelated but.. is the music industry expecting that we go back to buying CDs (or $0.99 tracks) if streaming services die out? Because I'm pretty sure I won't. I can't see myself going back to physical media or DRM-laden files any soon.

I don't know what the music industry expects to happen in the future, but I'm fairly certain that the best approach for supporting musicians would be for Bandcamp and/or similar sites to grow in popularity. They've got the right approach IMO; high-quality DRM-free digital files, with the majority of revenues going direct to the artist, as well as curated lists (made by Bandcamp and music fans) for discovering new music.

https://bandcamp.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandcamp

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#84

Post by tmalsburg2 »

Spotify are aggressively exploiting artists and yet they are not making money. Not sustainable, and it's not really suprising. If someone offers you all the music of the world for 10 bucks that is just too good to be true. I closed my Spotify account because I didn't want to be complicit in the exploitation of artists. I'm now using Qobuz ($20/month) and hope that they are paying more fairly (couldn't find any numbers, though). $20 per month still doesn't feel right to me, but unfortunately there are no better options.

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#85

Post by elfchief »

ivraatiems wrote: post #53
iamben wrote: post #3

I can't be the only one that has almost zero faith the music industry won't ruin Spotify? I'm sure it won't be deliberate, just a combination of stubbornness, greed and living in the past. Spotify and music is like a library and books. It's fantastic and accessible for listening and discovery. I'm hard pushed to find a friend that didn't use napster or limewire that's moved to Spotify - it's just easy, there and the…

The music industry doesn't need to ruin Spotify. It's ruining itself. Its support is abysmal, its apps are bug-riddled and get worse with every update, and it's consistently doing boneheaded "pivot" moves (like mandatory Facebook login a couple years back, "version 1.0" of the desktop app more recently), and so on. It's squandering the good faith and great library it has.

I'm still shocked that the spotify desktop app won't let you output to anything other than the default audio device. There's an open request with thousands of votes on their tracker that has been in "not right now" state for half a decade. I know people with multiple outputs aren't a majority, but c'mon, it's gotta be less work to add than pretty much every other "feature" they've added in that time...

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#86

Post by untoreh »

majewsky wrote: post #70
pimeys wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other big areas where it's seriously lacking content: 1) Modern contemporary electronic music, which is usually available vinyl only. 2) Classic albums in their original form. When there's a remaster, Spotify typically only has the remaster, original was either never there or will be removed when remaster is out. Now, when you start to invest to your sound system even a bit (not talking about 100k wires her…

> Modern contemporary electronic music, which is usually available vinyl only. Oh, the irony.

I am not sure what is ironic about this, unless you mistook electronic music for edm?

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#87

Post by gumby »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #84

Spotify are aggressively exploiting artists and yet they are not making money. Not sustainable, and it's not really suprising. If someone offers you all the music of the world for 10 bucks that is just too good to be true. I closed my Spotify account because I didn't want to be complicit in the exploitation of artists. I'm now using Qobuz ($20/month) and hope that they are paying more fairly (couldn't find any number…

> Spotify are aggressively exploiting artists...

What do you mean by that?

And separately, is it better or worse or the same as how the music industry has exploited artists over the years?

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#88

Post by lobster_johnson »

hellopat wrote: post #74
ivraatiems wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The music industry doesn't need to ruin Spotify. It's ruining itself. Its support is abysmal, its apps are bug-riddled and get worse with every update, and it's consistently doing boneheaded "pivot" moves (like mandatory Facebook login a couple years back, "version 1.0" of the desktop app more recently), and so on. It's squandering the good faith and great library it has.

I have absolutely no issues with the mobile or desktop versions of the app.

The mobile app is pretty decent, but it's not well designed. It's easy to get lost in the confusion mishmash of navigation elements. For example, if I'm playing a song, I tend to hit the hamburger menu in the upper-right corner to find the "add to playlist" function, when it's in the tiny "..." icon next to the pause button.

I'm reasonably happy with the desktop app, although it's still as terrible at organizing your collection of music as it's always been. For example, if you save a single song from an album, that album shows up in your "Albums" view, which makes no sense. And if you go to that album, it's actually a weird, special virtual album and not the real album (there's a "View full album" link to get to that one).

I was using the "Save" function for quite a while until I met the 10,000 song limit. Which is a ridiculously low limit for any lover of music, especially when album counts toward that limit — "saving" an album is actually just saving the individual tracks. You can't raise this limit; you're done, or you have to go back and unsave music.

The "Local files" function is also pretty obviously an afterthought. You can only play them to a device if your device is on the same network as your desktop machine; this also goes for syncing. To play your "local files" on a device, you have to mark them for offline play on the device while the desktop Spotify is running. How ridiculous is that?

A final gripe: After 10 years, Spotify still doesn't categorize classical music by composer and performer separately. Apple Music does this correctly.

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#89

Post by cheriot »

ProblemFactory wrote: post #52
patrick_haply wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I often find is that artists will have have everything on Spotify except their latest album, at least for a few months. Fair enough, they want people to buy their albums; it's just one area where I find Spotify consistently incomplete.

> it's just one area where I find Spotify consistently incomplete. At first (especially some years ago when the catalogue was much smaller) this used to annoy me. But Spotify has made a lot of progress in side-stepping the issue. The Discover Weekly playlist of recommended music in particular was a great invention. It doesn't matter that much if artist X's latest album is not on Spotify, as long as they can find some…

Exactly. Netflix streaming has proven how well this strategy can work with a limited library.

Re: The clock is ticking for Spotify

#90

Post by dontreact »

madebysquares wrote: post #8
sydd wrote: post #4

I think Spotify will die in 5-10 years, but not because of royalty fee woes. We will not go back to the "buy a song for $1" model of the early 2000s. But it will die because of the moonopolistic and anti-competitive practices of the popular OSes: Apple preinstalls Apple Music, Google Play music, and Microsoft Groove (all 3 clones of Spotify). This agressive, monopolistic behaviour will kill Spotify, just like MS riva…

This is becoming my biggest annoyance with streaming services. The integration with your OS(iOS or android) makes it a much more attractive option when using those devices. My second biggest annoyance is the increasing trend of "artist exclusives" if you pay a monthly fee and your favorite artist are giving exclusives to the other services I'm less inclined to continue using that service(Spotify) because I don't get…

I personally hope that piracy is now viewed more as stealing than in earlier days. I think there is a greater understanding that the culture of music as a whole will suffer if we don't put any money into the system. I at least hope that members of the HN community don't view relying mostly on piracy to get music as morally OK.

The problem is that digital music is a type of good that is mispriced by the free market: a public good. There needs to be just enough money to going to the artist to get the album recorded, and once that amount of money is there, there is no incentive for anyone to give more money. Giving more money won't make it easier for more people to get the music, because distributing it digitally is pretty easy/cheap. Kind of like a public park. Because this incentive is only there up to a point, the good gets mispriced.

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