Spotify - anyone heard of it?

So with Spotify I still can't even filter/search my local files since the desktop downgrade. It's been months and it's absurd.

As I understand it, with Apple Music I'll be able to have all of my local tracks in the cloud along with access to all of Apple Music's catalog. This is the killer aspect for me, to be able to listen to all of my music and all of a streaming catalog on the go - and to be able to properly see them on my laptop.

Is there something I'm missing about the other services that is equivalent?

From http://www.apple.com/music/

http://i.imgur.com/1uKDhew.png

I suspect (it's just a guess) that the iTunes software works loads better on a Mac than on a PC. Or not. I mean, it must work well enough for it to have hung around as long as it has, but I absolutely hate it (on a PC).

Oh, that doesn't look promising. ITunes does in fact work fine on my Mac, but the interface has gotten way too clumsy as the software has taken on new roles.

Ooops, just saw Sonos announced that Apple Music won't be available. I'm out.

“Sonos will not have Apple Music on it at launch but we fully expect to support them when they’re ready to focus on the home listening experience. Right now they’re fully focused on mobile .”

I suspect (it's just a guess) that the iTunes software works loads better on a Mac than on a PC. Or not. I mean, it must work well enough for it to have hung around as long as it has, but I absolutely hate it (on a PC)

Yeah I have a Mac and never quite understood the hatred this program gets (I can understand a lot of complains aimed at Apple's way of doing things in general though) until a friend who's on a PC tried to explain to me how iTunes worked on his computer. It seemed like a totally different program, and one that was very shitty by the sounds of it. That was a few years ago so maybe iTunes PC has gotten better but either way if it really functioned like he told me I understand people hating it. Weird that they would make something that shitty.

iTunes is immensely better on a mac.

Why is Apple even bothering to put this on iTunes? Surely there's more value in signing a few exclusive mega-deals, watching as music starts disappearing from Spotify, and using it to drive sales of iPhones?

Hope that doesn't happen

They're saying it won't be available "at launch"

Yeah, but I read the rest of their statement -- "we fully expect to support them when they’re ready to focus on the home listening experience" -- as a diplomatic way of saying don't hold your breath. People have been asking Apple to make iTunes Radio available through Sonos for two years. Since Beats Music was already available through Sonos I thought it was a possibility for the rebranded service, but if they're withdrawing support now I suspect they don't plan to reintroduce it. The thing with Sonos is that you access all of your audio -- on-demand streaming, radio, podcasts, local music, etc. -- through the Sonos app (whether desktop or mobile), and Apple generally seems wary of giving up that control over the user experience.

As I understand it, with Apple Music I'll be able to have all of my local tracks in the cloud along with access to all of Apple Music's catalog. This is the killer aspect for me, to be able to listen to all of my music and all of a streaming catalog on the go - and to be able to properly see them on my laptop.

Is there something I'm missing about the other services that is equivalent?

I've been using Google Play Music to do this for years

iTunes on a PC is bad like spotify on anything. That bad.

xpost, ok. I've been spotify for so long that I haven't really looked at anything else.

iTunes sucks on a mac too. So much.

How?

It cannot recognize compilations correctly (at least sometimes), it seems determined to get rid of list view, it's larded up with videos and movies, the iPhone UI tool is a joke, wireless syncing works only sporadically.

Exactly how is itunes on a PC different from on Mac?

i still hate iTunes on my mac

itunes on a pc sounds like pc music on a mac

It cannot recognize compilations correctly (at least sometimes), it seems determined to get rid of list view, it's larded up with videos and movies, the iPhone UI tool is a joke, wireless syncing works only sporadically.

― schwantz, Tuesday, June 9, 2015 1:55 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If it isn't recognizing compilations, edit the metadata to indicate it is comp. I find that a lot of people's problems with iTunes ultimately boil down to a poorly maintained library.

In regards to list view, yes that is annoying, but if it was spotify, they would remove it completely and never give it back instead of just burying it in the options.

Agree with the wireless syncing though.

It loads slow and sucks up a lot of CPU juice. If you're opening iTunes, it's about the only thing you'd better be doing on your PC until you close it.

x-post

In this case, the metadata says comp, but it stubbornly refuses to group them together in Album view.

TBF, I did the downgrade thing on Spotify, so it's not like I love their latest app. I'm just skeptical when people think Apple's going to jump into a space where it doesn't have a good track record (cloud anything) and somehow fix all of the problems that Spotify has been working on for 5 years.

I'm hopeful that Apple's service will light a fire under Spotify to work on features that I want, though!

I've found that issues with compilation sorting in iTunes is often due to the "album artist" metadata. That needs to be blank for the comp to be sorted with the others at the end of the list, but it often has "various" or the name of the artist who put the comp together in there. Clear out that entry and you should be ok.

Made the Album Artist a space, and that worked! Thanks!

iTunes wins! Death to Spotify!

if you're just getting out of streaming entirely, there are probably several media players that are significantly less shitty than itunes

At this point, iTunes is for mixtapes and my own music only.

Nobody using Plex? Since they updated their music capabilities a couple months ago it's been fantastic for me. It now basically works like Google Music/iTunes without all the cloud nonsense inbetween & no max nr of tracks limit.

They took away the copy and paste feature to create playlists.

