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Spotify is raising the price of its single-account premium plan for the first time since 2011 and hiking other services as well
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- Title
- Spotify raises premium subscription price for millions
- Published
- Jul 24 2023
Of all the price hikes recently, this one is still worth it I think.
A good library and ability to make playlists and a good UX for saving offline for flights and places without data is all I need. 0 interest in podcasts etc. Spotify is still a solid and reasonably priced service.
And the way they do that is by paying fuck all to the people whose content they stream out. I keep saying please pirate my music if the alternative is to pay Spotify for it.
Apparently their split is 70/30, which seems a little high these days (IIRC standard is closer to 15%). It’d be nice if they could accept a smaller cut, somehow. Not sure how much a bit of bandwidth, payment processing, and a recommendation system is worth, though.
The argument against Spotify that most musicians have is less about the total amount of the split, but how the payment structure benefits record companies and large artists over smaller or independent ones. The way per stream payments are calculated and the way that contracts set those rates creates a system where millions of streams (not hyperbole, that's the actual scale needed) are required to make similar amounts of money to what artists used to be able to make from a small dedicated fanbase. This is at the same time as Spotify replaces the methods artists already depended on and small fanbases are not aware that their favorite artists receive almost none of their monthly subscription.
A more equitable method would be that the redistribution portion of each subscription is only given to the artists the subscriber listened to that month. Unfortunately this means that large artists would get a smaller share making any such platform less attractive to them, and large artists are the ones that bring the most people to a platform.
I personally prefer to spend my music budget on Bandcamp because I know the reality is that no one could make a living making the music I like with current streaming models. This obviously comes with some pretty big convenience costs though so I understand why its not a popular decision.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJr_TVbJYcU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXudOLStaXA
100% Agree. The split doesn't matter if what's getting split is pennies.
According to https://soundcamps.com/spotify-royalties-calculator/
100,000 Streams/plays of a song + 70/30 split + worldwide fans/audience
= $166 (!!!)
(Note: this extremely low amount is for the artist’s total amount before labels, management & distributors take their commission.)
Literally buying a song for 99 cents is equal to streaming it 500+ times
There is no way for artists to actually survive on those numbers. That definitely is more insulting than piracy in my opinion. Hell, buy a patch or a pin or some piece of merch, and the band is getting an infinitely higher amount of money from you than they ever will from you in a lifetime of streams
Couldn't have put it better myself. My band's music has been listened to upwards of 15,000 times in the 4 years we've had material on Spotify. Last week I cashed out £80 for all of those streams. Eighty pounds. Eight zero. Some rough calculations suggest that in order for every member of the band to make minimum wage, we would need to be generating about 25m streams every year.
Spotify tells me that roughly 10% of that 15,000 streams are unique listeners. If each of those listeners paid £1 for each of our 5 singles, we still wouldn't have enough to make a living at music with, but we'd be £7,500 better off, and able to churn that money back into things like hiring a van to do a tour, recording an album, paying a manager or agent, paying for promotion and press... All of which is stuff which then helps you get more work, more sales, more streams, and more money.
Instead, all of our listeners are on Spotify, and we get pennies, and are constantly funnelling our own money in practice, merch, travel, recording, mastering, publishing... It's ridiculous. I don't have any illusions about being able to make it "big" or whatever. But it would be nice to have my hobby project at least be self-fucking-sustaining.
So as a plea to anybody who reads this and who has bands that they like the music of: please find a way to buy their music, and not just stream it. If they're on Bandcamp, buy it there (preferably on a Bandcamp Friday). iTunes and Amazon are also available, if less good for artists. But if you get value from their work, please, please, please: pay them for it.
Thanks for this inside perspective, 0d_billie.
Out of curiosity: do you have comparable data for any of the other streaming providers for your band? Are there any better options, or is the whole model broken?
The overwhelming majority of our streams came from Spotify, it seems like our audience doesn't really use much else to listen to music. Anecdotally I hear that Apple Music is better for artists (going as high as $0.01 per stream, what extravagance!), but I don't personally have the data to support that.
