Lots of people at this point basically ignore music unless it's on Spotify and fall back to youtube. I don't think anyone picks up Apple Music because of exclusives. Mostly it's a question of what platform people prefer.
I'm super happy apple music exists because it puts some movement into the space. Before it there was no real competition to Spotify.
> Before it there was no real competition to Spotify.
What about Google Music (or is it Google Play Music or just Play Music or just Play under a music category? ugh)? They were earlier and have been really good especially lately. Their initial iOS app was awful but I heard it has improved. There is also Groove music (which I guess is now XBox music?) but the Apps are awful for it. I got a Groove music subscription for the heavily discounted black friday sale and stopped using it after a few weeks simply because the apps are all absolutely horrific.
Play music has no desktop client so it's not even worth considering. I think apple music and Spotify are both very nice. The android apps of both are particularly good and both have acceptable desktop clients.
I'm using it in chromium in app mode, with the Streamkeys extension for global hotkey and media key support. Notifications seem to work, but I've got them disabled.
They could release an electron app, but I believe it'd be an identical experience.
I'm on a desktop so I don't care about offline support, perhaps that's the feature that removes the web version from consideration for some people.
That's true, their desktop client is just a Chrome wrapper. I still use it and like it more than Spotify. Other than Discover weekly, I've enjoyed Google Play's recommendations more, and the ability to upload 20,000 of your own songs to stream anywhere is a huge bonus.
Fair enough on the offline access (though the only time I'm offline and want to listen to music I am using my phone so I've never had a use case to keep the music on my computer) but Chrome supports the media key access and you can grab extensions on any browser to use them so those work the same.
Why would I work for something that should be readily available as a basic feature? In my opinion this is a perfect example of the contrast between apple and Google. Google simply does not care about user experience. They will make a functional service and that's it. Apple will create a good user experience. The service exists to enhance that experience.
Oh I agree but it's also a limitation of the web itself. Fortunately it's easy to get media key support (I honestly wanted it for things other than google music support so that was a little bit of a happy accident). But yeah Google never focuses on the UX (case in point: they haven't updated the calendar, contacts or tasks in at least 8 years now which is INSANE; some of the bugs from years ago are STILL THERE). But I digress.
I haven't found any bugs in Spotify yet. And I think the experience is far superior to play music in the browser. Things just feel smoother and snappier. Also both apple music and Spotify let you download tracks for offline playback.
Another problem is the play music android app. It's probably the worst designed android music player. OTOH Spotify and apple music are so well designed that I consider them actually beautiful.
> Play music has no desktop client so it's not even worth considering.
It has no first-party native desktop client, but...so, what, really? Its streaming content from the internet anyway, so I can't really see what the problem is with using a web client as the first-party desktop client.
(OTOH, there is at least one third-party non-web desktop client for it.)
Eh just release a proper native client if you want to compete? I don't understand why people would prefer a Web client over native. Tell me one advantage. For the user.
Performance is great, looks are subjective, and none of your other point are relevant to me. Like I said, there's literally nothing it gets me. Clearly it's not the right solution for you, and that's a bummer - because I love it : )
It's not about specific users. It's about the user base in general. A native app has many advantages that a user may like or may not care about. On the other hand a Web app has one advantage, not needing to install it. In my opinion, people in general would care much more about having a lot of options and features even if they have to go through the extra click needed for installation.
One way to check what most users care for is to look at subscription numbers. And I couldn't find a reliable source for that. So I guess our discussion is pending until we see user numbers.
Yeah, I get what you're saying. I just don't agree. I've never thought that a native app was "missing" - I never thought about it at all until it was brought up in this thread.
And for me, it's not at all about the user base - it's about a specific user - me. If it's not the right service for you because there's no native app luckily you have alternatives and can move on. I think it's an awesome service for 10 bucks a month.
Only really exists on mobile. Spotify exists everywhere (hardware, all mobile platforms, all gaming consoles, etc.).
Google does not give a shit about their software past the barebones experience. Nobody in my family picks up Google software unless I or my brother push them to. It's just too confusing and badly supported in general.
You can stream to Chromecast, what else do you need? A different app for each of the dozen platforms out there? Google Music All Access is one of the few streaming services that got it right.
Play Music is an hidden gem IMO (disclaimer : I work for one of their competitors) . It is a shame that Google does not push it.
The Orange should go away and the android app needs more maintenance / QA but otherwise that's an extremely solid product IMO.
Other than that : youtube, rdio, deezer, soundcloud, pandora, there are a lot of products in the same place.
As somebody working in that market, honestly most music services look the same to me and if you are fully satisfied with whatever music service you use, you probably don't really need to switch.
