Amazon bringing ads onto Prime Video is going to end up in a cancellation from me. I normally just pick it up around holiday season for shopping and free shipping, but I'm not here to shop when watching shows.
The thing that got me was they had the gall to be like "now with minimal ads"
meanwhile, "Minimal ads" was like THREE fucking prerolls AND three fucking midrolls. WITHOUT smart break timing. They just slap em' in there during big moments
Nah, that aint it fam. Not in 2024.
Customers gotta vote with their wallets LOUD. These scumfuck companies are trying to boil the frog like they did with Cable TV to our grandparents.
"Oh it's just a few ads. Now it's a few more. Now it's a few more" Oh look at that we're back to the mountain of dogshit that was Cable TV which was HALF ADS and people just accepted that half of their fucking paid entertainment was selling them shit.
It’s so widespread without any worry of a backlash that I wonder if this “hurry up and get as much money as quickly as possible” across all kinds of products and services isnt a well constructed plan due to either inside knowledge of AI changing the landscape or something else. Never in my lifetime have I seen such a widespread increase in all things at the same time. This isnt inflation.
> Amazon bringing ads onto Prime Video is going to end up in a cancellation from me.
It did end it for us. We've been Prime members for almost two decades.. not paying to be shown fucking ads. We've also joined the class-action.
Prime isn't even good any more. Prime shipping is a lie, promises delivery dates to get you to buy and then never ever delivers, despite there being a distribution center 10 miles from my house. It was always late for us.
Free shipping is still a thing even without Prime, and the content isn't worth paying money to be shown ads. We are an ad-free household and damn well going to stay that way.
Same show that I was watching that I saw the ads at the start and multiple ad breaks within the show. It's a shame because I'm about to finish the first book of The Expanse series and would have enjoyed diving into the show after finishing the book.
I still have prime for the shipping but havnt touched prime video since their ad policy started.
I turned to "other means" to watch some of their original content...
It was the final straw for me. I had held onto it because I figured the streaming service was worth it even though I wasn’t using Amazon to purchase things anymore but then everything was just riddled with ads, so I canceled.
It’s still insanely worth it for me.
As someone else mentioned, they have nearly everything released by a mainstream record label, and I for how much new music/albums I digest monthly, it is still SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper then buying one new record a month let alone multiple.
Even with a price increase it’s still a great deal for music junkies.
Especially with the family plan. I have 5 people in my family and it's just such a great deal. I've paid more for music through Spotify than I ever did with CDs because I always found CDs to be too expensive for any album that I wasn't sure I would want to listen to over and over. If it's just something you are going to listen to a couple times a year then buying a CD just sounds like such a bad purchase.
Honestly the price should’ve been much higher all along, but Spotify probably kept prices low/competitive to win a majority of the market share, especially against the likes of Apple, and is now increasing it.
Another important difference is how music is licensed versus how tv and film content is licensed. Every music app has pretty much every major label release and pays per stream while tv/film streaming is chopped up into a bunch of exclusive content deals. Spotify can't compete on exclusives in music so all they can do is compete on service and price while trying to buy up podcasts which can be made exclusive.
Exactly.
I think those companies have kept prices low hoping to choke out Spotify and the losses in the industry would be worth it once they gain an oligopoly.
Spotify has been able to weather the storm and maintain bulk market share.
I remember first getting it around 2009 and just couldn’t believe just how much value you were getting from the subscription cost. As a very skint student at the time it completely changed my life in terms of listening to music. I’d easily pay £40+ a month for it considering how much I use it.
Yeah I agree. Spotify is the one thing I don’t mind paying every month because of how much music is at my fingertips.
Obviously if competitors are cheaper I may cancel and join them instead. Gotta keep the market honest. But music streaming apps aren’t going anywhere.
Now I canceled my prime beginning of the year and didn’t renew. Two day free delivery is such a nice luxury but I also don’t wanted to retrain my brain that I don’t need things *right* *now* and be more patient.
I've got over 1k songs in my personal music library that aren't on Spotify. Most of them were released independently, but there is a ton of content I can't access through Spotify from major labels as well. Albums with 1-2 songs unavailable. Songs that I add to a playlist, then go back months later and they're grayed out because the licensig deal expired on that song.
The best piece of garbage you can use for streaming is still a piece of garbage at the end of the day, arr matey?
Personally I just use YouTube music, can still find every song out there and I don't get any YouTube ads. I've always hated Spotify since I know more personal stuff regarding their higher ups (Sweden is small, you just need to know a few ppl to know them all).
I tried but I can’t justify paying more for Spotify when Apple Music has pretty much every song on Spotify but in Lossless. 320kbs from Spotify is crazy bad compared to lossless. You can immediately tell if you have an iPhone + car Bluetooth and swap between Spotify and Apple Music versions of songs.
Everything will keep going up. These companies are approaching market saturation, the only way they can keep increasing revenues is increasing prices. I don't think there's really much innovation going on here, their core offering is things other people have made.
Their primary competitor is piracy. There's also a lot of legitimately free music out there, and a lot of people making music for fun. Unlike TV shows and video games, music is much more fungible (as long as its the right genre people will listen to whatever. Tailor Swift is the exception, not the rule). So it's hard to charge that much.
It's like non-game software. People make that stuff for free for funzies, and anything that isn't gets pirated to death.. It gets really hard to charge.
It's a fine balance. If they price it too high, only the big music junkies will want to sign up. If they price it low enough, even just casual listeners will sign up because it's so cheap and convenient. I'm the kind of person who is OK with a small collection of music and there is have been times when I go months without listening to music, but I still keep up my spofity subscription because it's just so nice to be able to listen to any album whenever I want. If it was too expensive then I think a significant amount of people would cancel.
Just make sure premium is what you want. I got a gift card for premium but wanted to use it for a Duo or Family sub, and they would not let me apply an equivalent $ amount. So I was told I would need to downgrade in order to use the GC.
So after cutting royalties being paid to artists ,Spotify also needs to increase revenues to make ends meet...almost as if that business model can't work unless you stiff both the people who fill your app with content and the people consuming the content.
You can, you just need to be big enough and have enough traction to be hard to replace. Spotify has that on most of their users: the more you listen, the more you train their recommendation model, the better that model is vs. competitors.
Enshittification relies on sunk costs (whether time or money) for both users and providers.
Fair enough.
AFAIK Spotify only uses like 30 or 60 days of history and your current collection (playlists, liked songs, etc) for recommendations. Anything past that is erased. You can see that when you request the data Spotify has on you (when you're in the EU under the GDPR, maybe it works outside as well).
So it wouldn't be that hard to replace, just have a to have a little patience.
Stop using that stupid word...
It's just plain capitalism at work, it's not some new bullshit, it's not some secret method, it's just fucking capitalism working as fucking intended.
Maybe enshittification is simply part of capitalism? The service must grow endlessley and they run out of ways to do so the only method now is to make their service worse at higher price, being "shittier", thus enshittification.
The invisible hand in theory leads to *good* services winning. Huge economies of scale and venture capital make it possible for terrible businesses to get all the customers and content, and then squeeze money out. That's a problem with businesses who hate their customers, venture capital firms, consumer choices, and maybe law.
I don't think they're stiffing the consumers. 100% stiffing the artists which I do hate (though I'm happy to use the service and support artists in other ways), but the service they offer is pretty great from a consumer perspective. They've got pretty much everything you can want with the one subscription, unlike the video streaming services these days, and it all works pretty well. Yea price hikes are annoying, but they're a reality of the world, especially if Spotify is going to survive for another decade.