Ultimately, the whole model is broken though. Even at Apple's rate you'd need to listen to a single track 100 times to equal one purchase of the same song. Spotify's average for all artists is something like $0.003 per stream, so you're looking at 300-400 streams to get the same as one person purchasing it, which is unrealistic to the point of insult.
Sadly I don't see this changing any time soon. The cat is out of the bag, streaming wise. It's going to be very difficult to go back to getting people to buy the music they listen to, if not completely impossible. Part of the problem as I see it isn't even financial. It's that streaming completely devalues music in the ears of the listener. Once upon a time (not even that long ago) you had to deliberately choose what to listen to, and usually listen to the whole thing in order. You could curate your own experience much more. But now we just outsource that process to an app with an algorithm, and feed in a mood or a vibe and let Spotify take over. There's no cognitive effort required any more, beyond "skip track." To break the stranglehold streaming has, you first have to convince listeners to once again shoulder that mental effort (such as it is) of knowing what you like, what you have in your library, and what you want to listen to at that moment. But because Spotify (et al.) have managed to relegate music to a background commodity that you barely have to think about once you hit "shuffle playlist", it's just not going to happen.
Out of curiosity, shouldn't that beef be between musicians and ASCAP/BMI/SESAC? They're negotiating (and
bloodsuckingtaking their cut of what they get) for the musicians.I'll fully admit that I have an adversarial hatred those organizations after having to deal with them on the other side.
My parents had a restaurant for 30 years and we'd have bands play off and on over the years . One day in the early 2000s we got a call from ASCAP saying that we owed them money for music for that year. We were told that it didn't matter that we hadn't had a band in over 3 years at that point in time. They claimed that surely someone had sang "Happy Birthday" and I said, actually, no, we pay for the song on the jukebox (that we already were paying a music license for). That didn't matter.
They used a formula set up for what to charge. We had 100 seats available per the fire marshall so it was based on seating. We had a phone, so they charged us per seat for "hold music" even though we never in 30 years had a phone capable of hold music. They charged us per seat for having a radio in the kitchen (we'd listen to Gator games, Buc's games and occasionally baseball) because people in the dining room might be able to hear it. We were charged 2x per seat for karaoke (once for the singing of the lyrics and again for the lyrics appearing on the screen) even though we weren't doing karaoke at the time. They demanded a cut of our cover charge (which we never had charged). They charged us for x amount of band performances based on some other formula for the year (that we didn't have that year). That first year, all in all, I want to say it came out to around $900. Oh, sorry but the minimum is $1200 so you'll be paying that. Why? Because fuck you, that's why.
Unshockingly, BMI called us up 2 weeks later to the day for the same shakedown.
Over the years I'd get angrier and angrier at their calls and would ask more and more questions and find new ways to treat them like shit.
-How can you justify "Achy Breaky Heart" as worth more than a human life? (Fines were something like $200k per song while airlines were paying out something like $160k if someone died in a crash--an argument I learned in the Napster days). "I don't deal with that side of things" OK, but how do YOU justify it?
-You say you are owed 35% of my cover charge (if I charged one), are you willing to hand out fliers or check IDs to earn that money? "No"
-What if I employed a musician with 100% their own works? They would collect on the musician's behalf and said musician could go to them for their payment.
-What if said musician wasn't a member? They would have to join before payment could be rendered.
-How do you know how much money to give Shania Twain over, say, Journey? "We have a complex formula for that" (yeah, right)
-Why aren't ring tones considered a "public performance" like singing around the campfire? (this was around the time they had tried to go after the Girl Scouts for singing) "No comment"
Since we were already paying for the licenses we started having bands again on Saturday night, Karaoke on Wednesday and open jam sessions on Sundays. There wasn't a single band that I spoke to in over 10 years who were happy with ASCAP/BMI.
