Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

I am long term bearish on Spotify, and if I could isolate Apples music business or Amazons, I would take the following trade all day:

long (aapl music)(amzn music)(youtube music), short Spotify.

Their recommendation engine is just not that good. Youtube Music has a far superior one.

It seems like the kinds of people using Tidal either jumped to Bandcamp or just download all their music.

I agree on the recommendation piece, but Apple’s playlist and library management is atrocious, especially on desktop. Why can’t I drag-and-drop music into a playlist in the sidebar? Apple Music also feels (to me, at least) much slower than Spotify. Most likely this is due to the more aggressive client-side caching that Spotify does, but it’s worth the trade-off, in my opinion.

These are solvable problems for Apple, though. They need to more cleanly separate the legacy iTunes Store and pay-per-song UX from the Apple Music streaming paradigm. Maybe even have separate apps for them.

Apple Music only has significant usage because of their anti competitive behavior.

All apps on the App Store have to go through rigorous review and are restricted to Apples discretion in being granted access to OS features while Apple themselves use undocumented features to compete as a platform.

Try hooking up AirPods to your iPhone and do nothing else. The Lock Screen changes to have an Apple Music player with a random song you may have never listened to.

This, even if you were listening to another song on YouTube Music or any other music app as your last played audio.

On more than one occasion, I’ve accidentally played some idiotic pop song that Apple Music pushes into this experience while commuting with AirPods and noise cancellation on while holding the phone firmly grasped in my hand.

It’s ridiculous how many of these little UX tricks they adopt that boost the metrics of their internal products while openly denying the competition access to the same.

> It’s only a problem if a single provider is a monopoly and uses that to squeeze out other companies in order to raise prices.

The giants behave different to monopolies in the past.

Amazon makes its catalogs available for free, which makes businesses like Netflix and their offerings look expensive. They subsidize the costs using revenues from different business units, which is not only unfair, it's not actually competition.

It's not even necessarily about money. Giants care about attracting and keeping people on their platform.

Once actual healthy businesses dry up, revenues paid to creatives will go down. They've already begun picking apart other studios and assimilating their businesses, and this will only accelerate.

> Increased competition is a good thing.

Not when music, movies, and art become just features of the tech giant platforms. It dumbs everything down and ensures the tech giant opinions are the ones that get amplified.