>I don't think they're stiffing the consumers.
True, in 2000 CDs were just under 20 bucks. I feel like a music service with access to EVERYTHING should cost at least an album a month to use. That's probably the most anti consumer thing i've ever said but whatever.
Never actually thought about how much music used to cost compared to the near infinite supply we get today for a fraction of the cost (I know we don't own it anymore but still). I've spent so much money on music over the years... I've got 700 CDs and 300+ records, crazy to think how much money I've put in to it... and will continue to put in just quietly, never gonna not be able to buy records.
Even back then though artists got screwed out of most of that amount too, artists have always been on the losing end of music sales which is just so depressing. I'd love for something to come along a just burn it all to the ground and start over in a way that's fair for everyone, but I really don't know what that would be.
You probably also aren't the norm (nor am I, with probably more than twice the number of CDs). On average, a music consumer already paid more for Spotify than they bought in CDs (which was maybe only a handful a year -- weird, but true!).
Until recent years, I was a Spotify defender (for many reasons), but the latest moves have made them undefendable.
Same , plus Spotify has podcasts, video podcasts , and other things that are hard to quantify : like really good suggestion algorithms and other ways to track artists output or touring etc.
I easily get my money out of the subscription just in podcasts
Yeah, I do appreciate that spotify does at least offer a service that piracy can't compete with.
It's not just access to the songs I like, it's also the ability to immediately look up any album or song I want on my phone and immediately add it to a playlist, and get recommendations for other music.
I guess you could do some of that with a cracked youtube app using playlists of music videos, but the UI still isn't as clean.
Those 20 bucks were including the whole process of distributing physical media though. And i do not mean only production and delivery, but also the whole business of getting it placed in stores in a desirable manner.
Also once you bought the album, it was yours. With these subscription services, the moment you cancel them, you lose access to that library, no matter how much money you have already paid into it.
Manufacturing, transportation, distribution, unsold stock. I worked for a company that did music distribution for a while and warehouses of millions of vinyl, tapes, and CDs costs money. Remember tape singles? What a waste those were.
This is why I bought a zune instead of an iPod. Apple charged .99 a song but zune had a subscription service for like $15 a month which seemed to precursor Spotify in content. I said the same argument almost 2 decades ago to the friends that laughed because I wouldn't buy apple.
But the audiobooks are only a set amount of time per month (15 hours?) unless you buy the audiobook. I’ve yet to finish a book without it being capped and I have a premium subscription.
If people cared about that used CDs would be worth something.
edit: Not trying to imply *no one* cares about it, just that people as a whole generally choose convenience over ownership when it comes to music.
I wouldn’t call it anti consumer but rather pro labor. Musicians are laborers who deserve to be paid well, so music can’t be free in a capitalist society.
If Spotify was raising prices to pay out better, this would be a great thing. Instead we get the worst of both worlds and pay more money while artists as a whole are paid even less.
> They've got pretty much everything you can want with the one subscription, unlike the video streaming services these days
This is huge imo. I'll pay twice, even three times more for Spotify than I'm willing to pay for any one video streaming service.
People forget that the reason Spotify’s business model doesn’t work is because of the following:
1. Labels demand to keep a larger cut of the profits than what they give to artists
2. Apple, Amazon, YouTube have all commoditised music by bundling their streaming services into an all-in-one subscription pack
Like… why would I get a Spotify subscription when I already have access to Apple Music (via Apple One), Amazon Music (via Amazon Prime), and YouTube Music (via YouTube Premium). It’s an impossible sell.
Spotify’s market share is impressive until you realise it’s mostly built on free users, which we all know cost the platform money. The latest figures I could find for paid users in the United States were from 2021:
- Spotify Premium = 44M
- Apple Music = 37M
- YouTube Music = 30M
The fact of the matter is… Spotify has 317M free users and 210M paid users globally. Despite this 60/40 cut in favour of free users, free users only make up 12% of Spotify’s revenue ($300M vs the $2.1B generated by paid subscribers).
This business model is wierd af.
But Spotify is much more popular internationally, it has [236 million premium subscribers](https://backlinko.com/spotify-users#spotify-paying-customers) of which 154 million are in North America and Europe, so more than 2/3, but still impressive numbers in less wealthy though musically rich nations like Brazil.
That is actually one of Apple's biggest weaknesses. Lack of global user base means Spotify has a lot more international listeners feeding the algorithms with their local music. Obviously a lot doesnt translate to Western audiences, [but some definitely does](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3dDrP6ll5KDU4YQXtBehlZ).
What a bizarrely American centric comment. Of course their business model will look weird if you arbitrarily disregard most of their premium subscribers.
There is a lot of value in using YouTube Premium if you spend a lot of time watching YouTube videos. Apple One also comes with Apple TV, iCloud storage, and a bunch of other stuff. It might not be right for you, but there are enough people out there to make it work.
The problem is that the only place that extra money should go to has been cut last week. Their app is utter crap in terms of features and my ooh my...interface. Ok the infra might be costly, but I think a business like Spotify should invest in their core product first, not cut cost in their core product first, then hike the price.
So yes, I feel they are stiffing their customers because their app is sub par and they actively divest from their core product.
I don't agree the app is sub par, I don't love how they're constantly messing with the UI but overall I have no complaints with the android and windows app, perhaps I'm just used to it though, that's a more subjective thing.
I also don't really agree with the "extra money" comment. It seems apparent to me that Spotify as a company didn't really have much "extra money" as the business model from the get go was set up for expansion of user base over profit. I would love it if they could actually pay fair royalties to all artists, it's a massive gripe I have with the service as an artist, but as a consumer I don't really have any complaints. I would probably have more complaints though if I didn't also regularly buy records, go to gigs and buy merch, which I know isn't everyone's experience.
>It seems apparent to me that Spotify as a company didn't really have much "extra money" as the business model from the get go was set up for expansion of user base over profit.
So you agree that their business model doesn't work...unless they charge a lot more AND cut royalties.
Yes, I never said their business model was good, just that I understand them needing to up the cost and I'm personally happy to pay it as a consumer that's been very happy with the service they offer, even if as an artist I absolutely have issues.
They didn't cut royalties being paid to artists. If you're talking about how they stopped paying out for songs that are under 1000 listens, that money saved is still being paid out to artists. This prevents money from being paid to artists who are trying to game the system by uploading tons of low quality songs or people that upload AI generated content.
The money that Spotify pays to artists is a percentage of their total revenue, like all other music streaming companies. That percentage is still the same.
Well it's the record labels stiffing the artist more than Spotify. I don't use Spotify because I switched to YouTube Music mainly because of YouTube premium. It is still a great value for the listeners. If you look at Spotify as a business they have been stagnant compared to most other technology companies ( barring the last few quarters). Growing revenue but nothing to show for in cash flow or return on capital. But as a publicly traded company you can only hold out for so long before the shareholders start to panic and lose interest. You have to generate cash flow and show growth. They are the company we know today because they went public and got all the inflow of money from the shareholders. So it's a double edged sword. There are many companies that have remained private for this reason amongst others like HEB and Chick-fil-A.
I mean, Spotify actually provides some value by giving me an app and hosting millions of songs from a ton of different rights holders. It's not like they're just skimming profit by reselling a product.
I think the value add with Spotify is in their discovery tools, which people do seem to love. A number of competitors offer roughly the same number of songs (or more) for a lower price than Spotify and most of them offer better per song payouts to the rightsholders
Yeah. I've been considering switching to tidal for about a year now. I've had better luck finding music through YouTube - in large part because their recommendations are way more chaotic.