That being said Play Music is pretty great for me because :
-It lets me upload my own mp3s without needing anything else than the folder where it needs to look for them. You can even ask the app to always monitor a specific folder for new music files. It tries to match these files with its catalogs and if they match they will be automatically added to your library instead of being uploaded. When you upload an unknown file, you can alter its tags and cover if you in Play Music and you can regroup them in Albums anyway you want.
As somebody with a huge existing music files collection, many of which are not available on any service, this is a killer feature for me. I understand that it is not going to appeal to everybody though.
- The Android and desktop apps have been constantly great for quite some time. The only complaints I could form is that this orange is not really great and that on Android they should probably get rid of the Transitions. The design idea is great but the platform does not support them really well. I have seen some kinks in the app recently but they might have been caused by the Android N beta build I was using at the time.
- Most of the big music services have the same base features : albums, curated playlists, automatic radios, family plans ... Play Music has these as well for quite some time. The suggestion algorithm has been pretty good for me but that's probably very subjective. Play Music also has nice contextual suggestions based on their Songza acquisition (for example right now : it is sunday afternoon, it proposes running, pokemon, BBQ, beach, ... musics ) .
- So overall it is a great service, IMO absolutely on par with Spotify or Apple Music. The price is the same as any other music service .. but you also get 10% off on all of your Play Store apps & musics purchases and if you are in the USA, it also gives you Youtube Red (= no ads on youtube). The value proposition seems pretty insane to me compared to the other music services.
On one hand I liked Rdio because it was cheap and had a lot of niche music I liked. On the other hand their algorithms were shit.
E.g. I once indicated I liked some electronica by Marek Biliński, a Polish musician, and it took hours to stop the ensuing assault on my ears of 70's Polish pop music.
In general it took very little for their algorithm to start playing music I had no interest in, and a lot of effort to make it stop playing stuff I found awful.
Algorithmic music selection in general still seem to be in a very poor state - I've yet to find any that do great, presumably because a lot of them seem to treat it as a question of solving "people who listened to A also likes B". But it isn't. It's more a matter of "people who listened to some sequence of A,B and C, also listened to D relatively shortly afterwards without skipping/downvoting it" coupled with a lot of other checks (e.g. I might skip D even if it fits in perfectly with both my mood and A,B and C if I have heard it too often lately, or if it's a very loud/intensive track and it's late a night, and any number of othr factors).
I wonder how many of these systems try to take more factors into consideration but just aren't very good at it. And also how problematic the lack of more contextual knowledge is (e.g. I may make different selections when alone, vs. when a romantic partner vs. when with friends, even if the starting type is the same type of tracks - it doesn't mean my taste has changed). Many recommendation systems makes me vary about indicating a preference because they're not clear about how it'll be used and the ones I've used so far gives me little confidence they'll do the right thing...
So Apple has enough money coming in from other businesses that, if they want to (and maybe they do), they can simply operate their Apple Music service at a loss. Forever. Spotify can't do that so how do you combat against Apple, one of your biggest competitors?
Burying in the search rankings and not being featured doesn't seem like a good way to handle it. If those artists are among people's favorites if they can't find them as easily on Spotify AND if they can get exclusives with Apple, why wouldn't they just jump ship to Apple Music?
Obviously I don't understand all of the nuances of the music business so I could be completely off base here but it feels like, to me, this would have the opposite affect that they intend.
"So Apple has enough money coming in from other businesses that, if they want to (and maybe they do), they can simply operate their Apple Music service at a loss. Forever. Spotify can't do that ..."
But Spotify can and is also operating at a loss. They are just doing it with VC money instead of their own. The numbers for 2015 were a loss of almost 200 million dollars!
That VC money is given to Spotify on the expectation that eventually Spotify will stop operating at a loss. Otherwise there is no reason to give them money at all.
If and when that expectation no longer holds, the money will stop.
But what, exactly, does Spotify bring to the table that justifies more than a couple of percent operating fee? They don't own the content; they're just middlemen. The labels / rights holders can continually raise their prices to just below (or perhaps above, if VCs want to subsidize forever) Spotify's income.
Spotify's app works at best ok (I'm on android). But even a good app plus recommendations probably gets you amazon-sized margins.
Plus, Apple has Parental Controls which despite the community railing against Spotify to get this implemented for the past 4 years(!!!), there's still no response. Shameful really considering so many people are complaining about it.
... and they tried to promote themselves as a family friendly company.
Because you don't want your 8 year old streaking monologues full of "motherf this" "f* that" "n* what?" etc. etc. in front of Grandma - it's just not couth. While that's okay in private or whatever, you just don't want to promote that that kind of language is okay in civilized company - and you certainly don't want a radio station that you listen to at work to suddenly start cussing and swearing about life.
