For anyone wanting to rage at Spotify, I'd remind you that Spotify has never actually turned a profit. They lose money on every single paid user, and even more on free users. Tl;dr of the article (sorry for the account-wall) is that Spotify is contractually obligated to give around 70% of every dollar it makes to the labels, who then eat most of it and give a few crumbs to the artists. If you want to support artists, buy their merch, their physical albums, and go to their shows. If they're independent, they may actually see some non-trivial revenue from streaming as well.
Spotify may also be contractually restricted in what level of access they can offer for free - licensing can be very messy - and they also do need to create enough incentive to actually make the paid tier worth it. Given that a month of access to essentially all music ever costs about as much as a single CD did back in the day, it feels like pretty incredible value to me, personally. Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all. If the cost of streaming or buying music is genuinely a burden, I wouldn't blame you that much for pirating, but if you can afford it, I do think the value really is there, if only to avoid the sheer hassle of pirating and managing a local library. And if you really think that streaming is just uniquely corrupt and terrible, CDs haven't gone anywhere.
But if you can easily afford to pay for music and you still refuse to, at least have the honesty to just admit that you want to get things for free and you don't care about anyone involved in creating it getting paid for it, without dressing it up as some kind of morally righteous anti-capitalist crusade. It's normal to be annoyed about having to pay for things; we all are, and we all want to get things for free. Just admit that instead of pretending your true motivation is anything deeper.
Holy shit, an actually reasonable take on Lemmy regarding subscription services. I genuinely couldn't believe what I was reading and was waiting for the "LOL, JK! Pirate everything, they don't deserve my money and fuck every ad and paid service ine the universe."
ngl, I was expecting to enjoy roasting in downvote hell, so this has been a pleasant surprise haha.
I think a lot this stuff winds up people taking the bad feeling of paying for a thing, which is course completely normal, and twisting it into them somehow being personally wronged rather than simply accepting that yeah, spending money feels bad.
That said, if there is an obvious bad guy in this story, it's pretty clearly the labels, and given how unimportant radio and traditional music marketing is becoming, I would love to see more and more artists operate independently or with small labels and see the oligopoly of the Big 3 fall apart. They may have been somewhat necessary 80 years ago, but nowadays, they simply don't provide anywhere near as much value as they suck up.
For sure. Subscriptions have to have some sort of value add, and in a world where I was king they'd be illegal otherwise. Spotify: songs you don't own are being delivered to you. Value add. Dropbox: storage you don't own is being provided to you. Value add. BMW's heated seat subscription: you already own the heaters, the controls, the vehicle, and are paying for the battery that energizes those heaters and the gasoline that charges the battery. No value add. That's just rent-seeking.
I would also even say that a show/movie subscription makes sense. Except all of the services have already preenshittified themselves to the point where it’s literally more convient to just pirate everything.
So far spotify hasn’t done that so I’ll continue happily paying for spotify even though I’m a filthy pirate. Hell, spotify could double in price and I would still be perfectly happy with the service I’m getting.
its not the subscription service that's bad its the implementation of the subscription services that suck and you 100% should pirate and adblock every piece of media you consume unless its directly profiting a small creator otherwise youre setting a precedent that 18 subscriptions should be required for me to follow a tv show.
pirating was dying down in popularity until this rise of the current shitty corporate media garbage. money is the only thing that matters on this god given earth do you really think your money is better off in a corporations mega stock with a super small portion actually being given to a creator?
and if you say more things in life matter than money then go on without money, youll be completely unable to enjoy anything. solely off the basis of youll starve because low and behold we've monetized eating and drinking. two fundamental requirements of survival.
welcome to earth where ur either bombed by powerful people or youre blackmailed by the cost of living (designated by powerful people) enjoy your stay (or die the world doesnt actually care they just want your money, and dying is pretty lucrative for funeral homes anyways)
The difference is that music streaming services actually offer a better experience to most people compared to movie/tv show streaming services for example.
Choose whatever music streaming service you prefer and you get pretty much the same huge selection of songs across the board. You can pick based on features and user experience. With movies and tv shows, most content is exclusive to a single platform. So you have to keep adding/removing subscriptions unless you want to pay north of $100 a month to have all of them at the same time. Every streaming app has a different interface and different features, and some might not work on all your devices. Piracy isn't only cheaper in this case, but actually more convenient. It's the better product, even when you leave pricing out of the equation.
Sure, some people will always resort to piracy, but there's a direct correlation between the quality of service offered and the amount of piracy.
I can completely understand tv content piracy for convenience alone (and sure, it's cheaper/almost free, that's definitely a factor), but I never even thought about replacing music streaming with pirated content, because it's just super convenient.
Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all.
This is bunk. If people pirated the record labels out of business we would have less music sure, but there will always be people who make music for the love of the craft, rather than just to line an executive's pocket.
I'm all for directly supporting artists (and I buy albums and merch directly from the band wherever possible), but let's not pretend like the people pulling the strings aren't also responsible for the shitty situation they're in.
Fuck the recording industry and how they treat artists. And I say that as a premium streaming service customer.
The amount of it would still be dramatically reduced. Those people who are making music solely for the love of it already exist today and people are perfectly welcome to listen to them; nothing is stopping them at all.
I think it's probably safe to say that the vast majority of music that is listened to today would not exist if the artists couldn't financially support themselves from it. Do you really disagree with that?
I think it's probably safe to say that the vast majority of music that is listened to today would not exist if the artists couldn't financially support themselves from it. Do you really disagree with that?
Of course not, and I clearly called out that there would be less music if there wasn't an monetary incentive to do so. But at the same time, record industry titans falling would leave a massive vacuum that would be filled by more independent artists and labels. In the end, there would be less music overall, but there would still be some way for artists to get their cut.
Industry titans aren't music, they're merely the middlemen who craft what they think the public wants to hear and leech money from artists. Them falling would be a boon to the smaller and more niche acts who don't get the chance to explode because they don't have the weight of a major label to push them into the spotlight.