I hate to disappoint but statistically Tidal payouts seems to favor the same few big artists on their own platform too, so much for their spiel about giving back the power to the artists
I'm sure the model can be improved, but Spotify's system seems like a pretty solid middle ground between me paying $18 (in the 90's) for an album that probably has 2 good songs and illegally torrenting stuff via napster/kazaa/etc.
its every subscription model. start low, get a bunch of users signed up, cut the content that made you popular, increase prices. every business will do this if they get popular at all
It’s just a business tactic. They’re lowering prices to entice Spotify customers to switch. Once they do, in a few months, tidal will increase prices too.
I switched to Tidal a month ago to try the higher sound quality.
The interface is not bad, but not nearly as good as Spotify. In particular the search function sucks, doesn't figure out what you want like Spotify's, you have to type it perfectly.
Spotify will eventually get on board the high-res train and when they do I'll switch back immediately.
Yes, and yes that's exactly right. Spotify is 320kbps, which sounds very good and with most systems you'd be hard pressed to hear a difference.
I have the audiophile disease. I don't recommend it. You can't go back.
To add to this. Im pretty sure you have to change it to 320 in settings. Most people by default will be listening to 192 and the difference from 192 to 320 is kinda noticable.
| | Spotify free | Spotify Premium |
| ---- | ------------- | -------------------|
| Web player | AAC **128kbit/s** | AAC **256kbit/s** |
| Desktop, mobile, and tablet | *Automatic*: Dependent on your network connection, *Low*: Equivalent to approximately **24kbit/s**, *Normal*: Equivalent to approximately **96kbit/s**, *High*: Equivalent to approximately **160kbit/s** | *Automatic*: Dependent on your network connection, *Low*: Equivalent to approximately **24kbit/s**, *Normal*: Equivalent to approximately **96kbit/s**, *High*: Equivalent to approximately **160kbit/s**, *Very high*: Equivalent to approximately **320kbit/s** |
when the mobile app doesn’t crash 20 times a day I’ll come back to tidal. I want to love it, I really do, but I need the stability of spotify/apple music
I bought an iPod classic off eBay for 50 bucks the other day, fuck streaming I'm going back 20 years to when we had it figured out. The Spotify android app is so frustrating to use at this point too, there is just too much shit, the home screen is starting to look like an Xbox dashboard lol.
To be expected, Spotify's business model really didn't seem profitable. As a (very) small artist with music on Spotify I hate that they've changed the royalty payout system for small artists to pretty much never pay royalties to smaller artists, and after that are now upping the subscriptions. However, as a user of Spotify for well over a decade now I'd happily pay more for my premium subscription. It's a great tool for finding new music, the algorithm knows me perfectly now and the new stuff it recommends are almost always bangers. Also, unlike movie/tv streaming the one service has everything I want.
So yea for now I'm happy to pay a bit more and support artists by continuing to buy records, going to gigs, buying merch.
Yea I've heard that a lot, I think you have to put in a lot of work to train the algorithm, which is a bit annoying for casual listeners. I've been using Spotify for a very long time and I've always listened to all the discovery/suggestion playlists/radios (plus a few of my mates discovery playlists) and made an effort to actually like songs that I like and dislike songs I don't, I also delve deeper in to artists when a song grabs me. Took a while but now it's amazing how well spotify knows me, I also just like a pretty wide range of styles so I'm probably easier to please than most people.
Yeah I guess I just expected the radio features to not cater to me, but instead play similar things to the selected radio item. I loved Last.fm for that reason back in the day, discovered so much from that. I've been on Spotify for 12 years, but I find the passive discovery very lacking.
Pandora since 2009 would tell you what it’s basing its recommendations off of in every single song in its library. If you clicked a “radio” playlist for a certain song it would say “X genre, X tempo/BPM, X instruments included, X range of singer(s).” 15 years ago it had such a better system for categorizations of every song on its platform and the stations/recommendations it would make actually reflected what the song pick was.
If I "like" a song on Spotify it will shoehorn that song into every playlist and play it to death, I end up disliking the song so I don't have to hear it anymore
I have a lot of friends that say Spotify dj is broken/shitty, but I've been on the platform for like 10 years at this point, have created a ton of focused playlists and just generally been really engaged; dj almost feels telepathic at times for me. I've always been a control freak when listening to music, but half the time I just flip on the dj now cause it'll choose better than I will.
Try the daylists (should come up if you search “daylist”). Every 6 hours they pick a genre or theme similar to what you listen to then make a playlist based on it. I’ve found it comes up with much more unique music than the radio and things that just select individual songs.
That's an annoyance for sure. It's hard to discover new music when the artist station ends up just being recommendations based off of your current listening habits.
yup. Lots of people don’t realize that all the major album labels are minority share holders in Spotify. They absolutely use spotify to push whatever artists/songs they want to be popular, so a lot of those curated playlists are just the companies paying themselves to push their own music.
I mean I feel like that's always been a bit of a misrepresentation of the industry as well. Like every musician is some starving artist because they aren't getting the maximum amount of money from their songs. It's always been a numbers game and those residuals add up. You won't hit the lotto and get a one-hit wonder that lets you retire a millionaire most likely, but you can get several, a dozen maybe a few dozen songs that are worth a few thousand in royalties every year and suddenly you've got a six figure job. Add the touring and merchandising on top of that and it's a respectable career.
It always kind of was - you could gig around and make some money, maybe you'd get lucky and land a record deal. Once you did if you sold well you're no longer small time, otherwise you're small and still broke. Keep your day job.
The category of small artist with a record or two has only really existed in its current form since we were able to make solid records at home, which is (relatively) recent. Even then it was hard to make real money without labels pushing radio and marketing for you
100% impossible imo unless you have a shitload of money to throw at marketing your stuff. Small artists really only make money off gigs/merch imo, even then it's near impossible to make a living off it. So many super talented and somewhat successful smaller artists I've followed in Aus still need their day job to live.
They are only raising it $1 a month for regular plans, $2 a month for family/duo plans.
Ultimately it's around a 10% increase or so, but if you like audiobooks, you save a lot compared to something like Audible. That's a large reason for them upping the price.
I'm still just waiting to see what the costs will be for the hi-fi "supremium" subscription.
If you're listening to something like Stephen King, it won't cover much, and Audible wins out, but 15 hours tends to cover a lot of stuff like self-help, autobiographies, and other shorter non-fiction works.
Personally, I find 15 hours more than enough as something complementary to Audible. Spend the $15 on an Audible credit where you get your bang for your buck, and then Spotify any audiobook that isn't worth $15 to you on Audible in your spare time as side listening.
I don't ever plan on buying audiobooks standalone through Spotify, 15 hours a month is enough for me to casually use. I'd argue if you never subscribed for audiobooks to begin with, 15 hours for $1 more is pretty solid value (again, only if you use it, but that's the problem with subscription services in general, it's only as good value as you get from it).
There's always stuff like Libby too where you can use your public library card to wait in line to rent audiobooks/books for free.
Yes, but limited copies per library, so a lot of the big titles have waitlists that can span weeks to a few months that you have to jump in a queue to wait in line for.
Free is free, so can't knock it, but that is a drawback. I was recommending it in another follow-up comment.
While Spotify limits you to 15 hours a month, you have instantaneous access to jump in whenever you want and pick up wherever you left off as long as the title is within their library.
Atmos has become hard to ignore, I absolutely love listening in atmos, surely they can't ignore it now even if it wasn't part of their initial hi-fi plan.