And it wasn't just us. I had a good friend who owned a local talk radio station. Ninety percent original content from local hosts with maybe an hour of syndicated shows a day. He had to pay them musical rights as well--for TALK RADIO. Remember that 100% original material part earlier? They charged him for royalties to his own jingles on his own ads. Since he was a radio station they charged differently than they charged us so his fees were substantially higher. He showed me the papers but when they did that he signed up as a member to get his payments on the money they collected in his name. They paid him back less than 20% of what they charged him as a radio station--and that wasbefore the membership fees he had to pay as an artist.
There were no legitimate or feasable options, either. Our choices were pay close to 10 thousand or more per year to a lawyer to prove our innocence to save having to pay a few thousand a year or hope they didn't somehow find a way to fine us $250,000 for a song overheard in our building.
The flipside is that it curbs piracy and a lot of people will stream music they'd never buy. In all the time that iTunes was around I spent maybe $100 total on it; I'd just pirate a ton of music because I hated Apple/iTunes and I'd occasionally buy an album I was really interested in (and I bought a lot of them used which means no money to the artists anyway).
Since I started using Spotify like 10 years ago I have pirated a grand total of one album (Dre's Compton, since it was a Tidal exclusive originally). So artists are definitely making more money off of me than they would have before.
A stream is not even close to equivalent to a sale. I used to listen to tons of songs on the radio and see their videos on TV. I almost never bought any of them, even in some cases where I liked the song and enjoyed it every time it came on. Just for perspective, if someone had 10,000 streams on Spotify, that's like having your music played on the radio once and only once in a major market years ago. I doubt they got paid much for one play then either.
Sure, it may curb some piracy, but since the royalties are so low, I find it nearly equivalent to piracy. It's just industry-sanctioned piracy with DRM on top. Both are ways of enjoying media while paying most artists effectively nothing.
I think overall it conditions the general public to get used to a new norm that is bad for artists, and to feel like because it's legal, it's better or something. For some people it may keep them from buying music, so for every bit of music streamed that would have been pirated, there's a piece of music streamed that could have been purchased.
I'm not 100% anti-streaming, I use it occasionally, but I supplement that with buying music and merch too. And it's great for people that can't afford to buy music. Trying to reconcile all of this is a tough problem, and I suppose the wall I constantly bang into comes down to capitalism (it's starting to feel like a thought-terminating cliche but still feels true here). It is strictly because artists need to turn their expression into income that these problems are created and tough to solve.
I just wish the industry and the situation with paying artists wasn't so broken, where streaming is now "the way" of listening to music and pays so very little.
It's so twisted that I would find buying a band t-shirt and pirating their album to be ethically superior to streaming their music.
But it isn't nothing, it's something. The way I engaged with music before was giving artists pretty much nothing except when I went to live shows (which I did) and bought merch (which I did). Nowadays that's how a lot of musicians make the real cheddar.
I think that's a fair take; at the same time, this 'new norm' is far more preferable for almost all consumers. Artists may struggle to make a lot off streaming, but at the same time, streaming allows them to have worldwide reach and access to almost 500 million users on Spotify alone who may be recommended their music -- instead of just having to put it out in the aether and advertise, or play shows to hope word spread, or get their music on the radio, TV through music videos etc.
Music used to be VERY expensive, looking back. For example here is a NYT article from 1995 talking about the cost of CDs - they quote the usual price for a CD for popular acts at $16.98 USD ($34 today), which is 100x what it costs to press the CD. And that's in the US -- CDs were more expensive pretty much everywhere else. How many people do you know that would pay $34 for a single album on CD today? I don't know any. If it's a special vinyl release then maybe, and people will pay quite a bit for those, but that's a very different market that is as much about art/display/collecting - maybe even moreso - as it is about listening to the music.
It's a tough situation because there's no silver bullet and I think that comes across in your comment too, so it's not like we are on completely different pages. I do love Bandcamp and I've bought albums through it, usually for a small amount as a lot of bands do PWYW sometimes/all the time. But Bandcamp feels like the Web 1.0 alternative these days, when you want to connect with and support a band in a more intimate way - it's not the standard.