Spotify has the biggest network advantage which gives them some power over the artists. They need to use that power now in order to fend off Apple or it's curtains for them.
I'm no expert on the streaming industry either, but I'd guess it's because Spotify has much larger numbers of casual listeners (the free tier), which provides a long-tail for popular songs that aren't new enough for "exclusives".
So it's essentially Spotify's way of saying "if you don't want our customers to listen to the album when it's new, don't rely on us for listeners when it's old".
Although these claims are going to be essentially impossible to prove. Who's to say what should or shouldn't be in a playlist, for example?
Do people actually take exclusives into account that much when picking a streaming service? It seems to me like the biggest differentiating factors would be price and familiarity, as long as the services in question had a reasonable amount of the content one wanted.
Features for me are the big ones. Currently i debate between Spotify and Google Music. I vastly prefer Spotify's social features and collab playlists.. currently using Spotify. With that said, i was using Google Music for ~5+ years due to having a large custom library which was accessible cross device.. Unfortunately Spotify doesn't support this.
Tough decisions on the features front, atleast. Exclusives and other crap.. those don't matter to me. Fwiw.
Exclusives are just a good way to get people to try out your service. It works best when someone doesn't already have a streaming subscription, and their favorite artist releases an album exclusively somewhere. You sign up to hear the album, you like the service, you decide to stick with it.
With timed exclusives they can also capture some amount of revenue from conversion of free trial users into "forgot to unsubscribe" users.
They got me with Coloring Book a few months ago. It wasn't available elsewhere, so I signed up for the free trial. Well before the free trial was over Coloring Book appeared on Spotify (my preferred platform). I prompt forgot about Apple Music until I saw a bill in my inbox. I then couldn't figure out how to unsub without googling the process, it's certainly not readily available as an option in-app (although that just might be the way Apple sometimes tends to obfuscate through streamlining).
The unsubscribing process is truely awful. I'd try them again as rumour has it they have got a lot better, but importing Spotify playlists wasn't possible early on. I'll have to look again to see if that's solved.
So Spotify is penalizing artists who opt to do an exclusive with a company whose business model doesn't give their music away for free? That just seems wrong.
Spotify is a money losing operation that artists already criticize heavily because they make pennies from it (because most users are on the free tier and ad revenue is much smaller than paid subscriptions)[1]. They have deep pocketed competitors for whom music represents an ancillary business. They're on month to month contracts with the major labels who want them to match Apple Music's higher cut [2].
Usually you take the stick over carrot approach when you have some leverage.
From what I know of the market, most of the money paid to music services goes to paying the contracts.
The main issue is that the labels are the ones which get paid the lion's share, not the music service or the artist.
I don't see why if an artist can publish directly on Apple Music they can't do it on Spotify.
Artists are usually locked by their labels with pretty bad contracts that prevent them from doing anything else on the side.
Labels often even can even get the majority of the revenue from live performances.
Publishing directly is the Tidal model and it really should be the future as it benefits the artist and the streaming provider and positions the record label as the middle man that it is.
I am not aware of any artists that "publish direct" to Apple Music. The reason that is a problem for a Spotify is because that is "biting the hand that feeds."
If you start encouraging artists to deal directly to you the streaming company, you can rest assured that when it comes time to renegotiate your licensing deal with the record labels the terms will not be very favorable or at least not as favorable as they were previously.
You mentioned that "Labels often even get the majority of revenue from live performances."
I believe what you are referring to is a "360 deal" I think these are largely the domain of the only biggest artists in the world. I could be wrong though.
I get a bad feeling about everyone in this space operating at a massive loss in an attempt to force the competition out of business by attrition. It seems like the domestic equivalent of dumping. I'm not informed enough to make a strong judgment on it, but it doesn't seem like healthy competition.
But is Apple Music operating at a loss, though? Doing so is not their modus operandi. They don't have a free tier and the only time they're not making money is during the one month trial period. On top of that, they actually do pay more to artists/labels.
Anyone else think Apple is fighting a petty war? Spotify is a solid product and instead of spending energy, money and time fighting them, they could acquire them and take on more ambitious fights.
Or they could compete in the marketplace w/ a better product, an integrated product strategy, and a long term understanding of the market and talent. In doing so, they deliver shareholder value without burning unnecessary cash.
Oh look! They're doing exactly that with exclusives.
It works both way. The producers want to be paid for their work and they've said so many times, in uncertain words. Spotify is still at the point that they rely on new signups at the free tier. Apple doesn't do free, they pay better, and they are willing to give artists the white glove treatment.