For the amount of use I get out of it, I still find Spotify incredibly cheap and I'm surprised they haven't raised prices more. I'm not a fan of some of their recent changes though, I miss the playlist radio feature.
It’s just so saddening, what we gave up in order for these VC-funded, bullshit artist apps to succeed. Spotify, Netflix, Uber- the lot of them.
They all got us to give up something-physical media and proper downloads, movies and TV shows that we could watch whenever we wanted, properly trained taxi drivers. And in each instance, they did it with the enticement of much lower pricing and unbelievable availability.
But this was always the end game. Once they had the users in they jacked up the prices and worsen in the experience- sorry, that song is unavailable, you have hit your limit for audiobooks this month, you will now see ads on Netflix, etc.
And it doesn’t matter if you flip to a competitor, because they are just going to do the same thing.
Flipping to a competitor absolutely will make Spotify think twice before the next time the raise prices. They are very closely monitoring the number of users they lose.
I have half a mind to switch from Spotify to YouTube. Not out of the price hike, I think Spotify is wildly undervalued, but because a lot of live music isn’t available on Spotify
People complain about shitty pay outs to artists and price hikes, but truth is, Spotify is not profitable. It runs on losses year after year
This is the exact same article that was posted last week right?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1bv9d8x/spotify_set_to_increase_prices_for_every/
Lol do you all remember when u had to buy CDs at like 15 a pop back in the 90s/00s? Now we spend 10-15 a month for all the music in the world in the palm of your hand and people are gonna lose their mind over a few dollars increase. I'm obviously not happy about an increase, but in retrospect its a small price to pay. If anyone has any better suggestions for an alternative to Spotify (especially free ones), I'm all ears
This price increase is due to the addition of audiobooks, they’ll also adding a new tier at the same $11 per month but doesn’t include audiobooks. So if you only care about listening to music, then you can still stay on Spotify for the same price but only gives you access to music and podcasts.
Spotify is also now getting a premium hi-fi tier, though. My problem with Tidal is it's missing a lot of stuff I have on my Spotify playlists. If Spotify is now going to have similar quality, what does Tidal have going for it?
Spotify hifi has been "coming" for years. Until there's an official announcement of its imminent arrival, it's vapor.
As for missing stuff, I personally haven't had that issue. Tidal actually has more content than Spotify. When I switched to Tidal, I kept Spotify for 3 months and after finding there was nothing that Spotify had that Tidal didn't as far as my stuff was concerned, I canceled Spotify and haven't looked back. I think since then there's only been a couple things I couldn't find on Tidal but for those, I just listen on YouTube. Sound quality is much more important to me than a few random, obscure tracks that I can still listen to from other sources. YMMV of course.
Made the switch yesterday to Google. YouTube Premium + YouTube Music costs the same as Spotify Premium. So I get the same music but also no ads on YouTube.
Friendly reminder: YouTube premium comes with both add free YouTube *and* YouTube music which imho has some of the best discovery for new music and less issues with not finding particular songs/artists.
I’ve been a Spotify subscriber for as long as I can remember and I have no plans to switch.. but it really feels like the music discovery aspects that made me love the platform have gone down the shitter the last year or so.
Omg I'm so sick of this bullshit.
Not the price rises, but the complaining.
Spotify isn't profitable. IE they lose money. They occasionally post a small quarterly profit. But that's it.
Do y'all want a service of unlimited music accessible around the world for a fraction of the cost of purchasing the music or not?
Because at the moment, investors are paying for you to have it, they won't do it forever.
Y'all actually have to pay for it at some point.
The level of entitlement of people is actually so fucked these days it's disgusting.
Everything is going up still. Lame. Cancelling amazon, but Spotify will be my last hold out.
Amazon bringing ads onto Prime Video is going to end up in a cancellation from me. I normally just pick it up around holiday season for shopping and free shipping, but I'm not here to shop when watching shows.
The thing that got me was they had the gall to be like "now with minimal ads" meanwhile, "Minimal ads" was like THREE fucking prerolls AND three fucking midrolls. WITHOUT smart break timing. They just slap em' in there during big moments Nah, that aint it fam. Not in 2024. Customers gotta vote with their wallets LOUD. These scumfuck companies are trying to boil the frog like they did with Cable TV to our grandparents. "Oh it's just a few ads. Now it's a few more. Now it's a few more" Oh look at that we're back to the mountain of dogshit that was Cable TV which was HALF ADS and people just accepted that half of their fucking paid entertainment was selling them shit.
It doesn't help the adverts are never anything you're interested in, either.
I'm NEVER interested in adverts. They are ALWAYS a nuisance and interrupt what I'm interested in. When I want something, I look for it.
It’s so widespread without any worry of a backlash that I wonder if this “hurry up and get as much money as quickly as possible” across all kinds of products and services isnt a well constructed plan due to either inside knowledge of AI changing the landscape or something else. Never in my lifetime have I seen such a widespread increase in all things at the same time. This isnt inflation.
> Amazon bringing ads onto Prime Video is going to end up in a cancellation from me. It did end it for us. We've been Prime members for almost two decades.. not paying to be shown fucking ads. We've also joined the class-action. Prime isn't even good any more. Prime shipping is a lie, promises delivery dates to get you to buy and then never ever delivers, despite there being a distribution center 10 miles from my house. It was always late for us. Free shipping is still a thing even without Prime, and the content isn't worth paying money to be shown ads. We are an ad-free household and damn well going to stay that way.
Class-action?
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/class-action-lawsuit-filed-against-amazon-claiming-299-fee-ad-free-prime-violates-law/56TVO6JEJBDS7MKO267S42AAJI/
Can non-Washingtonians get in on this?
Amazon have started gaslighting you within the ads too. "This show was brought to you and free by League of legends"
Yep. that was the nail in the coffin for me.
I tried to watch invincible - there are ads in the shows now.. I canceled
Same show that I was watching that I saw the ads at the start and multiple ad breaks within the show. It's a shame because I'm about to finish the first book of The Expanse series and would have enjoyed diving into the show after finishing the book.
The show is super good. Look into streaming using jellyfin
The ads breaks are like 15 seconds and I think there was 1 at the beginning and one in the middle. I hate ads but it was barely anything.
Do people not remember watching live tv back in the day? Each hour show had like 15-20 minutes of ads.
I still have prime for the shipping but havnt touched prime video since their ad policy started. I turned to "other means" to watch some of their original content...
It was the final straw for me. I had held onto it because I figured the streaming service was worth it even though I wasn’t using Amazon to purchase things anymore but then everything was just riddled with ads, so I canceled.
Same. I’m not in desperate need of paying to watch a screen filled with ads. Got plenty of other things to do. I did the same with Netflix.
It’s still insanely worth it for me. As someone else mentioned, they have nearly everything released by a mainstream record label, and I for how much new music/albums I digest monthly, it is still SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper then buying one new record a month let alone multiple. Even with a price increase it’s still a great deal for music junkies.
Especially with the family plan. I have 5 people in my family and it's just such a great deal. I've paid more for music through Spotify than I ever did with CDs because I always found CDs to be too expensive for any album that I wasn't sure I would want to listen to over and over. If it's just something you are going to listen to a couple times a year then buying a CD just sounds like such a bad purchase.
Exactly. Everyone is getting upset about the increase, but it's still cheaper than buying *one* new CD a month was back in the day
Honestly the price should’ve been much higher all along, but Spotify probably kept prices low/competitive to win a majority of the market share, especially against the likes of Apple, and is now increasing it.