The reality is that if we didn't have streaming, I'd listen to WAY less music. When I listen to the radio these days, it's talk radio. I don't watch cable TV, so I don't sit down and watch music videos for hours like I did when I was a kid. I'd be exposed to less, I'd listen to less. I suppose one could make the argument "well, you'd listen to the radio/watch more music videos if you couldn't just stream music on Spotify" -- and that's a fair argument, but me personally, I'm an old fuck and I'd just spend the money somewhere else. Another problem is that music is now competing with people's "listening time" with podcasts. It always competed with talk radio, but podcasts are on a whole other level, with many shows having hundreds of episodes available on demand.
Yeah, we truly agree far more than we disagree- and as I feel like I implied, a lot of what I was describing was an ideal that I aim for- not always reality- and I'm not completely against streaming as a consumer. Especially when costs are rising for everything around us, I don't blame myself or others for using streaming when it's convenient, affordable, accessible, etc.
I buy what I feel I can comfortably afford (merch and music) and I stream everything else (or use it to try new bands/albums I discover before I buy them, etc)
I guess what gnaws at me on these topics, is the fact that the system and incentives are twisted enough that what's good for the consumer is often not good for, or even nearly hostile to the artist.
My problem is that I listen to and collect so much music, that both libraries are quite large- and I'm trying to stream what I don't own, instead of acquiring it on the high seas like I used to... though that does make it more difficult to listen to stuff I don't own in my car (because I do not want to use mobile devices / bluetooth / etc in my car, only MP3s... and you have to own those in some way to put them on a USB stick...)
To add to your comment, we are overvaluing how much music means to an average user. Personalized music systems have been available for decades. Still, it didn’t make a dent in how people consume music in a general sense until iPod became a thing. We had amazing stereo systems being sold, walkmans, good headphones and let’s be honest, headphone technology isn’t exactly a state secret. Their design stayed the same for most parts. Meaning, the public could reach to proper audio systems so that they could enjoy their music yet it wasn’t this common to see someone rocking their headphones daily. So much so that music had to be produced with mono compatibility and small speakers in mind to keep those songs sound good on an average system. Because, to an average listener, spending this much money on music was unfathomable.
Then, a couple of decades pass. Suddenly a small device arrived with the ability to fit hundreds of songs inside. But its greatest selling point wasn’t even this. Because at the time we already had computers that could copy your CDs to your hard drive and compress it to much smaller mp3 files. The biggest factor was iTunes. You didn’t have to pay for the extra 12 songs you were never going to listen to. You didn’t have to deal with going to the store to buy it. Essentially, it was a system that made you the owner of your music with a %90 discount on all your effort and money and it was a legal alternative. At the time this was a big fuck you to the greedy music industry. Of course, it caught on, because people for the first time, people felt like they were paying the value they thought their favourite songs deserved.
I’m pretty sure it can be argued how much artists’ efforts must be rewarded in creating amazing pieces. But people’s reactions would be the same as it’s already been said here. They would be listening less. Streaming normalized the notion of trying new genres, bands and formats. This wouldn’t have been possible if streaming music had not been so accessible to everyone. And did this so, despite the greedy companies striking everything down with copyright laws and trying to keep their products under their belts. For once, we have music services that serve pretty much all of the songs you want and their catalogues are not spread across multiple services that you have to subscribe to all of them like we had with cable TV.
When we look at the comments here, we see people saying they’re all right with the price changes. Even on the pirate forums, people are saying Spotify is one service that they can justify paying and they don’t need to pirate music any more. That should say something about the accessibility of these services.
So, I know plenty of our musician friends feel robbed because of these streaming services. But what they’ve gained from discoverability is due to the accessibility of music, which would not have been possible without these prices.
