8mo ago

Spotify has raised prices for the second time in a year, with no new benefits, after its CEO sparked outrage by claiming the cost of creating 'content' is 'close to zero'

www.techradar.com Spotify announces price hike, right after CEO enrages music fans by claiming the cost of creating 'content' is 'close to zero'

The latest price hike couldn't have come at a worse time

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innovate its product features
What. It's meant to stream music. Tf do you mean?
- The bad Ai dj. The car thing they rolled back. The new logo that's the same as the old one, but now border. The cache that causes you to hear the same ten songs multiple times in a week.
  
  the playlist saved for offline playback that will still try to connect to the internet for like 30 seconds when you open it while actually offline. the Discover Weekly playlist that will serve you the song that you've marked as "not interested" over and over and over and
  
  The UI that gets progressively worse with each update, ruining what was perfectly fine before. The attempts to create the audio focused equivalent of TikTok.
  
  The way shuffle constantly shuts itself off even when set within the settings to be the default. The shitty Smart Shuffle that adds in songs that break up my playlists terribly. The way it plays the same song again the first time you enable shuffle and hit next.
  
  Yall are noting not even the reason why I went to Apple Music: no ability to actually consistently sync an offline library across devices, your own files.
  
  The "repeat" option that activates itself is probably the most frustrating bug. I can't recall the last time I legitimately wanted to listen to a song on repeat but it enable itself very often.
  If I could simply remove the feature I would.
  
  That’s never happened to me
  
  I use Tidal and get annoyed because the shuffle clearly has a recency bias to it, and it keeps trying to recommend show tunes to me in my Daily Discovery, and the suggested albums for me has become considerably worse since the last update, but everything i hear about what Spotify has been doing has made me glad i switched over a couple years ago.
  
  How good is tidal? Is its catalogue as good as Spotify?
  
  I've recently switched from Spotify to Tidal and I'm happy with it...
  
  Yeah, get a trial and see though.
  
  Tidal does have higher bitrate songs, also atmos and sony's 360 audio and when done right the spacial audio sounds nice. Amazon music is decent too and it comes with prime.
  
  The cache part pisses me off. I'm fucking paying you to stream me music. Not the same fucking shit over and over and over again.
  
  I really don't get it. Users have been begging for a true random shuffle for years. It's not a hard thing to implement.
  
  True random shuffle would be a terrible idea. No one wants the same track showing up multiple times in a row, which would not be uncommon in true random shuffle.
  
  I think the idea is that the play order for the entire playlist is shuffled on each loop, so you play all songs in one order, then it shuffles, and you play all songs again but in a different order.
  
  ^this - why is it so hard to implement sigh
  
  I disagree that that's what it means, IMO "shuffle" explicitly means each track exactly once. Pedantry aside, what I meant was a truly randomized order when you shuffle a playlist. It's a major critique of Spotify among users and has been for a very long time.
  
  You can make a truly random shuffle that doesn’t do that in like five pibes of code. This is the most pointless objection to random shuffle that I’ve ever seen.
  
  Lines of code. Lines. Not pibes.
  In unrelated news, I hate autocorrect. Pibes is not a fucking word.
  
  I mean, not really. This is actually a non-trivial topic, and true random is a really bad label for what someone actually wants out of a shuffling algorithm.
  See the following engineering blog post on the subject: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/
- If anything, they've taken features away from people lately. The quality is still shit. Lossless is still nowhere to be seen. Free users are losing options too. Yet they're making record profits, and jacking up the price
  
  Spotify actually doesn't make that much profit, if any.
  But the record labels are major shareholders and definitely influence the pricing structure. Spotify is essentially a marketing frontend for the record industry.
  
  I am literally looking at their financial report for 2024 Q1 and it shows a profit.
  
  They’re reporting 1.00 billion in gross profit as of Q1 2024 so yeah, they make money. It’s kind of impossible to compare much though since they’re the only freestanding music competitor that’s popular.
  The closest comparison I can make is using Apples reported figures of making around $9.2 billion in revenue for its 93 million user base.
  Meanwhile Spotify is making around 2.63 billion in revenue for its near 3x subscriber base estimated around 240 million. So I wouldn’t say they’re not making money, but maybe you can see why they think they can squeeze a lot more. Best to just unsubscribe honestly, they’ll keep doing this
  
  So they’re leaving a lot of money on the table and getting criticized for their greed? I’m not sure how that’s a coherent position.
  
  This is why they have record profits. They attack at both ends. Strip features, increase prices.
- AI generated music based off your likes and listening. It lines up with his statements. There was no innovation here. The same as every "disruptor" technology that just cheapified everything and one it was ubiquitous attempt to remove the core of the business.
- They did add audiobooks.
  Though the interface for audiobooks sucks, so I hope they improve it.
  
  The last thing I ever wanted from Spotify was audiobooks or podcasts. We've had excellent apps available for several years already, we don't need half assed bloat added to (very poorly) replicate the same features
  
  The part is what drives me mad. Podcasts and audiobooks are not that hard to do properly. You could very easily separate them into distinct apps or at least a special tab that acts like a proper player. Instead audiobooks are basically albums.
  There's a shuffle button.
  On an audiobook.
  
  Nah, what's worse is that it's only 15(!) hours per month!
  
  Which for most people would give you a week of audiobooks to listen to in your commute to work.
  
  Sure, but it also only counts book time. If you listen 2x it's only 7.5 hours.
  
  Yup this is what irks me most. I don't think of audio books and music in the same context. Why the fuck are they mashing them together? Wrapped includes podcasts.....
  
  It's the dumb goal of tech bros to create an "everything app" that does everything you want.
  
  Without podcasts I am not sure I'd still use Spotify
  
  Why not use a free/cheap pocketing app designed for it specifically? All the podcast apps I've tried are far better than spotify. UI-wise at least.
  
  Their podcast and audiobook integration has been so sloppy.
- They haven't ever been profitable with just streaming music.

249 comments