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Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

midiaresearch.com

31–40 of 176 posts

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#31

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.

I still don't understand how a business can be unprofitable for 16 years. At one point don't you say, "whelp, this isn't going to work"?

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#32

I was a long time user of Google Play Music until they killed it and moved everyone over to the inferior YouTube Music product. I suffuer through it mostly because it comes bundled with YouTube+ which removes ads.

I use the Vinegar extension for Safari which replaces the YouTube player for a simple HTML5 tag and consequently removes the ads. Don't know if there's alternatives for other browsers, but worth looking into if this is all that's keeping you there.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#33
Would be interesting to see this broken down by region - Spotify is very dominant in the UK in my experience for example, but not sure if there will be pockets / countries where it swings the other way.

Personally I find Apple Music just a bit clinical, and it's just not as universal (for instance Spotify works just as well on a PC as a Mac - iTunes for Windows though? ugh).

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#34
I pulled the trigger on an Apple Music subscription this year because it pays artists better.

Spotify still considers a penny per stream "entitled" according to an exec giving one of the most absolutely tone-deaf AND nonsensical justifications for their choices ("we solved piracy by more or less adopting piracy's business model and legitimizing it!") [0]

Apple stepped up to that level. [1]

Revenue streams from recordings matter for supporting artists. There's still some issues with the economics of buffet streaming, but a penny a stream starts to at least approach the right magnitude.

[0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22387453/apple-music-arti...

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#35

I was a long time user of Google Play Music until they killed it and moved everyone over to the inferior YouTube Music product. I suffuer through it mostly because it comes bundled with YouTube+ which removes ads.

I use the Vinegar extension for Safari which replaces the YouTube player for a simple HTML5 tag and consequently removes the ads. Don't know if there's alternatives for other browsers, but worth looking into if this is all that's keeping you there.

Firefox with ublock origin extension also removes all ads from youtube.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#37

I was a long time user of Google Play Music until they killed it and moved everyone over to the inferior YouTube Music product. I suffuer through it mostly because it comes bundled with YouTube+ which removes ads.

Long time user of Google Play Music as well and I gotta say...while YouTube Music is slightly inferior (edit: to GPM), it's not even close to inferior enough to convince me to go back to Spotify.

Granted, it does look like Spotify finally fixed the thing that got me to leave in the first place (10K library limit) but there's nothing so bad about YTM that I'd bother to pick up and move again.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#38

I was a long time user of Google Play Music until they killed it and moved everyone over to the inferior YouTube Music product. I suffuer through it mostly because it comes bundled with YouTube+ which removes ads.

Same. Ad-free YouTube is essential for me, and getting YouTube Music as part of the bundle is a nice bonus. I have the family plan but my kids are always bugging me to get a Spotify family plan instead. If I do ever cave and pay for Spotify, I'll have to keep the YouTube premium plan anyway since I can't go back to watching the obnoxious ads on YouTube.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#39
I am all in on Apple and only a few dollars away from the Apple One bundle being worth it for me but I just don't like Apple Music. The UI is just too difficult to use and it feels slower than it should be, definitely slower than Spotify. While I have no love for Spotify's podcast ventures and dislike them trying to push me to listen to podcasts on their platform, I do love it for music and it "Just Works". Also I can use Spotify with my Echo's in ways that don't work with Apple Music. Yes, you can play Apple Music through the Echo's but only using your voice. With Spotify I can throw music to an Echo or a group of them and control it all from my phone.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#40
Eddy Cue should be fired for allowing Spotify to reach such critical mass. Music and playlists is such a sticky ecosystem that people don't just up and switch services at a whim. The 381 million users that Spotify accumulated over the years will never switch to another platform. Apple lost so many years with trying to spin Beats into something that it wasn't, rewriting clients, and putting out garbage like "Your Station".
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