"Sponsored recommendations": I pay for Spotify Premium, and yet somehow I'm still the product?
"Sponsored recommendations": I pay for Spotify Premium, and yet somehow I'm still the product?
I opened Spotify this morning to be greeted by a modal popup with a "sponsored recommendation".
Why am I seeing ads if I'm already paying for the premium plan!? 😑
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Never understood why anyone would want to rent their music in the first place. As good as the service may be when you sign up for it, you know it will eventually turn to shit as they're trying to monetize every last cent out of it, and then your only choices are to endure the shit or to quit the service and be left with nothing.
Convenience, pure and simple.
I used to maintain a gigantic Google Play Music library and used that to listen to music. I also had a hard copy locally and used Winamp.
Then Google killed GPM and there was no real good alternative at the time so I picked up Spotify and got easily hooked on the ability to listen to anything I wanted at any time. No ripping, no uploading, no buying, no hassle, no nothing. I've discovered so much music through the recommendation engine. Some are bigger bands I just hadn't listened to, some are obscure.
But the point is, for the cost of a single CD per month I was able to listen to any CD from any band whenever I wanted. It was an extremely easy decision to sign up.
But the point is, for the cost of a single CD per month I was able to listen to any CD from any band whenever I wanted. It was an extremely easy decision to sign up.
Yeah but my point is, you pay but you don't actually get those albums. So if after some years Spotify turns to shit you don't have anything to show for when you cancel the service, and even though you have paid the equivalent of dozens of albums your music collection is gone.
Also, I don't buy anyting near an album per month, so even on that level it doesn't make sense to me. I do have a large collection, but I'm not really digging much current music anymore so if I buy two albums per year, it's a lot.
I listen to music on Spotify like 8 hours per day every day. I listen to all sorts of music too. I don't want to own every song I listen to, but I want to be able to rapidly access a library of songs and playlists that I select and the service allows me to do that. To say you don't understand why someone would pay is being a little obtuse. I share a family plan with five other people, cuts the cost significantly.
It doesn't sound like it would be a great service to pay for given your needs. But keep in mind these are services, saas, there is no expectation that I, as a customer, will take any of it to the grave with me, and I'm not like... unaware of that fact.
What I get in return is a growing library and the ability to listen to just about anything at no additional cost, some nice features like auto playing similar music after an album or playlist ends, and what I consider a perk of not having a physical or digital library to care for to repurpose that time as I see fit.
Sure, it would be a hugely sad day if Spotify fully fucks me, and there's plenty I don't like. But that risk is built into my decisioning, and the value is absolutely there.
Yeah I mean, I am not paying to own it, you know? I don't think of it in those terms at all. I'm paying for access to Spotify's library. The product is the access. It removes a ton of decisionmaking overhead for someone like me whose primary enjoyment comes from listening to a huge variety of music and listening to as much new (or new to me) music as I can get my hands on.
I wasn't buying an album per month before, but that also means I wasn't discovering music at anywhere near the rate I can today. Before I had to make the decision to spend 10-15 bucks on an album that maybe I wouldn't even like. Now the barrier to giving a new album a shot is essentially zero. For me that is just so cool.
So I think it comes down to what you enjoy and what your music habits are. If you're confident in what you like, don't find music discovery to be something worth paying a fee to improve, and want to listen to a few albums a year on repeat... Then yeah it's a bad value proposition. But for me, it's an astonishingly good value. And to be clear, I still do buy albums for bands I really enjoy because I want to fully support the artists. But there are lots of bands id never even have given a chance if I hadn't been able to first discover them as part of a service I already pay for.
Never understand why anyone would want to buy their music in the first place. I got tired of music really quickly, so buying would be waste of money for me, since, after some time, I won't be listening to music I bought. For me, renting music is better than buying. And sometimes I would just like to find some new music, since I'm tired of listening to the same old s*it. Just give me something random, something new, I newer heard before. But that's just me, and I believe this is not for anyone.