As a listener you have a choice of pay now for access or wait until it's streaming everywhere else.
I get that artists want to make more money but at the end of the day, that is simply a function of the total pot size and the money that has to be spent to get a pot that size.
Spotify, so far, has been losing money. Overall, monetizing music is just a very hard business. I feel that point is often missed by artists who want to put the blame on Spotify as if Spotify is sitting on billions in profits that could go to the artists. Apple temporarily enabling a few artists to make some extra money doesn't change the fact that music is a very hard business to make money in--as much for the broadcasters like Spotify as for the artist.
I agreed with you until you talked about exclusives which is the definition of anti-competitive. Paying labels for exclusive content is probably the largest signal that your product isn't as good as your competitors.
Spouts is good but stagnated and maybe got worse. The app doesn't have good navigation. When you have been down a rabbit hole the only way out is to hit back repeatedly 10ish times. The search is pretty sensitive to typos and misspellings. And where did the "About the artist" section go?
“Apple treated me like I was a voice of a creative community that they actually cared about,” Swift told Vanity Fair about the latter dispute, which saw Apple change its plans not to pay rightsholders for streams on its Apple Music service’s free trial shortly after she criticised them in a blog post.
“And I found it really ironic that the multi-billion-dollar company reacted to criticism with humility, and the start-up with no cash flow reacted to criticism like a corporate machine.”
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 89.9 ms ] threadI'm super happy apple music exists because it puts some movement into the space. Before it there was no real competition to Spotify.
What about Google Music (or is it Google Play Music or just Play Music or just Play under a music category? ugh)? They were earlier and have been really good especially lately. Their initial iOS app was awful but I heard it has improved. There is also Groove music (which I guess is now XBox music?) but the Apps are awful for it. I got a Groove music subscription for the heavily discounted black friday sale and stopped using it after a few weeks simply because the apps are all absolutely horrific.
They could release an electron app, but I believe it'd be an identical experience.
I'm on a desktop so I don't care about offline support, perhaps that's the feature that removes the web version from consideration for some people.
That's why they should release a proper native app.
That has worked better for me than Spotify's desktop client, which while is nice is extremely buggy.
Offline usage and media keys.
Another problem is the play music android app. It's probably the worst designed android music player. OTOH Spotify and apple music are so well designed that I consider them actually beautiful.
It has no first-party native desktop client, but...so, what, really? Its streaming content from the internet anyway, so I can't really see what the problem is with using a web client as the first-party desktop client.
(OTOH, there is at least one third-party non-web desktop client for it.)
One way to check what most users care for is to look at subscription numbers. And I couldn't find a reliable source for that. So I guess our discussion is pending until we see user numbers.
And for me, it's not at all about the user base - it's about a specific user - me. If it's not the right service for you because there's no native app luckily you have alternatives and can move on. I think it's an awesome service for 10 bucks a month.
Only really exists on mobile. Spotify exists everywhere (hardware, all mobile platforms, all gaming consoles, etc.).
Google does not give a shit about their software past the barebones experience. Nobody in my family picks up Google software unless I or my brother push them to. It's just too confusing and badly supported in general.
Huh? I use it on desktop every day. https://play.google.com/music/listen
Other than that : youtube, rdio, deezer, soundcloud, pandora, there are a lot of products in the same place.
That being said Play Music is pretty great for me because :
-It lets me upload my own mp3s without needing anything else than the folder where it needs to look for them. You can even ask the app to always monitor a specific folder for new music files. It tries to match these files with its catalogs and if they match they will be automatically added to your library instead of being uploaded. When you upload an unknown file, you can alter its tags and cover if you in Play Music and you can regroup them in Albums anyway you want. As somebody with a huge existing music files collection, many of which are not available on any service, this is a killer feature for me. I understand that it is not going to appeal to everybody though.
- The Android and desktop apps have been constantly great for quite some time. The only complaints I could form is that this orange is not really great and that on Android they should probably get rid of the Transitions. The design idea is great but the platform does not support them really well. I have seen some kinks in the app recently but they might have been caused by the Android N beta build I was using at the time.
- Most of the big music services have the same base features : albums, curated playlists, automatic radios, family plans ... Play Music has these as well for quite some time. The suggestion algorithm has been pretty good for me but that's probably very subjective. Play Music also has nice contextual suggestions based on their Songza acquisition (for example right now : it is sunday afternoon, it proposes running, pokemon, BBQ, beach, ... musics ) .
