Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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?

It would match with what brimstead said

Also I'm surprised Courtney B is that popular

Right, the published figure is a range from $.006/stream to $.084. (http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained) I usually just simplify to $.007 for rough estimates. So ~150 streams = $1. Billboard treats 1500 streams as the equivalent of an album sale, so that's about the same.

This is often the point where people say "Wait, it takes 1500 streams to equal an album sale, but I bought a lot of albums that I didn't play 1500 times!"

But the dynamics of streaming are wildly different than the dynamics of album listening. You didn't play your copy 1500 times, sure. Actually, this is songs, not albums, but you might not have played your 10-song album 150 times, either. But in streaming, you don't have to buy the album. All the people who didn't buy your album might still stream some of its songs. If one of your songs gets added to a popular playlist, it could get streamed 100,000 times in a single day. Rachel Platten's "Fight Song" has been streamed almost 8 million times (for >$50,000 already), and it doesn't even have an album you can buy. "Uptown Funk" has been streamed about 350,000,000 times, which is worth well over $2 million. And that's just from Spotify.

That's all v interesting but have you changed your brand colour? The green is looking slightly bluer this morning.

^^^ just came here to post this! I like the bluey green!

But are stars back???

thats really all i want. it was my fav thing about spotify

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/06/15/its-just-a-color/

"Spotify changed the color of its icon and it’s driving people crazy"

fwiw, I'm a fan of the yellower green. This branding update is DOGSHIT ;)

old color >>>

was beginning to think I'd somehow developed sudden-onset colorblindness until I actually clicked and realized I just hadn't gotten the update

Coca-Cola has a signature shade of red. T-Mobile has a signature shade of pink. Spotify has (had?) a signature shade of green. Time has shown that you can fuck around with the typeface, shape or flatness of your logo and people will adjust, but if you change the color of it, then people get totally discombobulated. This is Branding 101.

i know this isn't how it works but i like to imagine that the team responsible to returning ctrl+f functions to local files search have instead been hard at work changing the color

lol

There was a time when the logo was kind of intentionally battered looking - had some blemishes on it or something

Android still has the old logo, I feel like a second-class citizen

"overripe avocado"

Anybody try this? When I hit "more" button to choose more artists I "love" it presents me with the likes of Derulo and Skrillex; nice idea though

https://spotify-tasterewind.com/

tried that, and it's terrible in countless ways, but mostly i was wondering why ralph tresvant repeatedly showed up among the relatively small list of artists i'm able to "love" to get this thing started. kanye, drake, hozier, avicii, skrillex and ... ralph tresvant???

Yeah, I think that Taste Rewind thing wasn't actually supposed to be announced yet. There's some intermittent problem that results in some people getting an un-personalized list of artists to pick from (just the most popular), instead of ones you've actually played. They're working on it.

That would explain it!

Example of why the new brand color sucks:

http://i.imgur.com/IVO9mgvl.jpg

Sayin' it needs a white background?

Apparently, Spotify's design group referred to the old color as "broccoli," but whatever they called it, it stood apart from most other app icons (especially on iOS).

If that was broccoli, this is mint chocolate chip.

I'm have OCD about storage space and my usage on my stupid phone. That's why it kills me that there's no way to clear the cache. No way to remove what you downloaded last week but decided you don't need this week. You're stuck with it until you delete and reinstall!

yep. so i delete and reinstall about once a month.

Right. And then you have to re-download the stuff you still want. Ehhhh