If you still have to work a full time job to live, that's a lot less time available to create art. You sound like you'd expect artistic friends to give you a discount on their work "to get their name out there"
Thank you for calling this out. Also, art is not about volume. What does it matter if I can listen to 10,000 tracks that sound like bunk vs 10 tracks that touch the fabric of your being.
Also, what if you genuinely love a lot of music? We do exist.
I would feel drastically unfulfilled music-wise, if I only had around 10 songs to choose from. I listen to music way too often for that. I would absolutely start to get bored of the same songs after a bit. That's only about one album's worth.
For me personally, using a music subscription service just makes sense right now. I am very busy, so I don't have time to pirate everything anymore. I'm not saying that I wouldn't do it again if push came to shove, but I'm not at that point.
I like that I don't have to worry about things being hidden in the files. I like that I don't have to worry about suspicious websites. I like that almost everything that I want to listen to is right there, in the same place. I like that it comes with a music player. It might not be the absolute best sound quality out there, but I also don't have to sort through a ton of apps to find an app that works.
I didn’t take it literally lol. I was just stating my experience in response to someone else’s comment. If I see “1000” and “10” in the parent comment, I’m probably going to use “1000” and “10”. It would feel weird if I threw in random new numbers, I guess.
To me, all of this is more of a “you do you” thing. I’m sorry if I made it seem like I was angry or upset with you. I actually think that it’s cool that both are options, honestly. Freedom of choice, and all that.
I didn’t think you were angry anything. I just wanted to say in proportion there would still be tons of music to consume. I’m similar, I will break into a new genre even when everything starts sounding stale… except, I know of the hundreds of songs I listen to there is only so much time in the day to find new music and I go back to the stuff that really hit me.
The ideas is you can literally create thousands, hundreds, millions of songs but if the people churning them out are no talent hacks you may never find 10 songs that move you. If anything you are helping my argument.
But I first need to be able to listen to a shitload of songs to identify the ones I want to hear over and over. Without streaming services, I would be heavily restricted regarding discoverability.
Agreed, I have Spotify premium for the convenience, but I have no illusions about where that money goes, which is why I go to concerts and buy vinyl records when possible.
we have a family subscription (12€/mo.?) in our household, and i would probably not go back to pirating music anytime soon. they offer genuinely great features and from your post, they don't seem to be the bad guy here. anyway, if it's not shutting down in the next couple of months, i'll keep using it. but they do neet to get some FLACs onto there soon.
if there existed something like spotify for video streaming, i probably wouldn't even pirate movies right now.
Yeah, Spotify has supposedly been working on a lossless option, but it's been in the works for years now. Don't have a clue what the hold-up is, especially given that other services have it already. Tidal and Apple Music have it already if it's something particularly important to you.
These aren't the only options. I've gotten into Bandcamp and it's great because I can listen to an album multiple times before deciding if I want to buy it. Then when I do, I get a DRM-free FLAC copy to keep forever, and a much larger portion of money goes to the artist.
Sure it doesn't have the extreme catalog of Spotify or things like social playlists. It's very album-based (which I like personally) and takes a little more effort to choose what you listen to. But I've had no difficulty discovering new artists and great tunes.
Of course the company has problems too. The new buyer just laid off half the staff and says they won't recognize the union, so we'll see how it fares. But even if it goes under, I keep the music I bought.
Can you elaborate? I can find articles that say there have been layoffs but what does that mean for the platform and how it supports the artists? Is it basically dead and not worth using anymore? I want the large majority of my money to go to the artist not the label or platform shareholders, is there something similar to bandcamp in that regard? Don't suggest physical media please a lot of artist either don't make any or are extremely difficult to find and buy.
They were bought last year by epic games. Now they were sold to songtradr, probably because it wasn’t profitable enough for EPiC. As part of that more than half the people were let go.
They’ll want their money’s worth, so prices fo up, or in this case the percentage cut. My bet is also the enshitification is starting soon. For now it’s fine, the future, probably not. But that’s just my guess.
I seriously do not believe that companies running major online services continuously for over a decade have not made a profit. This must be Hollywood accounting.
It's not at all a coincidence that this happened at the same time interest rates were rock bottom. Lyft has never had a profitable quarter, nor has Spotify. I think Uber has had a few, but they've also heavily struggled. Netflix does well, but no other video streaming service has been profitable. Disney+ has already started to dial back on production as a way to cut costs. Reddit has been around for a long time and isn't profitable.
Capitalism isn't actually as easy as a lot of people think it is. To make sense of this, you have to realize that in extremely low interest environment like we had, the primary business objective is not profit, but rather, growth. Especially in the tech world, you're trying to sell a story to investors that you're creating an entirely new market that you're poised to absolutely dominate, and that if they simply give you money now, rather than getting some profit in the short-term, they're going to wind up owning a lot of extremely valuable shares in the next Microsoft, or Netflix, or whatever. Debt is very cheap, and so tapping into that stream of investor money doesn't cost you much at all, and you can build some cool new thing that people like a lot. The problem comes when the chickens finally come home to roost, and the investors expect to get something for their money. That is currently happening, now that debt is much more expensive and investors are much less willing to take big risks, which means that those services that were living off of investment money now need to either establish that they can actually make the numbers work or perish.
Spotify, for instance, is sitting on nearly two billion dollars of debt. Now, they're not in the worst position, because for better or for worse, the labels need some streaming services because that's simply how people consume music today, so the labels will have to keep it alive on way or another. But it doesn't change the fact that the numbers need to add up eventually. Reviewing Spotify's sheets, they're not in a terrible position though. They lost $453 million in 2022, but they also spent $1.48 billion on research and development. They've been doing a lot of development on podcasts and ML-based recommendations, which is probably where a lot of that went, and the kinds of engineers that work at Spotify don't come very cheap at all.