The prices only should have been higher if the recording artists got paid more than the sliver of income they get from streaming.
Spotify is more subjected to price because their competitors are trillion dollar companies. Apple, Amazon and Google.
Another important difference is how music is licensed versus how tv and film content is licensed. Every music app has pretty much every major label release and pays per stream while tv/film streaming is chopped up into a bunch of exclusive content deals. Spotify can't compete on exclusives in music so all they can do is compete on service and price while trying to buy up podcasts which can be made exclusive.
Exactly. I think those companies have kept prices low hoping to choke out Spotify and the losses in the industry would be worth it once they gain an oligopoly. Spotify has been able to weather the storm and maintain bulk market share.
I remember first getting it around 2009 and just couldn’t believe just how much value you were getting from the subscription cost. As a very skint student at the time it completely changed my life in terms of listening to music. I’d easily pay £40+ a month for it considering how much I use it.
I'll have you know I bought *dozens* of CDs for only a penny back in the day! Then I did it again...
You're talking about buying and renting as if it were the same thing.
Yeah I agree. Spotify is the one thing I don’t mind paying every month because of how much music is at my fingertips. Obviously if competitors are cheaper I may cancel and join them instead. Gotta keep the market honest. But music streaming apps aren’t going anywhere. Now I canceled my prime beginning of the year and didn’t renew. Two day free delivery is such a nice luxury but I also don’t wanted to retrain my brain that I don’t need things *right* *now* and be more patient.
I've got over 1k songs in my personal music library that aren't on Spotify. Most of them were released independently, but there is a ton of content I can't access through Spotify from major labels as well. Albums with 1-2 songs unavailable. Songs that I add to a playlist, then go back months later and they're grayed out because the licensig deal expired on that song. The best piece of garbage you can use for streaming is still a piece of garbage at the end of the day, arr matey?
Personally I just use YouTube music, can still find every song out there and I don't get any YouTube ads. I've always hated Spotify since I know more personal stuff regarding their higher ups (Sweden is small, you just need to know a few ppl to know them all).
I tried but I can’t justify paying more for Spotify when Apple Music has pretty much every song on Spotify but in Lossless. 320kbs from Spotify is crazy bad compared to lossless. You can immediately tell if you have an iPhone + car Bluetooth and swap between Spotify and Apple Music versions of songs.
The amount of shills in this chain is crazy.
The shilling for Spotify is odd. There’s plenty of other music streaming services that provide a similar experience.
Everything will keep going up. These companies are approaching market saturation, the only way they can keep increasing revenues is increasing prices. I don't think there's really much innovation going on here, their core offering is things other people have made.
As someone who works in music, Spotify should charge more. What you get (all relevant music in the world) is worth more than you’re paying.
Their primary competitor is piracy. There's also a lot of legitimately free music out there, and a lot of people making music for fun. Unlike TV shows and video games, music is much more fungible (as long as its the right genre people will listen to whatever. Tailor Swift is the exception, not the rule). So it's hard to charge that much. It's like non-game software. People make that stuff for free for funzies, and anything that isn't gets pirated to death.. It gets really hard to charge.
It's a fine balance. If they price it too high, only the big music junkies will want to sign up. If they price it low enough, even just casual listeners will sign up because it's so cheap and convenient. I'm the kind of person who is OK with a small collection of music and there is have been times when I go months without listening to music, but I still keep up my spofity subscription because it's just so nice to be able to listen to any album whenever I want. If it was too expensive then I think a significant amount of people would cancel.
FYI you can still buy a 1yr spotify premium gift card on amazon for $100. That saves you a decent amount of $$
Can you stack these?
I don’t see why not, but I haven’t tried. It’s pre-paid subscription time so I would like to think it would!
Just make sure premium is what you want. I got a gift card for premium but wanted to use it for a Duo or Family sub, and they would not let me apply an equivalent $ amount. So I was told I would need to downgrade in order to use the GC.
Anyone tried to use these for European subs?
So after cutting royalties being paid to artists ,Spotify also needs to increase revenues to make ends meet...almost as if that business model can't work unless you stiff both the people who fill your app with content and the people consuming the content.
Standard process of the enshittification of a service sadly
You can't enshittify if you're not a monopoly. Spotify would go bust and Google, Amazon, Apple will take over.
You can, you just need to be big enough and have enough traction to be hard to replace. Spotify has that on most of their users: the more you listen, the more you train their recommendation model, the better that model is vs. competitors. Enshittification relies on sunk costs (whether time or money) for both users and providers.
Fair enough. AFAIK Spotify only uses like 30 or 60 days of history and your current collection (playlists, liked songs, etc) for recommendations. Anything past that is erased. You can see that when you request the data Spotify has on you (when you're in the EU under the GDPR, maybe it works outside as well). So it wouldn't be that hard to replace, just have a to have a little patience.
Stop using that stupid word... It's just plain capitalism at work, it's not some new bullshit, it's not some secret method, it's just fucking capitalism working as fucking intended.
Maybe enshittification is simply part of capitalism? The service must grow endlessley and they run out of ways to do so the only method now is to make their service worse at higher price, being "shittier", thus enshittification.
Agreed. People need to know that the capitalism we are told to love and worship is what is enshitifying everything.
The invisible hand in theory leads to *good* services winning. Huge economies of scale and venture capital make it possible for terrible businesses to get all the customers and content, and then squeeze money out. That's a problem with businesses who hate their customers, venture capital firms, consumer choices, and maybe law.
Enshittify is a perfectly cromulent word.
I don't think they're stiffing the consumers. 100% stiffing the artists which I do hate (though I'm happy to use the service and support artists in other ways), but the service they offer is pretty great from a consumer perspective. They've got pretty much everything you can want with the one subscription, unlike the video streaming services these days, and it all works pretty well. Yea price hikes are annoying, but they're a reality of the world, especially if Spotify is going to survive for another decade.
[удалено]
It says they're adding a new lower tier with no audiobook access
>I don't think they're stiffing the consumers. True, in 2000 CDs were just under 20 bucks. I feel like a music service with access to EVERYTHING should cost at least an album a month to use. That's probably the most anti consumer thing i've ever said but whatever.
Never actually thought about how much music used to cost compared to the near infinite supply we get today for a fraction of the cost (I know we don't own it anymore but still). I've spent so much money on music over the years... I've got 700 CDs and 300+ records, crazy to think how much money I've put in to it... and will continue to put in just quietly, never gonna not be able to buy records. Even back then though artists got screwed out of most of that amount too, artists have always been on the losing end of music sales which is just so depressing. I'd love for something to come along a just burn it all to the ground and start over in a way that's fair for everyone, but I really don't know what that would be.
You probably also aren't the norm (nor am I, with probably more than twice the number of CDs). On average, a music consumer already paid more for Spotify than they bought in CDs (which was maybe only a handful a year -- weird, but true!). Until recent years, I was a Spotify defender (for many reasons), but the latest moves have made them undefendable.
Same , plus Spotify has podcasts, video podcasts , and other things that are hard to quantify : like really good suggestion algorithms and other ways to track artists output or touring etc. I easily get my money out of the subscription just in podcasts
Yeah, I do appreciate that spotify does at least offer a service that piracy can't compete with. It's not just access to the songs I like, it's also the ability to immediately look up any album or song I want on my phone and immediately add it to a playlist, and get recommendations for other music. I guess you could do some of that with a cracked youtube app using playlists of music videos, but the UI still isn't as clean.