That is insane.

Ha, oh wait.

I couldn't get this to work, and it looked like it wasn't working for anyone else either.

But I just pasted in the top part of the window, where the playlist name is, instead of down in the lower part, where the song titles appear (and where I used to always paste).

Anyway. Howya doin'?

http://pando.com/2015/06/12/is-spotify-doomed-because-of-apple-music-no-spotifys-been-doomed-from-the-start/

"And finally, while $9.99 a month may be an enormously good bargain for access to 20 million songs — especially considering the average price for a single compact disk in 2000 was $14.04 — that amounts to an annual rate of $120, which is far more than consumers have ever spent on music. At the height of the industry, Americans only spent $28 a year on recorded music."

Hmm, $28 seems low. Let's see what the actual link says, shall we?

"At the 1999 peak of the recorded music market, about $40 billion of recorded music was sold. How much did the average consumer spend per year on recorded music? Hundreds of dollars? Nope. At the time, according to the music trade group International Federation for the Phonographic Industry, across the total 18-and-over population (both across many countries or individually within one), the average amount spent came to $28 per consumer.

But that includes people who did not buy any music that year. If we look at just the consumers who bought music, they spent $64 on average that year."

Ah, yes, that includes people WHO DID NOT BUY ANY MUSIC THAT YEAR, which makes the number completely irrelevant and you guys are terrible journalists.

that number is not completely irrelevant.

if apple music makes that number (the average spent on music by all people) go up then it seems literally the most relevant statistic possible.

looking only at people who spent something other than zero is not useful. the number or fraction of people who spent something other than zero has changed.

what if in 1990 it was one dude spending $100m and no one else spending anything. then your number would by $100m, but the average including everyone else would be $0.33 for a 300m population. do you think the music industry pays more attention to the first number or the second number?

it's like calculating average household income but excluding all the households in which no one has a job. i mean you can do it, but it's probably not what you're trying to measure.

i found the article a little confused so mea culpa if i got this wrong but it seems like the reason spotify is doomed is bc they aren't yet profitable and that's bc (this author theorizes) the music industry is too powerful to allow spotify to make the revenue it needs to succeed?

But the whole thrust of this piece is "how much are people who buy music willing to spend on buying music?" It's not being treated as a general expense.

Kind of miss the torrenting days at this point

Not me. Keeping up a proper ratio was hard work, because I was downloading stuff nobody else was downloading from me!

yes the article is a bit confused/ing

i think the general points are 1) freemium is bad for profitability since most people pay $0 2) the 'music industry' have played their hand well by refusing to kill spotify (and freemium) yet so they have an alternative when negotiating with apple, but 3) they want apple's approach to win.

The case Ek keeps making is that the ad-supported free tier in Spotify leads to more paid subscriptions. Apple believes this too, of course, thus the three-month free trial they are offering everybody. This is the same thing Beats tried on their own (via an AT&T deal). So the only real argument here is about how long the free trial period should be. Apple thinks it should be 3 months, although it's not clear whether that's just an intro offer for while the service is new. Beats thought the free trial should be 14 days, unless you signed up with AT&T, in which case you got 90 days. Google and Tidal both think it should be 30 days. Spotify thinks it should be as long as it takes. At the moment you can also get a 3-month barely-paid trial of Spotify Premium for $.99. People keep portraying this as a philosophical issue, but I think it's actually just a practical one. Everybody is testing price points and discounts and levels and special offers to see how people react. And Spotify subscriber growth got dramatically faster after we expanded the ad-supported level on mobile, so it looks like a pretty sane course at the moment, businesswise. (You can't judge profitability by current Spotify results, since we're deliberately expanding ahead of revenues.)

But if you want a moral dimension, note that Apple is apparently not paying any royalties during their trial period, whereas Spotify pays royalties for all listening. So it'll be interesting to see how much unpaid streaming of, e.g., Taylor Swift gets generated by Apple Music during free trials of a service with "no free option". (And Pandora and YouTube pay lower rates than Spotify already.)

The time it would take me to recreate my S playlists in Apple music is enough to keep me with S.

"as long as it takes" and "x days" are very different

But if you want a moral dimension, note that Apple is apparently not paying any royalties during their trial period, whereas Spotify pays royalties for all listening.

funny how that's not been mentioned

That is a dick move by Apple.

Sorry if this a newbie question, but is it known which of the streaming services pays the most to the artist / label?

Because $10 a month seems very cheap to me. I would pay double if it meant that much more would go to the artist.

unless you're a mega star, you're not making money from spotify. $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream

To pick a random example, take Courtney Barnett, who I'd consider a somewhat successful emerging artist. You can see stream counts for her top 10 songs in the Spotify client, from which you can estimate that her double EP and album have combined for somewhere on the order of 25,000,000 streams, which would be worth somewhere around $150,000-$200,000 in Spotify payments to her label (5/6ths) and her publishing company (1/6th).

How much of that money gets to her depends on her label/publishing deals. But it's real money, at least. And remember that Spotify still represents a pretty small fraction of the overall streaming industry, and streaming is a very small piece of the overall music industry.

Great example, thanks Glenn

I feel like my math is probably wrong, but using $175,000 from the example equates to about $1 per 142 streams. Could that be right?