Now, you'd probably say that they could simply not do that and content themselves with being a perfectly adequate music streaming service, but if they announce that they're doing that, it opens a huge opportunity for a competitor to go guns a' blazing to try to develop a bunch of flashy new features to steal customers. Additionally, the labels, and indeed musicians as well, don't want music to be cheap. They want it to be valuable and so desirable that people are willing to pay a decent amount for it. Musicians aren't exactly selfless saints either; no one really is. Plenty of artists, of all genres, could easily make their music completely free to access, play free concerts, and personally cover all associated costs with doing that. But they don't, because at the end of the day, everyone wants a slice of the pie.
So they would rather take in more debt at an unfavorable time than to maintain a profitable leading business or even to limit research investment to a sustainable level? That really makes it sound like being unprofitable is a choice rather than an inevitable reckoning with a fundamental unsustainability of the business.
Yet ultimately they make up for those excesses by squeezing the customers more.
If investors, knowing all that you do for this long, continue to approve this approach, then it seems like it's itself a mechanism to try to extract more out of a market that could have been stable. In which case referring to it as an inevitability to be blamed on customers who aren't really paying its worth doesn't seem quite accurate. After all, if they were, the investors would be seeking to expand in some manner, right? Which means these businesses aren't allowed to simply be profitable, and customers will always be on the hook for that.
But still they can't be quite so unprofitable to be unsustainable or they would just fall apart. If hollow hype was enough to keep investors in, we wouldn't see tech fads come and go so quickly. Seems to me that most tech companies don't get to survive their "unprofitability" for so long.
That really makes it sound like being unprofitable is a choice rather than an inevitable reckoning with a fundamental unsustainability of the business.
Yeah, for a while it is a choice. Finding an audience, finding a customer base, finding product/market fit, all of these things take time. But after a while that choice gets taken away. If Spotify doesn't start making money soon, its investors probably won't stick around much longer.
Seems to me that most tech companies don't get to survive their "unprofitability" for so long.
A massive subscriber number absolves a lot of sins. Not unprofitability, though; at least not for very long. Hence .
It's still not a good justification for making the free version completely useless. Those limitations are just ridiculous; I miss the days where paying for a product only meant getting rid of ads and gaining some exclusive features. Maybe they should also reduce the label share instead of always making the customers pay more. I refuse to pay a subscription for non-trivial things like music; they can still make money off me with ads when I use the free version. They can increase their profits with other features like they are already doing by allowing people to buy merch from Spotify.
Those days were built on the backs of venture capital. They were never sustainable. Now you're on the other end, and it's either deal with more ads and more restrictions, or pay up and get rid of all of that (or use something else).
I assure you, Spotify would love nothing more than to reduce the label share - it's not as if they love giving away almost all the money they make - but they also have next to no real leverage, since the labels have all the power here.
Again, Spotify loses money with every single free user. There may exist some balance point where they can actually reach financial stability by converting a large chunk of them into paying users, and I don't think can really blame them for doing what they can to achieve that.
That doesn't mean it doesn't suck to lose features you liked, but an individual not liking something doesn't make in immoral.
I doubt major labels can live without Spotify as much as Spotify need major labels. They can push users to pay for Spotify by adding more cool features for payed users instead of removing fundamental features of the free version. Forcing people to pay is never the right solution
The labels could murder Spotify in a day if they decided to simply stop offering them licenses and went exclusive with Apple, Amazon, Tidal, or anyone else.
The labels of course do get quite a lot of money from Spotify so they don't have much of a reason to do that, but again, they really are the ones that hold the cards.
This is business. The only right solution is the one that gets them closer to financial stability. They have been developing features for the paid tier and have been exploring other revenue streams (hence the deep dive into podcasts), but ultimately, they have absolutely zero obligation to give away content for free.
Ok, forget about reducing the labels share. I think the other points i made about finding new ways to generate more profits are still valid and better than making the free version almost useless. If spotify wasn't profiting from free users too they would shut down the free version completely
Spotify isn't profiting at all; that's the entire problem.
It's banking on the hope that offering a limited free tier will encourage some amount of users to become paid subscribers, while offsetting the cost of operating that at least a little bit by serving ads. It's unfortunate that you can't make sufficient revenue by just operating a free tier that's truly sufficient, but those numbers quite clearly do not work.
I mean, are you saying that you would be complaining less if Spotify simply killed the free tier? I rather doubt that.
You said that spotify isn't profiting at all then explained how they profit a bit for it. I'm sure they would make more profits by finding alternative way to make money like artist subscriptions than from pushing people to subscribe by making the free version almost useless and yes I would complain less if Spotify killed the free version. I only use spotify on desktop to support artists by playing a playlist of artists I want to support on repeat with almost inaudible volume. All music I really listen to is locally either from music i bought or pirated music
What a waste or resources. It is doing stuff like this that forces the companies to put restrictions on the users. Please stop playing music you are not listening to, for everyone's sake.
I used to not mind paying for Netflix because it was better than trying to pirate things. That has changed 😅. It's still easier to pay for spotify premium than try to pirate music. However, I would be cautious as they may try to make additional changes to the premium tier (price hikes without actual useful additional features) that would make it not worth it. Looking at the year in review that spotify does every year, and I listen to a TON of spotify between work and personal use I probably listen to 12+ hours a day so it would take a lot for me to ditch it but not impossible.
This is ridiculous. Spotify has been effectively doing dumping as an economic policy, and now that they have a sizeable portion of the market share, they're turning to enshittification to make a profit. I see nothing defensible in that. The fact that they can't turn a profit means that they're trying to drive out competitors with less VC money.
We as consumers are not obligated to ensure healthy profit margins for random megacorps, and especially not ones engaged in anti-competitive behaviour, and it's embarrassing to defend that. I've never used Spotify and I never will, but the idea that they lose money on every user tempts me. I second the other guy in the comments: If it isn't economically viable, it shouldn't exist. It's just wannabe monopolism otherwise
Fundamentally, no industry can survive on VC money forever, so there simply has to be some kind of crunch eventually, either by reducing the product, increasing the price, or both.