I certainly think it made a dent. It wasn't the same as the iPod, but that's because the iPod came out right at the time when online file sharing and music piracy were starting to become accessible to many. I was pirating music before I had an mp3 player, and listening on my computer. I knew people who burned CDs. And Walkmans were very popular, cassette tapes in particular changed how people listened to music pretty significantly. But it didn't drastically change the sales structure. They generally still had to go out and buy music to listen to it. Piracy existed, and plenty of people would record songs off the radio etc but it was pretty limited in most markets, while it ran rampant in others (third world countries specifically, but they didn't have as much money to buy music with anyway).
Well, iTunes didn't invent that. It just made it more accessible. Cassingles were a thing but kind of went away when CDs took over; however cassingles were something you generally saw more often in bigger shops; people living outside of major markets saw way fewer of them and had less selection.
I can agree with that. I think another piece that isn't really being talked about is not just about the sharing of music and reaching a wider audience, but the making of music. It's much, much, much easier to make music in 2023 than it was in say 1983. In fact, it's significantly easier to make music in 2023 than it was in 2003 -- I can say that with surety because I did it myself, and even if we are only talking about digital recording/DAWs, they've come sooo far in the last 20 years.
Musicians, even if they put a ton of effort and work into their art, can now focus that effort on the art instead of the actual labor of managing multitrack analog recording and cutting actual tape. Unless they want to of course.
I'm also a fan of mostly indie acts and this is precisely why I go to live shows and buy merch directly from them. It's near impossible for anyone to go into a recording studio and make a decent living. Touring is, as it has always been, where the money is made.
Ah, thank you for the clarification! I only read through a summary of that video, but it seemed like it made the same point as this article. Yeah; it definitely seems like a user-centric payout for streams would make sense, and isn’t that complex to implement.
Fwiw — beyond finding fairer platforms to consume music on — if you’re American and want to help, it looks like there’s an attempt at regulating streaming to be less awful for artists. So if you have a representative to call, it could be worth doing too.
Yeah, I got the email that they increased my premium subscription price by $1 and I was like "okay sounds fair."
I've gotten such great use out of Spotify over the years. A dollar increase is nothing. But I'm still patiently waiting on Spotify Hi-Fi, very aware that I could get that with Apple or Amazon at no extra cost. (I complain, but at this point I'm so used to Spotify, plus re-creating playlists would be a pain in the ass, so I'll just keep sticking to it).
I used apple music for years, switched to Spotify to try it, then switched back after a year. If you ever did change your mind there’s software to port over your playlists to other streaming services. I used STAMP but I know there’s a few others out there.
Thank you! I'll remember that, in case someday I do end up switching over.
I’ll also add, they only raised it by $1 after all this time (in $CAD), which is a very good deal still.
I shopped around for about 6 months. Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon. Spotify just gives the best service by far.
I couldn’t believe how annoying apple was to use. Literally every time you open the app to skip a song, or select something you’d get a pop up screen advertising another artist or feature. And it was an annoying pop up too, the kind that shifts the buttons slightly while loading so you press the wrong button when trying to quickly skip.
On top of that, I can’t believe how bad music suggestion is on apple. I listen to one random broadway musical song and it just starts suggesting ALL broadway music, even if it was just that one song I liked. And it doesn’t take into account tone of music, or singers, or anything. It really feels like it will just suggest the top 50 chart, or use a super broad caragory like “you listened to a country song, so now we will only give you country music in selections, even though that country song was actually a rock and roll song with a country setting”.
Also, if you own any of your Apple Music but then buy the subscription it makes it incredibly difficult to access JUST your paid for music on the service.
I could go on about how shite apples service was, it’s really the service of 1000 small cuts adding up to the worst thing ever.
YouTube and Amazon were okay I guess, but I didn’t like their apps, and some music I like was hard to find.
Spotify basically has no competition as far as I can see.
Yes, I agree that it's still worth it for listening to music, but if a better alternative shows up I might jump ship.
They are doing a terrible job by destroying and "simplifying" their UI/UX. Instead of giving users options, they constantly change it a lot while there was nothing to fix. Like the way Liked Songs as Library disappeared and a Playlist was returned. It feels very much like they disagree with the user and force "their way" of listening to music.
