Live data from Hacker News

Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

midiaresearch.com

141–150 of 176 posts

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#141
Spotify is missing Spatial Audio that both Apple Music and Amazon Music supports. I might switch to Apple Music because I don't like how pushy Spotify has become with their podcast agenda and not supporting Spatial Audio.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#142

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 record…

If "payout per stream" is an important metric to you, then Apple Music is still the wrong choice though. Just like Spotify their payout per stream is still only mediocre. Tidal pays about twice as much per stream compared to Apple Music and Napster pays three times as much!

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#143

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…

The UI on Apple Music is atrocious. It isn't possible to go back a track when using their radio mode, nor is it possible to even see what the previous song was in case you decided you want to hear more by the artist or whatever. Truly awful design.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really respect your decision to choose your streaming service based on how they each pay out artists. I work for an independent label and the most recent analysis we did shows that in the US, Apple was paying out roughly just under $0.007 (7/10 of a penny) / stream, while Spotify was paying out around $0.004. These rates go down as you bring a more international user base, depending on where in the world the music…

Do you have numbers for Tidal or Amazon Music? I'd guess they'd land somewhere between the two.

Amazon's interesting because when you look at their premium tier, it's just under $0.01 / stream. But on a blended basis when you are include their ad-supported streams and their Prime Music streams, it's actually a bit more than $0.007 / stream so better than Apple.

I can't easily pull our Tidal numbers unfortunately.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't like Apple Music's TASTE in music. I'm with you there. Apple (and really all the streaming services) are constantly crowing about how many millions of songs they have. How about some metric for how many good songs they have? 80% of my wife's record collection is not available on Apple Music, so I'm left ripping her records in what used to be my spare time. The only reason we have Apple Music is for whe…

>80% of my wife's record collection is not available on Apple Music I'm really curious what kind of music is in her collection? I'm always amazed at the obscure stuff that is available... obscure jazz, klezmer, classical recordings, etc...

I’m not the person you’re replying to, but 80% of my record collection is not on AM (or spotify), as well. Hardcore punk!

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#146

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 record…

> Apple Music subscription this year because it pays artists better. I wonder if this is a growth tactic. If Apple was more altruistic, one could argue that they would pay their App store 3rd party devs (by taking less of a cut via the App store) better too. So, I am going to chalk this up as a possible business decision for growth.

I am sure this is not about Apple being altruistic or caring about artists at all. All streaming services pay out about 70-80% of their revenue. It just happens to be that for Apple Music "money to be paid to rights holders" / "number of total streams" equals a slightly higher "payout per stream" than their main competitor. There are other players on the market that pay twice or even three times as much per stream compared to Apple Music.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#147

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 ra…

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. Just tried it and had a different experience. The lock screen showed the last thing I was listening to last night: The SiriusXM app. It's funny because this sometimes catches me by surprise. I'll go to sleep listening to Sirius. Then I'll get into the car…

The is actually kind of annoying behavior. My work's phone system emails me voicemails as a sime email with a wav file attached (why wav? arent we 30 years past that for spoken text?). When I tap the wav file to listen to it, fine, but then I get in my car and it fires up and plays that voicemail.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

The most frustrating thing in Apple Music for me is that it's album-centric. I can't just say "put this artist in my library". No, I have to put every individual album, EP, and single that I want.

I just switched from Spotify to AM and that really frustrated me, too. They’re just trying to keep your library like a real world library, I guess.

Side note: I abandoned spotify simply because of this design change: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/AutoPlay-Option-...

Can’t toggle off autoplay in some circumstances! Totally unacceptable.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#149
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have numbers for Tidal or Amazon Music? I'd guess they'd land somewhere between the two.

# of Streams to make US $1: YouTube Music: 1,250 Pandora: 752 Spotify: 315 Amazon Music: 249 Deezer: 156 Apple Music: 128 Tidal: 78 Napster: 53 Source: https://hiphopdx.com/news/id.66835/title.t-pain-disrupts-mus... Original source: https://twitter.com/TPAIN/status/1476032631255060490 (not sure why this link isn't working)

If I had to guess, T-Pain's #s are encapsulating more regions than the US - everything I calc'ed was US-only. It gets really bad when you look at rates in emerging countries so I find it helpful to be very specific about what data is encapsulated in these rates.

Most importantly, while his title is not wrong, remember that this is not what it takes for an artist to make $1, it's how much money is paid out in aggregate for each recorded music stream. Artists make a smaller percentage of that amount, the label typically takes the lion's share.

Re: Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021

#150
post #61
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I actually like the iOS Music app (though their queue system isn't as intuitive as Google Play Music/YouTube Music) but their webapp and Mac app are hot garbage. I recall seeing an article that said the Mac app was being rewritten in the new macOS betas.

The redesigned iOS & Mac apps are a pile of shit and are a significant downgrade from the earlier "iPod" app and iTunes. Yes it turns out it's possible to do something even worse than iTunes.
Post reply on HN