We as consumers are not obligated to ensure healthy profit margins for random megacorps
I mean, this is a nice sentiment in the abstract, but in actuality, we kind of are if we want the product to continue to exist. Spotify is not going to be able to operate at a loss forever, and while there is a discussion to be had about what level of profit is warranted, I don't think it's a particularly wild thing to say that the answer is at least non-negative profit.
If it isn’t economically viable, it shouldn’t exist.
What I genuinely don't understand is how you can simultaneously say that Spotify shouldn't exist if it's not economically viable, and at the same time, you'll also criticize them for any attempt to make it economically viable. If Spotify shouldn't offer the free tier because it's not viable, and you'll also attack them if they stopped offering it, what do you actually want them to do?
I mean, this is a nice sentiment in the abstract, but in actuality, we kind of are if we want the product to continue to exist
Except what made the product attractive to the consumer are the very things making it unprofitable. Minimal ads, unlimited streaming of any and all music you want. Without that might as well stick to terrestrial radio, at least that doesn't use up your mobile data.
What I genuinely don't understand is how you can simultaneously say that Spotify shouldn't exist if it's not economically viable, and at the same time, you'll also criticize them for any attempt to make it economically viable. If Spotify shouldn't offer the free tier because it's not viable, and you'll also attack them if they stopped offering it, what do you actually want them to do?
The point you dismissed as a "nice sentiment in abstract" applies here: it's completely irrelevant to the consumer. If Spotify dies we will just go to Apple/Amazon/Youtube Music, and if they all die that's then iTunes and MP3s get to make a comeback.
Spotify's profitability is Spotify's problem, no-one else's.
Yes we'll all go back to those services and be worse off for it. The reality is, nobody outside of this congregation of websites wants to go back to downloading mp3s. Truthfully, most people on here don't either. I have a TB SD card that's over half full with flacs and I still use Spotify because the features it has are more convenient than setting all of that up myself, let alone trying to pirate older music that's relatively obscure. You ever felt what it's like to sit on 6 different torrents for the same album for 2 weeks with no seeds?
I was a young child during the napster days, and by the time my parents had anything better than dial-up iTunes had already taken off.
Maybe I'm less into music than most people, maybe most are music enthusiasts who actually take full advantage of all the music, all the time, for a low monthly rate thing but i mostly listen to the same small handful of artists with only the occasional breakout towards newer things. If Spotify and YouTube Music were both to die all I'd have to do is spend a larger amount upfront but then I'd be back to pretty much the status quo, and without the monthly bill. So for me any sort of significant changes in price or quality of service completely negate the sole reason I bother with music streaming and that is convenience and cost.
There’s a lot to the features that Spotify provides. First, there’s the social side: collaborative playlists, “jam sessions” that let your friends add songs to the queue, Spotify wrapped, etc.; then there’s the functionality side: I can play a song on my laptop and pick up right where I left off on my phone, or even switch to my phone while it’s still playing, the recommendations are great and, increasingly, people are turning to Spotify-curated playlists rather than making their own or selecting songs individually. All of those are things you can’t replicate easily outside of Spotify, with the exception of recommendations.
And remember, music is incredibly present in people’s lives. It’s almost always in the background, people use it to study, to drive, to cook, to work, to party, to hang out with friends, to destress, and for a myriad other reasons. Not everybody’s a music enthusiast, per se, but people listen to a lotttt of music.
I’m not saying you should use Spotify, but if Spotify and its competitors just disappeared, a lot of people’s lives would be worse for it
If it isn't economically viable, it shouldn't exist.
If you're claiming this as an axiom, I disagree. Public transit isn't economically viable. Homeless shelters and soup kitchens aren't economically viable. Increasingly in the modern world unbiased news isn't economically viable. If you're handicapped in some way you're probably not economically viable. Honestly the human race isn't really economically viable. Some things are objectively good and should exist at any price.
Now, I'm not under any delusion that Spotify is one of those things. Lol nope. But the statement on its own isn't really a defensible one, and I think only the most strident Randian libertarians would try.
If you're not claiming this as an axiom, and just saying that if Spotify in particular isn't economically viable it shouldn't exist, then I can probably get on board with that. But for my family's mental health, I think a service like Spotify should. Or the return of a plurality of online mp3 storefronts.
Who would have thought that good old dumping at a large scale and inadequate economic regulation would lead to companies basically "starving" themselves in a Mexican standoff?
And it's not just Spotify it's a major chunk of the tech companies, because no one learned anything from the dotcom crash.
Yeah this isn't Spotify's fault really. It's a cringe over prostitution of the industry with increased server cost, record studios asking more in premiums, and growing pains from increased salaries. It's unfortunate we can't ever just let something exist for the sake of general good without the greedy asking for their take when it becomes popular.
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Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all.
That is probably the stupidest thing I've ever read.
That's more or less the problem (one of many problems I suppose). Companies seem to think it's a good business model to burn money collecting a user base and then turn all their free users into paying users down the line.
it's like this to eliminate competition, any alternative has to fund marketing costs + unsustainable pricing, while Spotify will be running their ponzi scheme, effectively leveraging their market position.
I'm absolutely not defending Spotify or any other capitalist entity, but profit by no means constitutes a reason to exist. I know plenty of people who have never turned a profit and in fact accrued debt who are far more valuable than any executive at Spotify.
I just don't give a shit if Spotify or any major labels exist. I buy records and merch from independent labels run by people that actually have a soul.
https://medium.com/brain-labs/why-spotify-struggles-to-make-money-from-music-streaming-ba940fc56ebd
For anyone wanting to rage at Spotify, I'd remind you that Spotify has never actually turned a profit. They lose money on every single paid user, and even more on free users. Tl;dr of the article (sorry for the account-wall) is that Spotify is contractually obligated to give around 70% of every dollar it makes to the labels, who then eat most of it and give a few crumbs to the artists. If you want to support artists, buy their merch, their physical albums, and go to their shows. If they're independent, they may actually see some non-trivial revenue from streaming as well.