The podcasts and promotions (even for premium accounts) is what almost drove me away from the service. That one promotion of Drake was really weird and the pushing of Podcasts which aren't even remotely in my interest is very annoying. I just want an online database and listen to music (preferably HiFi) and not an "almost social medium" with music.
I am still pretty (unreasonably) furious about them changing the like icon in the mobile app UI from a heart icon to a + sign.
I fucking love music if it goes in my liked list I love it with my little pixelated heart.
I’m not doing list.append(song) like a machine just plussing my way to an array of sound files.
I had a pretty outsized reaction the morning of the update.
If I was the Spotify CEO I would have fired the product manager and designers on the spot who made that change.
I'm glad I left a year ago. More and more I'm trying to disconnect from services and try to buy products as much as I can. It was an initial investment, but once I caught up to buying my songs, it's cheaper to own your music than to rent (as long as you're buying less than 10 songs a month).
While I'd agree on principle, as I'm currently trying to rebuild my music library and set it up to stream from my home server, Spotify has been really good at finding new music for me and letting me know about new albums from artists I follow.
Yes, I could feasibly spend the money on a new album every month instead but I consider it the price of an album every month to determine if I should add a piece to my collection instead.
Honestly that's Spotify's chief value add for me. I love being able to listen to just about anything I can think to look for, but what I'd miss the most is notifications of new releases from the thousand-odd artists I'm following there. Keeping up with releases from hundreds of artists is a colossal pain in the ass that Spotify makes simple.
Yeah, that's a good point about recommendations. I've discovered dozens of new artists and hundreds of new songs through Spotify. I do get a bit nervous of them removing songs I enjoy without me noticing (which has happened) and then me never really hearing the song again.
Back in high school I used to have hundreds of GBs of pirated music and then creating all my playlists manually from there. Knowing I would always have it and be able to listen to it brought me comfort as well.
Overall, I still feel I'm getting good value from my subscription and when I got an email that it was going up two bucks to $15 for my duo plan I wasn't particularly concerned. I can't remember the last time the price went up but I feel this is more than fair for an app I use pretty much all day, everyday.
Lidarr allows you to follow artists and will find and download them through whatever means you set it up with (torrents or usenet). It's a good replacement I reckon, I'm currently moving to doing just that and streaming via emby to my phone.
When I can "ethically" purchase my music, I will. But after reading Chokepoint Capitalism I see no reason to do so over the big publishers.
Cool I like the sound of lidarr. I already use soulseek for getting music from bigger artists who won't feel the hit and then use bandcamp for the smaller artists who I feel need the coin.
I reckon I just need to get a decent memory cars for my phone and then I'm good to go.
I'm a Sonarr and Radarr user so this one slipped the net! Though, I've had issues with those services, I was only able to get Rarbg working as a tracker and we all know what happened there. Still, the metadata alone might be worth getting it set up!
You should check out https://wiki.servarr.com/ for a comprehensive list of the ARR apps cinematic universe. :)
I've tried to use Lidarr before just for tracking, not downloading and it didn't work out for me. I assume it was the size of my library that was the issue but it just behaved inconsistently and would not accurately record which releases I had. And I had no way to force it in a way that reflected what I wanted.
It's just a difference in music tastes. That's just a service I don't need. If I want new rock songs, I'll look for them. If people that I follow recommend something, I'll give it a listen that way.
I'd personally find it creepy that an algorithm knows so much about me that it can predict my music, but I know I'm in the minority there. All I need is good song quality and a good music player. I'm happy to get recommendations the hard way.
The upside is that I own my music, I can organise and edit it how I want, I can put it where I want and play it how I want, it will never disappear, and I don't have to continue a business relationship with a corporation to retain access to it.
For me, it's just reading music reviews, reading the forums on the torrent tracker I use, and checking out opening acts from shows I go to.
I'm sure it depends on what kind of music you like, but those work better for me than the recommendations I got from streaming services.
You can also just use youtube music
It's gonna sound stupid but listening to music on YouTube always cluttered the front page from all the videos instead.
