Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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

To be fair, not just a Spotify problem--all apps are like that, aren't they?

I don't have that problem with my Spotify app - but then, like the desktop app, it's at least two years old (it even has starring, woo).

I know you can clear an app's cache on Android, but I don't remember if you can do it on an iPhone.

wait how many tracks do i need to listen to to ensure spotify are making a loss

Aren't they already losing money?

Prompted to install a new version this morning. Still won't load my local files. C'mon Apple Music!!!

Does spotify publish a change log for these new versions? Would love to see the features they remove each time instead of just stumbling upon them and upping my rage randomly throughout the day.

Google music lets you manage (remove) downloads. Not sure if apple will allow this.

Apple will apparently not carry matador, rough trade, xl, 4AD on streaming for the moment
http://beggars.com/group/pressrelease/90/with-regards-to-apple-music

No Scott then :(

nah, Creed is on Wind-up

lool so no adele or jack white then, sweet deal for your customers apple

it is sort of nuts that they didn't get that shit worked out prior to launch... they've had years to discuss it!
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3043547/spotifys-new-look-signals-its-identity-shift