Spotify may also be contractually restricted in what level of access they can offer for free - licensing can be very messy - and they also do need to create enough incentive to actually make the paid tier worth it. Given that a month of access to essentially all music ever costs about as much as a single CD did back in the day, it feels like pretty incredible value to me, personally. Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all. If the cost of streaming or buying music is genuinely a burden, I wouldn't blame you that much for pirating, but if you can afford it, I do think the value really is there, if only to avoid the sheer hassle of pirating and managing a local library. And if you really think that streaming is just uniquely corrupt and terrible, CDs haven't gone anywhere.
But if you can easily afford to pay for music and you still refuse to, at least have the honesty to just admit that you want to get things for free and you don't care about anyone involved in creating it getting paid for it, without dressing it up as some kind of morally righteous anti-capitalist crusade. It's normal to be annoyed about having to pay for things; we all are, and we all want to get things for free. Just admit that instead of pretending your true motivation is anything deeper.
Holy shit, an actually reasonable take on Lemmy regarding subscription services. I genuinely couldn't believe what I was reading and was waiting for the "LOL, JK! Pirate everything, they don't deserve my money and fuck every ad and paid service ine the universe."
Thank you!
ngl, I was expecting to enjoy roasting in downvote hell, so this has been a pleasant surprise haha.
I think a lot this stuff winds up people taking the bad feeling of paying for a thing, which is course completely normal, and twisting it into them somehow being personally wronged rather than simply accepting that yeah, spending money feels bad.
That said, if there is an obvious bad guy in this story, it's pretty clearly the labels, and given how unimportant radio and traditional music marketing is becoming, I would love to see more and more artists operate independently or with small labels and see the oligopoly of the Big 3 fall apart. They may have been somewhat necessary 80 years ago, but nowadays, they simply don't provide anywhere near as much value as they suck up.
Some subscriptions make sense for the consumer, or at least justifiable.
IMO a music service like Spotify is absolutely one of them.
Turning heated seats in a subscription? Burn in hell.
For sure. Subscriptions have to have some sort of value add, and in a world where I was king they'd be illegal otherwise. Spotify: songs you don't own are being delivered to you. Value add. Dropbox: storage you don't own is being provided to you. Value add. BMW's heated seat subscription: you already own the heaters, the controls, the vehicle, and are paying for the battery that energizes those heaters and the gasoline that charges the battery. No value add. That's just rent-seeking.
And speaking of rent…
I would also even say that a show/movie subscription makes sense. Except all of the services have already preenshittified themselves to the point where it’s literally more convient to just pirate everything.
So far spotify hasn’t done that so I’ll continue happily paying for spotify even though I’m a filthy pirate. Hell, spotify could double in price and I would still be perfectly happy with the service I’m getting.
its not the subscription service that's bad its the implementation of the subscription services that suck and you 100% should pirate and adblock every piece of media you consume unless its directly profiting a small creator otherwise youre setting a precedent that 18 subscriptions should be required for me to follow a tv show.
pirating was dying down in popularity until this rise of the current shitty corporate media garbage. money is the only thing that matters on this god given earth do you really think your money is better off in a corporations mega stock with a super small portion actually being given to a creator?
and if you say more things in life matter than money then go on without money, youll be completely unable to enjoy anything. solely off the basis of youll starve because low and behold we've monetized eating and drinking. two fundamental requirements of survival.
welcome to earth where ur either bombed by powerful people or youre blackmailed by the cost of living (designated by powerful people) enjoy your stay (or die the world doesnt actually care they just want your money, and dying is pretty lucrative for funeral homes anyways)
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The difference is that music streaming services actually offer a better experience to most people compared to movie/tv show streaming services for example.
Choose whatever music streaming service you prefer and you get pretty much the same huge selection of songs across the board. You can pick based on features and user experience. With movies and tv shows, most content is exclusive to a single platform. So you have to keep adding/removing subscriptions unless you want to pay north of $100 a month to have all of them at the same time. Every streaming app has a different interface and different features, and some might not work on all your devices. Piracy isn't only cheaper in this case, but actually more convenient. It's the better product, even when you leave pricing out of the equation.
Sure, some people will always resort to piracy, but there's a direct correlation between the quality of service offered and the amount of piracy.
I can completely understand tv content piracy for convenience alone (and sure, it's cheaper/almost free, that's definitely a factor), but I never even thought about replacing music streaming with pirated content, because it's just super convenient.
This is a type of comment i hoped would die with reddit. They are fucking awful.
This is bunk. If people pirated the record labels out of business we would have less music sure, but there will always be people who make music for the love of the craft, rather than just to line an executive's pocket.
I'm all for directly supporting artists (and I buy albums and merch directly from the band wherever possible), but let's not pretend like the people pulling the strings aren't also responsible for the shitty situation they're in.
Fuck the recording industry and how they treat artists. And I say that as a premium streaming service customer.
The amount of it would still be dramatically reduced. Those people who are making music solely for the love of it already exist today and people are perfectly welcome to listen to them; nothing is stopping them at all.
I think it's probably safe to say that the vast majority of music that is listened to today would not exist if the artists couldn't financially support themselves from it. Do you really disagree with that?
Of course not, and I clearly called out that there would be less music if there wasn't an monetary incentive to do so. But at the same time, record industry titans falling would leave a massive vacuum that would be filled by more independent artists and labels. In the end, there would be less music overall, but there would still be some way for artists to get their cut.
Industry titans aren't music, they're merely the middlemen who craft what they think the public wants to hear and leech money from artists. Them falling would be a boon to the smaller and more niche acts who don't get the chance to explode because they don't have the weight of a major label to push them into the spotlight.
Making money through the art, not making art for the money
If you still have to work a full time job to live, that's a lot less time available to create art. You sound like you'd expect artistic friends to give you a discount on their work "to get their name out there"
It's a quote from a rap song.
Thank you for calling this out. Also, art is not about volume. What does it matter if I can listen to 10,000 tracks that sound like bunk vs 10 tracks that touch the fabric of your being.
But how do you find those 10 if you don't listen to 10000?
Also, what if you genuinely love a lot of music? We do exist.