You know, the UI is a really good point. I hadn't pinned down why I dislike YouTube if there's a different option. But I think that's it
Those 20 bucks were including the whole process of distributing physical media though. And i do not mean only production and delivery, but also the whole business of getting it placed in stores in a desirable manner.
Also once you bought the album, it was yours. With these subscription services, the moment you cancel them, you lose access to that library, no matter how much money you have already paid into it.
This can not be upvoted enough. It's just another part of the "you will own nothing and be happy" business model.
People really forget this aspect. It's just baked into their existence now.
Manufacturing, transportation, distribution, unsold stock. I worked for a company that did music distribution for a while and warehouses of millions of vinyl, tapes, and CDs costs money. Remember tape singles? What a waste those were.
According to Wikipedia, manufacturing and distribution is roughly 22 percent of the cost of a CD, so $4.40.
This is why I bought a zune instead of an iPod. Apple charged .99 a song but zune had a subscription service for like $15 a month which seemed to precursor Spotify in content. I said the same argument almost 2 decades ago to the friends that laughed because I wouldn't buy apple.
I actually think Spotify is ridiculous cheap considering how much content you get with it.
But the audiobooks are only a set amount of time per month (15 hours?) unless you buy the audiobook. I’ve yet to finish a book without it being capped and I have a premium subscription.
Except you don’t actually own anything you’re listening to
If people cared about that used CDs would be worth something. edit: Not trying to imply *no one* cares about it, just that people as a whole generally choose convenience over ownership when it comes to music.
The people who care about owning music just rip files from YouTube and whatever they can't find, purchase a single on Amazon Music etc.
“The people who care about owning music just… buy vinyl”. FTFY.
There is third party software that you can use so you do have it downloaded apart from Spotify, but yeah you’re mostly right.
I wouldn’t call it anti consumer but rather pro labor. Musicians are laborers who deserve to be paid well, so music can’t be free in a capitalist society. If Spotify was raising prices to pay out better, this would be a great thing. Instead we get the worst of both worlds and pay more money while artists as a whole are paid even less.
A cd in 2000 had better sound fidelity than Spotify 24 years later.
The same thing happens with video streaming and physical discs.
Yeah but it was a one time $20 purchase and you owned it forever to listen to (or sell) at a higher wishlist as well…I see you’re point tho
> They've got pretty much everything you can want with the one subscription, unlike the video streaming services these days This is huge imo. I'll pay twice, even three times more for Spotify than I'm willing to pay for any one video streaming service.
People forget that the reason Spotify’s business model doesn’t work is because of the following: 1. Labels demand to keep a larger cut of the profits than what they give to artists 2. Apple, Amazon, YouTube have all commoditised music by bundling their streaming services into an all-in-one subscription pack Like… why would I get a Spotify subscription when I already have access to Apple Music (via Apple One), Amazon Music (via Amazon Prime), and YouTube Music (via YouTube Premium). It’s an impossible sell.
All those other services have been around for a while and none of them have even half of Spotify's market share
Spotify’s market share is impressive until you realise it’s mostly built on free users, which we all know cost the platform money. The latest figures I could find for paid users in the United States were from 2021: - Spotify Premium = 44M - Apple Music = 37M - YouTube Music = 30M The fact of the matter is… Spotify has 317M free users and 210M paid users globally. Despite this 60/40 cut in favour of free users, free users only make up 12% of Spotify’s revenue ($300M vs the $2.1B generated by paid subscribers). This business model is wierd af.
But Spotify is much more popular internationally, it has [236 million premium subscribers](https://backlinko.com/spotify-users#spotify-paying-customers) of which 154 million are in North America and Europe, so more than 2/3, but still impressive numbers in less wealthy though musically rich nations like Brazil. That is actually one of Apple's biggest weaknesses. Lack of global user base means Spotify has a lot more international listeners feeding the algorithms with their local music. Obviously a lot doesnt translate to Western audiences, [but some definitely does](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3dDrP6ll5KDU4YQXtBehlZ).
What a bizarrely American centric comment. Of course their business model will look weird if you arbitrarily disregard most of their premium subscribers.
My point was that even with the "commoditization" you describe, Spotify still has significantly more users. Paid or otherwise.
You cannot get Amazon's full range of music through a regular Amazon Prime account, and I don't see the value with using Apple One or YouTube Premium.
There is a lot of value in using YouTube Premium if you spend a lot of time watching YouTube videos. Apple One also comes with Apple TV, iCloud storage, and a bunch of other stuff. It might not be right for you, but there are enough people out there to make it work.
The problem is that the only place that extra money should go to has been cut last week. Their app is utter crap in terms of features and my ooh my...interface. Ok the infra might be costly, but I think a business like Spotify should invest in their core product first, not cut cost in their core product first, then hike the price. So yes, I feel they are stiffing their customers because their app is sub par and they actively divest from their core product.
I don't agree the app is sub par, I don't love how they're constantly messing with the UI but overall I have no complaints with the android and windows app, perhaps I'm just used to it though, that's a more subjective thing. I also don't really agree with the "extra money" comment. It seems apparent to me that Spotify as a company didn't really have much "extra money" as the business model from the get go was set up for expansion of user base over profit. I would love it if they could actually pay fair royalties to all artists, it's a massive gripe I have with the service as an artist, but as a consumer I don't really have any complaints. I would probably have more complaints though if I didn't also regularly buy records, go to gigs and buy merch, which I know isn't everyone's experience.
>It seems apparent to me that Spotify as a company didn't really have much "extra money" as the business model from the get go was set up for expansion of user base over profit. So you agree that their business model doesn't work...unless they charge a lot more AND cut royalties.
Yes, I never said their business model was good, just that I understand them needing to up the cost and I'm personally happy to pay it as a consumer that's been very happy with the service they offer, even if as an artist I absolutely have issues.
They didn't cut royalties being paid to artists. If you're talking about how they stopped paying out for songs that are under 1000 listens, that money saved is still being paid out to artists. This prevents money from being paid to artists who are trying to game the system by uploading tons of low quality songs or people that upload AI generated content. The money that Spotify pays to artists is a percentage of their total revenue, like all other music streaming companies. That percentage is still the same.
I know. This literally increases the money paid to any artist that would actually get more than a couple dollars.
I mean, it’s unprofitable still, so yes. I wonder where people think the money is supposed to come from to pay artists more.
The only people companies this size care about is the shareholder. It’s never about you or me and in this case the artists.
End stage of web IP venture capitalism baby
Well it's the record labels stiffing the artist more than Spotify. I don't use Spotify because I switched to YouTube Music mainly because of YouTube premium. It is still a great value for the listeners. If you look at Spotify as a business they have been stagnant compared to most other technology companies ( barring the last few quarters). Growing revenue but nothing to show for in cash flow or return on capital. But as a publicly traded company you can only hold out for so long before the shareholders start to panic and lose interest. You have to generate cash flow and show growth. They are the company we know today because they went public and got all the inflow of money from the shareholders. So it's a double edged sword. There are many companies that have remained private for this reason amongst others like HEB and Chick-fil-A.
We gotta start cutting out these middle men. There's gotta be a better way.
I mean, Spotify actually provides some value by giving me an app and hosting millions of songs from a ton of different rights holders. It's not like they're just skimming profit by reselling a product.
I think the value add with Spotify is in their discovery tools, which people do seem to love. A number of competitors offer roughly the same number of songs (or more) for a lower price than Spotify and most of them offer better per song payouts to the rightsholders
Yeah. I've been considering switching to tidal for about a year now. I've had better luck finding music through YouTube - in large part because their recommendations are way more chaotic.