Plus, I've been burned by Google with Play Music and everything, I just don't really like giving them money.
I'm not saying give them money, you don't even need to integrate your youtube account, I use an app called ViMusic on my phone that doesn't even require being logged in and works similarly to ytmusic premium with offline cache and everything.
Personally though, I listen to music all the time on regular youtube and my front page is fine.
What are you using to do this? I have a Jellyfin server set up through caddy and the idea of hosting my own music sounds great.
I've been toying with the Plex music integration but as I'm still building the base I haven't really committed to it.
Fair enough, thanks!
Curious as to what your reasoning is to build this out vs using plexamp - regardless I'd be interested in trying it out if you build it out!
I saw that plexamp went free the other day but I'd already started setting up Plex and I'm really lazy.
My issue is that so much of the music I listen to isn't easily accessible elsewhere. There's a lot of Japanese bands I love but buying their albums implies importing them from Japan, if they're even available. There's artists that only release music digitally and are only on Spotify. There's artists that are so unknown or long retired that you can't buy their albums.
If I had the choice and funds, I'd get as much as I can in physical form or on Bandcamp. But it's not that easy.
I listen to a crap ton of Japanese indie stuff and have never touched Spotify or imported a physical album. There's almost always a digital channel outside of Spotify where you can get your music. Check out booth, dlsite, mora, ototoy, recochoku. Outside of spotify, sites like deezer and amazon music have ways to rip lossless music off of them. Hell, if you're out of luck, contact the artist themselves if they're relatively small, there's a good chance they'll reply to you.
I'd rather support piracy over Spotify if you really can't legally get it anywhere.
I listen to a lot of buttrock and jpop trash. I've found pretty obscure stuff in the iTunes store myself. Don't have any apple products, but if I can't find it on Bandcamp, it's my next option.
I should have switched to Tidal a year ago or better. Now there's no reason not to. And their family plan is now the same price as Spotify's duo. For hifi audio, there's really a noticeable difference in quality... Spotify caps out at 320kpbs I think? Tidal hifi goes up to 1411kpbs.
And as far as I know, Tidal still pays more to the artists than Spotify. The others are good reasons to switch, but I think this last one is the best. From what I've read, it's still a pretty paltry share... But at least it's facing the right direction.
I had considered Tidal in the past but it isn't as feature rich and didn't have as expansive of a library. I've always wondered if the higher audio quality is more of a placebo effect anyways.
For what it's worth, Tidal got caught up in controversy for having 'masters' of Neil Young's music when they were never supplied with them. I wouldn't be surprised if it goes beyond just his catalogue.
https://m.neilyoungarchives.com/news/1/article?id=Tidal-Misleading-Listeners
Tidal does provide better quality (though several YouTubers have done evaluations that show that the quality is not nearly as good as Tidal claims it is) but falls way short on convenience and device compatibility so I went back to Spotify. Unfortunately Tidal is trending in the same direction as Spotify of paying artists less and less as they try to make their business profitable. This video goes into the core problem that all the streaming services face and why we will likely never have a service that pays artists fairly:
https://youtu.be/gDfNRWsMRsU
Hell's bells, that video really took any virtuous feelings I had about Tidal and vaporized them. And you're absolutely right about the app's functionality and interface leaving much to be desired.
I also live/work in a fairly rural area (PNW about an hour from the Canadian border), and although some of the higher quality streams do sound better, if I skip a couple of songs it takes quite a while to buffer a new track. So, Spotify it is for now unfortunately... Also, I don't want to pay a third party service to transfer playlists over 1,500 songs.
I feel pretty discouraged about it. I listen to a lot of music, I think Spotify said last year I listened to something like 40-50k minutes. I don't know how many thousands of dollars I've spent on CDs from my mid teens to my mid 30s. Enough where the idea of rebuilding my collection digitally album by album doesn't sound feasible.