I would feel drastically unfulfilled music-wise, if I only had around 10 songs to choose from. I listen to music way too often for that. I would absolutely start to get bored of the same songs after a bit. That's only about one album's worth.
For me personally, using a music subscription service just makes sense right now. I am very busy, so I don't have time to pirate everything anymore. I'm not saying that I wouldn't do it again if push came to shove, but I'm not at that point.
I like that I don't have to worry about things being hidden in the files. I like that I don't have to worry about suspicious websites. I like that almost everything that I want to listen to is right there, in the same place. I like that it comes with a music player. It might not be the absolute best sound quality out there, but I also don't have to sort through a ton of apps to find an app that works.
You take me too literally. Just as there is not only 10000 songs there would be more than 10 songs that do it for ya. So that's not even a concern.
I didn’t take it literally lol. I was just stating my experience in response to someone else’s comment. If I see “1000” and “10” in the parent comment, I’m probably going to use “1000” and “10”. It would feel weird if I threw in random new numbers, I guess.
To me, all of this is more of a “you do you” thing. I’m sorry if I made it seem like I was angry or upset with you. I actually think that it’s cool that both are options, honestly. Freedom of choice, and all that.
I didn’t think you were angry anything. I just wanted to say in proportion there would still be tons of music to consume. I’m similar, I will break into a new genre even when everything starts sounding stale… except, I know of the hundreds of songs I listen to there is only so much time in the day to find new music and I go back to the stuff that really hit me.
The ideas is you can literally create thousands, hundreds, millions of songs but if the people churning them out are no talent hacks you may never find 10 songs that move you. If anything you are helping my argument.
But I first need to be able to listen to a shitload of songs to identify the ones I want to hear over and over. Without streaming services, I would be heavily restricted regarding discoverability.
Agreed, I have Spotify premium for the convenience, but I have no illusions about where that money goes, which is why I go to concerts and buy vinyl records when possible.
we have a family subscription (12€/mo.?) in our household, and i would probably not go back to pirating music anytime soon. they offer genuinely great features and from your post, they don't seem to be the bad guy here. anyway, if it's not shutting down in the next couple of months, i'll keep using it. but they do neet to get some FLACs onto there soon.
if there existed something like spotify for video streaming, i probably wouldn't even pirate movies right now.
I personally would never pay for music it it weren't for Spotify.
Yeah, Spotify has supposedly been working on a lossless option, but it's been in the works for years now. Don't have a clue what the hold-up is, especially given that other services have it already. Tidal and Apple Music have it already if it's something particularly important to you.
Supposedly they have a hifi service on the way that will offer lossless streaming, potentially pretty expensive though - https://www.techhive.com/article/790882/spotify-hifi-release-date-when-is-spotifys-lossless-tier-coming.html
These aren't the only options. I've gotten into Bandcamp and it's great because I can listen to an album multiple times before deciding if I want to buy it. Then when I do, I get a DRM-free FLAC copy to keep forever, and a much larger portion of money goes to the artist.
Sure it doesn't have the extreme catalog of Spotify or things like social playlists. It's very album-based (which I like personally) and takes a little more effort to choose what you listen to. But I've had no difficulty discovering new artists and great tunes.
Of course the company has problems too. The new buyer just laid off half the staff and says they won't recognize the union, so we'll see how it fares. But even if it goes under, I keep the music I bought.
You'll hate to hear what is currently happening with Bandcamp.
"This one time at band camp…"
Can you elaborate? I can find articles that say there have been layoffs but what does that mean for the platform and how it supports the artists? Is it basically dead and not worth using anymore? I want the large majority of my money to go to the artist not the label or platform shareholders, is there something similar to bandcamp in that regard? Don't suggest physical media please a lot of artist either don't make any or are extremely difficult to find and buy.
They were bought last year by epic games. Now they were sold to songtradr, probably because it wasn’t profitable enough for EPiC. As part of that more than half the people were let go.
They’ll want their money’s worth, so prices fo up, or in this case the percentage cut. My bet is also the enshitification is starting soon. For now it’s fine, the future, probably not. But that’s just my guess.
As for alternatives, I’ve got none.
I seriously do not believe that companies running major online services continuously for over a decade have not made a profit. This must be Hollywood accounting.
It's not at all a coincidence that this happened at the same time interest rates were rock bottom. Lyft has never had a profitable quarter, nor has Spotify. I think Uber has had a few, but they've also heavily struggled. Netflix does well, but no other video streaming service has been profitable. Disney+ has already started to dial back on production as a way to cut costs. Reddit has been around for a long time and isn't profitable.
Capitalism isn't actually as easy as a lot of people think it is. To make sense of this, you have to realize that in extremely low interest environment like we had, the primary business objective is not profit, but rather, growth. Especially in the tech world, you're trying to sell a story to investors that you're creating an entirely new market that you're poised to absolutely dominate, and that if they simply give you money now, rather than getting some profit in the short-term, they're going to wind up owning a lot of extremely valuable shares in the next Microsoft, or Netflix, or whatever. Debt is very cheap, and so tapping into that stream of investor money doesn't cost you much at all, and you can build some cool new thing that people like a lot. The problem comes when the chickens finally come home to roost, and the investors expect to get something for their money. That is currently happening, now that debt is much more expensive and investors are much less willing to take big risks, which means that those services that were living off of investment money now need to either establish that they can actually make the numbers work or perish.
Spotify, for instance, is sitting on nearly two billion dollars of debt. Now, they're not in the worst position, because for better or for worse, the labels need some streaming services because that's simply how people consume music today, so the labels will have to keep it alive on way or another. But it doesn't change the fact that the numbers need to add up eventually. Reviewing Spotify's sheets, they're not in a terrible position though. They lost $453 million in 2022, but they also spent $1.48 billion on research and development. They've been doing a lot of development on podcasts and ML-based recommendations, which is probably where a lot of that went, and the kinds of engineers that work at Spotify don't come very cheap at all.