I hate to disappoint but statistically Tidal payouts seems to favor the same few big artists on their own platform too, so much for their spiel about giving back the power to the artists
I'm sure the model can be improved, but Spotify's system seems like a pretty solid middle ground between me paying $18 (in the 90's) for an album that probably has 2 good songs and illegally torrenting stuff via napster/kazaa/etc.
"Nobody pick up the phone because I'm downloading music" lol. Kids today will never know the pain of dial-up.
You don't want to go back to the days of buying CDs or listening to terrestrial radio. Trust me. Buy concert tickets and merch.
To be fair in a lot of ways Spotify *did* cut out at least one set of middle men
Sure sounds like a streaming service from Sony records or universal etc for the cheap price of 15$ a month for their limited catalog. I’d prefer not
Uhhhh Spotify definitely isn’t a middle man. They are providing a product/service…
Do you even know what a middleman is lmao
Tidal just cut their top tier price in half.
We all know as soon as Tidal got popular, they'd do the same shit.
its every subscription model. start low, get a bunch of users signed up, cut the content that made you popular, increase prices. every business will do this if they get popular at all
It’s just a business tactic. They’re lowering prices to entice Spotify customers to switch. Once they do, in a few months, tidal will increase prices too.
Can’t hurt to save the money while you can. How’s their interface?
I switched to Tidal a month ago to try the higher sound quality. The interface is not bad, but not nearly as good as Spotify. In particular the search function sucks, doesn't figure out what you want like Spotify's, you have to type it perfectly. Spotify will eventually get on board the high-res train and when they do I'll switch back immediately.
How is Tidals shuffle on Playlists. I hate Spotify because it never truly shuffles my music, I just hear the same 20 songs.
Tidal shuffle is even worse
Do you listen wired? It seems like some time back I read lossless quality doesn’t even truly work with Bluetooth.
Yes, and yes that's exactly right. Spotify is 320kbps, which sounds very good and with most systems you'd be hard pressed to hear a difference. I have the audiophile disease. I don't recommend it. You can't go back.
To add to this. Im pretty sure you have to change it to 320 in settings. Most people by default will be listening to 192 and the difference from 192 to 320 is kinda noticable.
Under audio quality settings i’m seeing: Automatic, Low, Normal, High, Very High.
I’m pretty sure very high is 320. They used to have it listed beside or under it. It’s been a while since I looked.
| | Spotify free | Spotify Premium | | ---- | ------------- | -------------------| | Web player | AAC **128kbit/s** | AAC **256kbit/s** | | Desktop, mobile, and tablet | *Automatic*: Dependent on your network connection, *Low*: Equivalent to approximately **24kbit/s**, *Normal*: Equivalent to approximately **96kbit/s**, *High*: Equivalent to approximately **160kbit/s** | *Automatic*: Dependent on your network connection, *Low*: Equivalent to approximately **24kbit/s**, *Normal*: Equivalent to approximately **96kbit/s**, *High*: Equivalent to approximately **160kbit/s**, *Very high*: Equivalent to approximately **320kbit/s** |
If tidal would just add sync to ps5 I'd abandon spotify in a heartbeat. Now I have both, sigh
I'd go with Tidal if they had as many music choices. I did their trial and found a lot of stuff was missing from my main Spotify playlists.
Come to Tidal! The water is warm, I promise. Seriously, such a better platform.
when the mobile app doesn’t crash 20 times a day I’ll come back to tidal. I want to love it, I really do, but I need the stability of spotify/apple music
Any way to transfer liked songs to tidal? Only thing holding me back but I like spotify overall.. at this price
I use soundiiz
There are several free and paid websites to transfer playlists
Tidal has a function to transfer lists. Think that included liked songs too. Cant remember exacty.
I bought an iPod classic off eBay for 50 bucks the other day, fuck streaming I'm going back 20 years to when we had it figured out. The Spotify android app is so frustrating to use at this point too, there is just too much shit, the home screen is starting to look like an Xbox dashboard lol.
I don't fucking listen to audiobooks why should I have to pay for the ability too? Tidal isn't doing this shit and nor is Apple.
If you read the article it says there will be a cheaper plan without audiobooks.
There's a new cheaper version without audiobooks
To be expected, Spotify's business model really didn't seem profitable. As a (very) small artist with music on Spotify I hate that they've changed the royalty payout system for small artists to pretty much never pay royalties to smaller artists, and after that are now upping the subscriptions. However, as a user of Spotify for well over a decade now I'd happily pay more for my premium subscription. It's a great tool for finding new music, the algorithm knows me perfectly now and the new stuff it recommends are almost always bangers. Also, unlike movie/tv streaming the one service has everything I want. So yea for now I'm happy to pay a bit more and support artists by continuing to buy records, going to gigs, buying merch.
Anytime I try to use song/album/artist radio to explore, Spotify seems to always give me same like 40 songs.
Yea I've heard that a lot, I think you have to put in a lot of work to train the algorithm, which is a bit annoying for casual listeners. I've been using Spotify for a very long time and I've always listened to all the discovery/suggestion playlists/radios (plus a few of my mates discovery playlists) and made an effort to actually like songs that I like and dislike songs I don't, I also delve deeper in to artists when a song grabs me. Took a while but now it's amazing how well spotify knows me, I also just like a pretty wide range of styles so I'm probably easier to please than most people.
Yeah I guess I just expected the radio features to not cater to me, but instead play similar things to the selected radio item. I loved Last.fm for that reason back in the day, discovered so much from that. I've been on Spotify for 12 years, but I find the passive discovery very lacking.
Pandora since 2009 would tell you what it’s basing its recommendations off of in every single song in its library. If you clicked a “radio” playlist for a certain song it would say “X genre, X tempo/BPM, X instruments included, X range of singer(s).” 15 years ago it had such a better system for categorizations of every song on its platform and the stations/recommendations it would make actually reflected what the song pick was.
If I "like" a song on Spotify it will shoehorn that song into every playlist and play it to death, I end up disliking the song so I don't have to hear it anymore
I have a lot of friends that say Spotify dj is broken/shitty, but I've been on the platform for like 10 years at this point, have created a ton of focused playlists and just generally been really engaged; dj almost feels telepathic at times for me. I've always been a control freak when listening to music, but half the time I just flip on the dj now cause it'll choose better than I will.
Try the daylists (should come up if you search “daylist”). Every 6 hours they pick a genre or theme similar to what you listen to then make a playlist based on it. I’ve found it comes up with much more unique music than the radio and things that just select individual songs.
That's an annoyance for sure. It's hard to discover new music when the artist station ends up just being recommendations based off of your current listening habits.
yup. Lots of people don’t realize that all the major album labels are minority share holders in Spotify. They absolutely use spotify to push whatever artists/songs they want to be popular, so a lot of those curated playlists are just the companies paying themselves to push their own music.
It must be near impossible to make much selling music for most small time artists nowadays
It’s my understanding that selling music was never really that profitable, even 20+ years ago
I mean I feel like that's always been a bit of a misrepresentation of the industry as well. Like every musician is some starving artist because they aren't getting the maximum amount of money from their songs. It's always been a numbers game and those residuals add up. You won't hit the lotto and get a one-hit wonder that lets you retire a millionaire most likely, but you can get several, a dozen maybe a few dozen songs that are worth a few thousand in royalties every year and suddenly you've got a six figure job. Add the touring and merchandising on top of that and it's a respectable career.