Anyway, thanks for sharing the link. The guy had a lot of interesting things to say. Especially from a musicians perspective. :)
Further reading:
Spotify: Record jump in active users in second-quarter
Euronews | 25th July 2023
Spotify shares fall on revenue miss and weak guidance
CNBC | Ashley Capoot | 25th July 2023
I've used my fair share of Spotify Premium, it's what I currently use. I feel like $9.99 was a nice sweet spot price wise; I'm conflicted, I feel like, compared to something like Youtube Music, it's auto playlists based on stuff you listen to are a little better. My main worry would be, since this is just a dollar, what if it becomes another dollar later, and then suddenly it's $14.99 which is above what I would say is worth it.
Unsubscribing (and later resubscribing) is really easy though. I instantly dropped premium within minutes of receiving the mail. If I don't like alternatives I will resubscribe again but I doubt it.
I've been a Spotify Premium user for a long time now but I'm beginning to question if it actually worth it because people sure don't seem happy about YouTube Premium but it's actually a dollar cheaper per month in Canada if you get the annual plan and it comes with YouTube Music which AFAIK is on par with Spotify for simple music streaming. Can anybody that used both services before chime in? Am I missing something or are people just more upset with YouTube due to their ad blocking antics?
I pay for both Spotify and Youtube Premium. I don't really like the youtube music service. The app and website just aren't as nice and there is no desktop YT music app. If you wanted to save money and had to pick only one, I'd go with YT, but for me it's worth paying for both. The cost is inconsequential compared to most other luxuries.
I see, thanks for the info. Sounds like Spotify is the better experience for music
For another perspective, I prefer YouTube music over Spotify having tried both. I ultimately still miss google play music though.
And yeah, it also comes with YouTube premium which is nice.
Youtube Music is alright; minus the website. As a phone app, it's pretty good, nothing special, works well for me; the website, not so much, I've had issues with it, especially on long playlists, the website can just flicker and forget where I was, not an issue I've had on the mobile app.
I guess my main gripe, even if minor, is that Youtube Music bleeds over a bit more into regular Youtube than I would like for some stuff; ex. liked videos gets filled up with Music stuff. That is a minor issue yes, but it can be annoying to me sometimes.
I would also find it very annoying if my YouTube recommendations got flooded with music videos, thanks for letting me know
Yeah, I wish I could stop that. I don't listen to music on YouTube. But it's better than getting alt right videos just because I watched one gun video.
I switched from Spotify to YT Premium last year due to cost. I also watch a load of YT videos, so it works out well for me. Personally, I think YT Music has come a long way from where it started, with recent UI changes that look far more like Spotify and a great recommendation engine for finding new stuff. There are still some features that aren't quite parity, but it's not worth switching back to Spotify.
As another data point (from my side), I have music up on most streaming platforms and get paid basically nothing from Spotify despite it having the most plays. I get full split and it's ridiculously small. For April sales, 1 play gives me $0.004898996437 from Spotify. That same 1 play is $0.014451227495 from Youtube Music. 33% of the payout for the same song in the same month. From the musician's perspective, Spotify is kind of a joke. To make minimum wage for my state (a paltry $12/hr or $24960/year), I'd need 5,094,922 plays per year (or 424,577 per month OR 2450 streams per hour). And that's minimum wage. Imagine trying to make a living off of that. Also keep in mind that I am getting 100% of the money Spotify saves for the payout. For people on a label, with a manager, etc, they get far less of a cut.
Me, a Dane: 😐😑
There were a couple of threads about it over on r/denmark. I still have no clue why the subscription is so much more expensive for us than the rest of the world? It's pretty weird
I pay for Pandora Plus, which is their middle-tier plan with ad-free stations but no on-demand playing of specific songs. For $5/mo it's great for putting on background music and discovering new artists, then I use the savings over a more expensive subscription like Spotify as a budget to buy digital albums or CDs on Bandcamp, directly from the artists, or on Amazon (as a last resort). It means all my on-demand playing is of music I own using any player software I choose (as opposed to being held hostage by some streaming service's interface). I've been buying music for decades so I have quite a beefy library, so while it may not be for everyone I'm quite happy with this setup.