Now, you'd probably say that they could simply not do that and content themselves with being a perfectly adequate music streaming service, but if they announce that they're doing that, it opens a huge opportunity for a competitor to go guns a' blazing to try to develop a bunch of flashy new features to steal customers. Additionally, the labels, and indeed musicians as well, don't want music to be cheap. They want it to be valuable and so desirable that people are willing to pay a decent amount for it. Musicians aren't exactly selfless saints either; no one really is. Plenty of artists, of all genres, could easily make their music completely free to access, play free concerts, and personally cover all associated costs with doing that. But they don't, because at the end of the day, everyone wants a slice of the pie.
So they would rather take in more debt at an unfavorable time than to maintain a profitable leading business or even to limit research investment to a sustainable level? That really makes it sound like being unprofitable is a choice rather than an inevitable reckoning with a fundamental unsustainability of the business.
Yet ultimately they make up for those excesses by squeezing the customers more.
If investors, knowing all that you do for this long, continue to approve this approach, then it seems like it's itself a mechanism to try to extract more out of a market that could have been stable. In which case referring to it as an inevitability to be blamed on customers who aren't really paying its worth doesn't seem quite accurate. After all, if they were, the investors would be seeking to expand in some manner, right? Which means these businesses aren't allowed to simply be profitable, and customers will always be on the hook for that.
But still they can't be quite so unprofitable to be unsustainable or they would just fall apart. If hollow hype was enough to keep investors in, we wouldn't see tech fads come and go so quickly. Seems to me that most tech companies don't get to survive their "unprofitability" for so long.
Yeah, for a while it is a choice. Finding an audience, finding a customer base, finding product/market fit, all of these things take time. But after a while that choice gets taken away. If Spotify doesn't start making money soon, its investors probably won't stick around much longer.
A massive subscriber number absolves a lot of sins. Not unprofitability, though; at least not for very long. Hence
.
I definitely did NOT post a comment, read this comment, then delete my comment for feeling foolish.
Jk i did.
Great take 12/10
It's still not a good justification for making the free version completely useless. Those limitations are just ridiculous; I miss the days where paying for a product only meant getting rid of ads and gaining some exclusive features. Maybe they should also reduce the label share instead of always making the customers pay more. I refuse to pay a subscription for non-trivial things like music; they can still make money off me with ads when I use the free version. They can increase their profits with other features like they are already doing by allowing people to buy merch from Spotify.
Those days were built on the backs of venture capital. They were never sustainable. Now you're on the other end, and it's either deal with more ads and more restrictions, or pay up and get rid of all of that (or use something else).
I pay for albums i can afford by buying them and pirate the rest
I assure you, Spotify would love nothing more than to reduce the label share - it's not as if they love giving away almost all the money they make - but they also have next to no real leverage, since the labels have all the power here.
Again, Spotify loses money with every single free user. There may exist some balance point where they can actually reach financial stability by converting a large chunk of them into paying users, and I don't think can really blame them for doing what they can to achieve that.
That doesn't mean it doesn't suck to lose features you liked, but an individual not liking something doesn't make in immoral.
I doubt major labels can live without Spotify as much as Spotify need major labels. They can push users to pay for Spotify by adding more cool features for payed users instead of removing fundamental features of the free version. Forcing people to pay is never the right solution
The labels could murder Spotify in a day if they decided to simply stop offering them licenses and went exclusive with Apple, Amazon, Tidal, or anyone else.
The labels of course do get quite a lot of money from Spotify so they don't have much of a reason to do that, but again, they really are the ones that hold the cards.
This is business. The only right solution is the one that gets them closer to financial stability. They have been developing features for the paid tier and have been exploring other revenue streams (hence the deep dive into podcasts), but ultimately, they have absolutely zero obligation to give away content for free.
Ok, forget about reducing the labels share. I think the other points i made about finding new ways to generate more profits are still valid and better than making the free version almost useless. If spotify wasn't profiting from free users too they would shut down the free version completely
Spotify isn't profiting at all; that's the entire problem.
It's banking on the hope that offering a limited free tier will encourage some amount of users to become paid subscribers, while offsetting the cost of operating that at least a little bit by serving ads. It's unfortunate that you can't make sufficient revenue by just operating a free tier that's truly sufficient, but those numbers quite clearly do not work.
I mean, are you saying that you would be complaining less if Spotify simply killed the free tier? I rather doubt that.
You said that spotify isn't profiting at all then explained how they profit a bit for it. I'm sure they would make more profits by finding alternative way to make money like artist subscriptions than from pushing people to subscribe by making the free version almost useless and yes I would complain less if Spotify killed the free version. I only use spotify on desktop to support artists by playing a playlist of artists I want to support on repeat with almost inaudible volume. All music I really listen to is locally either from music i bought or pirated music
What a waste or resources. It is doing stuff like this that forces the companies to put restrictions on the users. Please stop playing music you are not listening to, for everyone's sake.
Okay, I'm not convinced you understand the difference between profit and revenue, so, with respect, I'm gonna move on here.
I used to not mind paying for Netflix because it was better than trying to pirate things. That has changed 😅. It's still easier to pay for spotify premium than try to pirate music. However, I would be cautious as they may try to make additional changes to the premium tier (price hikes without actual useful additional features) that would make it not worth it. Looking at the year in review that spotify does every year, and I listen to a TON of spotify between work and personal use I probably listen to 12+ hours a day so it would take a lot for me to ditch it but not impossible.
This is ridiculous. Spotify has been effectively doing dumping as an economic policy, and now that they have a sizeable portion of the market share, they're turning to enshittification to make a profit. I see nothing defensible in that. The fact that they can't turn a profit means that they're trying to drive out competitors with less VC money.
We as consumers are not obligated to ensure healthy profit margins for random megacorps, and especially not ones engaged in anti-competitive behaviour, and it's embarrassing to defend that. I've never used Spotify and I never will, but the idea that they lose money on every user tempts me. I second the other guy in the comments: If it isn't economically viable, it shouldn't exist. It's just wannabe monopolism otherwise
Fundamentally, no industry can survive on VC money forever, so there simply has to be some kind of crunch eventually, either by reducing the product, increasing the price, or both.