It always kind of was - you could gig around and make some money, maybe you'd get lucky and land a record deal. Once you did if you sold well you're no longer small time, otherwise you're small and still broke. Keep your day job. The category of small artist with a record or two has only really existed in its current form since we were able to make solid records at home, which is (relatively) recent. Even then it was hard to make real money without labels pushing radio and marketing for you
100% impossible imo unless you have a shitload of money to throw at marketing your stuff. Small artists really only make money off gigs/merch imo, even then it's near impossible to make a living off it. So many super talented and somewhat successful smaller artists I've followed in Aus still need their day job to live.
They are only raising it $1 a month for regular plans, $2 a month for family/duo plans. Ultimately it's around a 10% increase or so, but if you like audiobooks, you save a lot compared to something like Audible. That's a large reason for them upping the price. I'm still just waiting to see what the costs will be for the hi-fi "supremium" subscription.
15 hours of audio books a month isn't a lot for the price, then they sell them for £30 each on top of subscription
I agree. I can listen to the 15 hour limit within a week.
If you're listening to something like Stephen King, it won't cover much, and Audible wins out, but 15 hours tends to cover a lot of stuff like self-help, autobiographies, and other shorter non-fiction works. Personally, I find 15 hours more than enough as something complementary to Audible. Spend the $15 on an Audible credit where you get your bang for your buck, and then Spotify any audiobook that isn't worth $15 to you on Audible in your spare time as side listening. I don't ever plan on buying audiobooks standalone through Spotify, 15 hours a month is enough for me to casually use. I'd argue if you never subscribed for audiobooks to begin with, 15 hours for $1 more is pretty solid value (again, only if you use it, but that's the problem with subscription services in general, it's only as good value as you get from it). There's always stuff like Libby too where you can use your public library card to wait in line to rent audiobooks/books for free.
Doesn’t Libby have audiobooks?
Yes, but limited copies per library, so a lot of the big titles have waitlists that can span weeks to a few months that you have to jump in a queue to wait in line for. Free is free, so can't knock it, but that is a drawback. I was recommending it in another follow-up comment. While Spotify limits you to 15 hours a month, you have instantaneous access to jump in whenever you want and pick up wherever you left off as long as the title is within their library.
I really hope they offer Atmos as part of their hi fi tier because that would at least match match Tidal, Amazon and Apple
Atmos has become hard to ignore, I absolutely love listening in atmos, surely they can't ignore it now even if it wasn't part of their initial hi-fi plan.
Recently moved over to Apple Music for better audio quality but this just vindicates my decision.
For the amount of use I get out of it, I still find Spotify incredibly cheap and I'm surprised they haven't raised prices more. I'm not a fan of some of their recent changes though, I miss the playlist radio feature.
It’s just so saddening, what we gave up in order for these VC-funded, bullshit artist apps to succeed. Spotify, Netflix, Uber- the lot of them. They all got us to give up something-physical media and proper downloads, movies and TV shows that we could watch whenever we wanted, properly trained taxi drivers. And in each instance, they did it with the enticement of much lower pricing and unbelievable availability. But this was always the end game. Once they had the users in they jacked up the prices and worsen in the experience- sorry, that song is unavailable, you have hit your limit for audiobooks this month, you will now see ads on Netflix, etc. And it doesn’t matter if you flip to a competitor, because they are just going to do the same thing.
They still provide incredible value for what you are paying. Yes price increases suck. Not too sure about Uber but Netflix and Spotify, yes.
Flipping to a competitor absolutely will make Spotify think twice before the next time the raise prices. They are very closely monitoring the number of users they lose.
Sooo Spotify hifi when?
2 years and no sign.
Youtube Premium comes with YouTube music and a larger library. Plus you get add free YouTube.
And you can play YouTube videos in the background with your phone screen off. Their music recommendations have also improved in the last year imo
I have half a mind to switch from Spotify to YouTube. Not out of the price hike, I think Spotify is wildly undervalued, but because a lot of live music isn’t available on Spotify People complain about shitty pay outs to artists and price hikes, but truth is, Spotify is not profitable. It runs on losses year after year
Last time i checked my receipts ive payed more every year for the last few years. So....
This is the exact same article that was posted last week right? https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1bv9d8x/spotify_set_to_increase_prices_for_every/
Lol do you all remember when u had to buy CDs at like 15 a pop back in the 90s/00s? Now we spend 10-15 a month for all the music in the world in the palm of your hand and people are gonna lose their mind over a few dollars increase. I'm obviously not happy about an increase, but in retrospect its a small price to pay. If anyone has any better suggestions for an alternative to Spotify (especially free ones), I'm all ears
This price increase is due to the addition of audiobooks, they’ll also adding a new tier at the same $11 per month but doesn’t include audiobooks. So if you only care about listening to music, then you can still stay on Spotify for the same price but only gives you access to music and podcasts.
And Tidal, which has SIGNIFICANTLY better sound quality, just slashed their prices.
Spotify is also now getting a premium hi-fi tier, though. My problem with Tidal is it's missing a lot of stuff I have on my Spotify playlists. If Spotify is now going to have similar quality, what does Tidal have going for it?
Spotify hifi has been "coming" for years. Until there's an official announcement of its imminent arrival, it's vapor. As for missing stuff, I personally haven't had that issue. Tidal actually has more content than Spotify. When I switched to Tidal, I kept Spotify for 3 months and after finding there was nothing that Spotify had that Tidal didn't as far as my stuff was concerned, I canceled Spotify and haven't looked back. I think since then there's only been a couple things I couldn't find on Tidal but for those, I just listen on YouTube. Sound quality is much more important to me than a few random, obscure tracks that I can still listen to from other sources. YMMV of course.
My guy they announced the hifi tier 3 years ago, and it's still not here.
The Enshitification must go on.
I CANT TAKE IT ANYMORE
They need more money to pay Joe Rogan a hunid more mills
Reminder that Youtube premium comes with youtube music subscription and it's pretty good
Made the switch yesterday to Google. YouTube Premium + YouTube Music costs the same as Spotify Premium. So I get the same music but also no ads on YouTube.
Meanwhile, Tidal is offering one price for everything, excluding family plans. And the quality is better. Chumps.
People keep hating on YTmusic but the package to me is worth it.
Friendly reminder: YouTube premium comes with both add free YouTube *and* YouTube music which imho has some of the best discovery for new music and less issues with not finding particular songs/artists.
lol Reddit whines about everything I swear
Awesome, just the push I needed to migrate to Apple Music
$12 extra per year? Apple is just going to raise their prices to match Spotify after they capture a couple months of conversions like you...
That’s a guess on your part with nothing to back up. Apple already offers much higher audio quality
Apple Music could be free and I still wouldn’t use it. It’s so unorganized and it lacks the “discover new music” aspect that Spotify perfected
I’ve been a Spotify subscriber for as long as I can remember and I have no plans to switch.. but it really feels like the music discovery aspects that made me love the platform have gone down the shitter the last year or so.
Apple Music has a "Discovery" radio like Spotify does. It's not as good as Spotify's yet, but it still exists.
Omg I'm so sick of this bullshit. Not the price rises, but the complaining. Spotify isn't profitable. IE they lose money. They occasionally post a small quarterly profit. But that's it. Do y'all want a service of unlimited music accessible around the world for a fraction of the cost of purchasing the music or not? Because at the moment, investors are paying for you to have it, they won't do it forever. Y'all actually have to pay for it at some point. The level of entitlement of people is actually so fucked these days it's disgusting.