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Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

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Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#51
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's free with Prime and cheaper than other alternates for the paid version if you have Prime. For casual listening it's not bad at all. It also supports so called HD and Ultra HD, which I believe Spotify still doesn't support, while Apple does.

Does Apple or Spotify have some sort of extra feature over Amazon that would appeal to non-casual listeners? I had Apple for a bit, switched over to Amazon because of the Prime discount... while I'm aware that morally I should de-Amazon my life, the service is pretty convenient.

For me, Spotify is everywhere. It works on Google Home, Echo, Xboxes, PC, Linux, Android, etc.

For quite a while, Google Music wouldn't work on Echo devices and Amazon Music wouldn't work on Google Home. Spotify worked everywhere, had native applications, and a decent value for a family plan.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#53
post #2

Big surprise for me is Amazon music... with 13%! I don't know anyone that uses it. Maybe it's a regional thing?

Does Amazon give out Music accounts as a bonus when users subscribe to some other service, similar to Amazon Prime customers getting streaming? Maybe that can account for incidental and not intentional subscribers.

Some purchases on Amazon come with "3 months of amazon music", which surely adds to their numbers.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#54

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 Stat…

Their Music clients are also still far away from what I‘d expect from a Trillion dollar company.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#55
I expect Apple Music to continue to erode market share of these competitors... Apple One is just too compelling to be avoided, once you are in the Apple ecosphere. We had a Spotify family plan, but its a domino thing - once you start using one service, like AppleTV, it becomes a no-brainer to just switch everything over to apple rather than pay for different services. Is Spotify better for some people? Possibly, but for many (like myself) Apple Music was "good enough."

I do agree with schoolornot's post that Apple wasted a lot of time and let Spotify get farther ahead than they should have. It definitely feels like Apple has been agonizingly slow to push out and improve services.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#56

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 ca…

Spotify is a nonstarter for me because I can't upload my own music. I don't want to be beholden to whatever they decide I can listen to, and there's lots of music I want to listen to that's not in any streaming catalogue.

edit: note I say "upload," not syncing local files to my phone. I want a built-in streaming catalogue + cloud music locker that all my devices stream from, not something I have to manually transfer files between for every device

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#58

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.

[deleted]

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#59
post #42

Pandora isn't on the list, but I am unsure they are global. When they were purchased by Sirius I wanted to move to a Sirius subscription, but found out they would not port over your Music Genome Project information over. You would have to train it again. No other service has a feature that works so well. We keep it just for that reason.

I have used Pandora over VPN for like 10 years but decided to just drop it because it's not worth the hassle of getting the US app on iPhones anymore. They have the coming soon page for Germany up since 2014 and still nothing. I miss it.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#60

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 Stat…

I actually disagree here, iTunes music is DRM free so users still have it without the subscription service, and the music streaming services all have most of the tracks unlike video streaming so there's no moat to be built. Bad for Apple, good for consumers.
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