I mean, this is a nice sentiment in the abstract, but in actuality, we kind of are if we want the product to continue to exist. Spotify is not going to be able to operate at a loss forever, and while there is a discussion to be had about what level of profit is warranted, I don't think it's a particularly wild thing to say that the answer is at least non-negative profit.
What I genuinely don't understand is how you can simultaneously say that Spotify shouldn't exist if it's not economically viable, and at the same time, you'll also criticize them for any attempt to make it economically viable. If Spotify shouldn't offer the free tier because it's not viable, and you'll also attack them if they stopped offering it, what do you actually want them to do?
Except what made the product attractive to the consumer are the very things making it unprofitable. Minimal ads, unlimited streaming of any and all music you want. Without that might as well stick to terrestrial radio, at least that doesn't use up your mobile data.
The point you dismissed as a "nice sentiment in abstract" applies here: it's completely irrelevant to the consumer. If Spotify dies we will just go to Apple/Amazon/Youtube Music, and if they all die that's then iTunes and MP3s get to make a comeback.
Spotify's profitability is Spotify's problem, no-one else's.
Yes we'll all go back to those services and be worse off for it. The reality is, nobody outside of this congregation of websites wants to go back to downloading mp3s. Truthfully, most people on here don't either. I have a TB SD card that's over half full with flacs and I still use Spotify because the features it has are more convenient than setting all of that up myself, let alone trying to pirate older music that's relatively obscure. You ever felt what it's like to sit on 6 different torrents for the same album for 2 weeks with no seeds?
I was a young child during the napster days, and by the time my parents had anything better than dial-up iTunes had already taken off.
Maybe I'm less into music than most people, maybe most are music enthusiasts who actually take full advantage of all the music, all the time, for a low monthly rate thing but i mostly listen to the same small handful of artists with only the occasional breakout towards newer things. If Spotify and YouTube Music were both to die all I'd have to do is spend a larger amount upfront but then I'd be back to pretty much the status quo, and without the monthly bill. So for me any sort of significant changes in price or quality of service completely negate the sole reason I bother with music streaming and that is convenience and cost.
There’s a lot to the features that Spotify provides. First, there’s the social side: collaborative playlists, “jam sessions” that let your friends add songs to the queue, Spotify wrapped, etc.; then there’s the functionality side: I can play a song on my laptop and pick up right where I left off on my phone, or even switch to my phone while it’s still playing, the recommendations are great and, increasingly, people are turning to Spotify-curated playlists rather than making their own or selecting songs individually. All of those are things you can’t replicate easily outside of Spotify, with the exception of recommendations.
And remember, music is incredibly present in people’s lives. It’s almost always in the background, people use it to study, to drive, to cook, to work, to party, to hang out with friends, to destress, and for a myriad other reasons. Not everybody’s a music enthusiast, per se, but people listen to a lotttt of music.
I’m not saying you should use Spotify, but if Spotify and its competitors just disappeared, a lot of people’s lives would be worse for it
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If you're claiming this as an axiom, I disagree. Public transit isn't economically viable. Homeless shelters and soup kitchens aren't economically viable. Increasingly in the modern world unbiased news isn't economically viable. If you're handicapped in some way you're probably not economically viable. Honestly the human race isn't really economically viable. Some things are objectively good and should exist at any price.
Now, I'm not under any delusion that Spotify is one of those things. Lol nope. But the statement on its own isn't really a defensible one, and I think only the most strident Randian libertarians would try.
If you're not claiming this as an axiom, and just saying that if Spotify in particular isn't economically viable it shouldn't exist, then I can probably get on board with that. But for my family's mental health, I think a service like Spotify should. Or the return of a plurality of online mp3 storefronts.
Who would have thought that good old dumping at a large scale and inadequate economic regulation would lead to companies basically "starving" themselves in a Mexican standoff?
And it's not just Spotify it's a major chunk of the tech companies, because no one learned anything from the dotcom crash.
As a pirate, I approve of this take.
Yeah this isn't Spotify's fault really. It's a cringe over prostitution of the industry with increased server cost, record studios asking more in premiums, and growing pains from increased salaries. It's unfortunate we can't ever just let something exist for the sake of general good without the greedy asking for their take when it becomes popular.
Spotify thanks you for defending our platform and more importantly the investment portfolios of our shareholders. Share this email for one free month of spotify premium.
based take
Of course I just want things for free
That is probably the stupidest thing I've ever read.
Happy to have made an impact on you!
This is such a lame excuse. If the company never turned a profit - they shouldn't exist anymore. Not shittify their service till nobody uses it.
But their service is great if you pay for premium. Which is fine in my book.
A hacked client on the free tier is also a decent experience.
This month's expenses:-
I think I'm winning.
The point is they haven't turned a profit even with people having premium. So what's the reason for them to exist
This is the case with a lot of companies. Facebook didn't turn a profit for 10 years or something that sounds equally crazy.
That's more or less the problem (one of many problems I suppose). Companies seem to think it's a good business model to burn money collecting a user base and then turn all their free users into paying users down the line.
Think drug dealers. They wanna be that.
The analogy to a drug dealer is on point. They're relying on users being hooked on their dopamine outlet.
I'm still waiting on porn to pull the rug and take away my good times
it's like this to eliminate competition, any alternative has to fund marketing costs + unsustainable pricing, while Spotify will be running their ponzi scheme, effectively leveraging their market position.
I'm absolutely not defending Spotify or any other capitalist entity, but profit by no means constitutes a reason to exist. I know plenty of people who have never turned a profit and in fact accrued debt who are far more valuable than any executive at Spotify.
I just don't give a shit if Spotify or any major labels exist. I buy records and merch from independent labels run by people that actually have a soul.
Don't use it if you don't like it.
Hurr durr can't criticize cause I like it hurr durr
None of those options are new. It's how Spotify free always worked.