- So overall it is a great service, IMO absolutely on par with Spotify or Apple Music. The price is the same as any other music service .. but you also get 10% off on all of your Play Store apps & musics purchases and if you are in the USA, it also gives you Youtube Red (= no ads on youtube). The value proposition seems pretty insane to me compared to the other music services.
rdio and Grooveshark were competitors well before Apple/Google Music until both shuttered :(
E.g. I once indicated I liked some electronica by Marek Biliński, a Polish musician, and it took hours to stop the ensuing assault on my ears of 70's Polish pop music.
In general it took very little for their algorithm to start playing music I had no interest in, and a lot of effort to make it stop playing stuff I found awful.
Algorithmic music selection in general still seem to be in a very poor state - I've yet to find any that do great, presumably because a lot of them seem to treat it as a question of solving "people who listened to A also likes B". But it isn't. It's more a matter of "people who listened to some sequence of A,B and C, also listened to D relatively shortly afterwards without skipping/downvoting it" coupled with a lot of other checks (e.g. I might skip D even if it fits in perfectly with both my mood and A,B and C if I have heard it too often lately, or if it's a very loud/intensive track and it's late a night, and any number of othr factors).
I wonder how many of these systems try to take more factors into consideration but just aren't very good at it. And also how problematic the lack of more contextual knowledge is (e.g. I may make different selections when alone, vs. when a romantic partner vs. when with friends, even if the starting type is the same type of tracks - it doesn't mean my taste has changed). Many recommendation systems makes me vary about indicating a preference because they're not clear about how it'll be used and the ones I've used so far gives me little confidence they'll do the right thing...
Burying in the search rankings and not being featured doesn't seem like a good way to handle it. If those artists are among people's favorites if they can't find them as easily on Spotify AND if they can get exclusives with Apple, why wouldn't they just jump ship to Apple Music?
Obviously I don't understand all of the nuances of the music business so I could be completely off base here but it feels like, to me, this would have the opposite affect that they intend.
But Spotify can and is also operating at a loss. They are just doing it with VC money instead of their own. The numbers for 2015 were a loss of almost 200 million dollars!
The keyword is "forever" or at least for the next decade or two. It applies to Apple but not Spotify.
If and when that expectation no longer holds, the money will stop.
Spotify's app works at best ok (I'm on android). But even a good app plus recommendations probably gets you amazon-sized margins.
Just imagine if Amazon or Microsoft bought Spotify... instant marketshare tied in with a larger ecosystem.
... and they tried to promote themselves as a family friendly company.
So it's essentially Spotify's way of saying "if you don't want our customers to listen to the album when it's new, don't rely on us for listeners when it's old".
Although these claims are going to be essentially impossible to prove. Who's to say what should or shouldn't be in a playlist, for example?
Tough decisions on the features front, atleast. Exclusives and other crap.. those don't matter to me. Fwiw.
They got me with Coloring Book a few months ago. It wasn't available elsewhere, so I signed up for the free trial. Well before the free trial was over Coloring Book appeared on Spotify (my preferred platform). I prompt forgot about Apple Music until I saw a bill in my inbox. I then couldn't figure out how to unsub without googling the process, it's certainly not readily available as an option in-app (although that just might be the way Apple sometimes tends to obfuscate through streamlining).
Usually you take the stick over carrot approach when you have some leverage.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/04/taylor-sw...
[2] http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-contract-three...
https://medium.com/@sdotglass/apple-music-exclusives-2d5b5ed...
Artists are usually locked by their labels with pretty bad contracts that prevent them from doing anything else on the side. Labels often even can even get the majority of the revenue from live performances.
I am not aware of any artists that "publish direct" to Apple Music. The reason that is a problem for a Spotify is because that is "biting the hand that feeds."
If you start encouraging artists to deal directly to you the streaming company, you can rest assured that when it comes time to renegotiate your licensing deal with the record labels the terms will not be very favorable or at least not as favorable as they were previously.
You mentioned that "Labels often even get the majority of revenue from live performances."
I believe what you are referring to is a "360 deal" I think these are largely the domain of the only biggest artists in the world. I could be wrong though.
https://www.thebalance.com/how-360-deals-in-the-music-indust...
Oh look! They're doing exactly that with exclusives.
As a listener you have a choice of pay now for access or wait until it's streaming everywhere else.
Spotify, so far, has been losing money. Overall, monetizing music is just a very hard business. I feel that point is often missed by artists who want to put the blame on Spotify as if Spotify is sitting on billions in profits that could go to the artists. Apple temporarily enabling a few artists to make some extra money doesn't change the fact that music is a very hard business to make money in--as much for the broadcasters like Spotify as for the artist.
“And I found it really ironic that the multi-billion-dollar company reacted to criticism with humility, and the start-up with no cash flow reacted to criticism like a corporate machine.”