this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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I'm in the UK. Spotify family subscription is £17.99/month (US$ 22.84). Same price as Netflix premium, although I have Netflix standard at £10.99 (US$ 13.96). Now, I know that they give a high percentage to the record companies, source says 70% but really? What are they doing over there? They seem to have some fundamental problems. With Netflix, my history, watchlist, search results, etc. are consistent across sessions and devices. Spotify can't manage this. Netflix of course produce a significant quantity of original content. Spotify do a few live music sessions. I don't think that the user experience with Spotify has changed significantly in the last 6 years that I have been a customer.
So they're not making money. They're not improving the user experience or meeting the market standard for it. They're not producing original content and they seem unable to comply with local laws. Why have they not been disrupted by one of their competitors?
What you are missing is that they are majority owned by the same record companies they are paying out 70% to. They even specifically structured the deals between Spotify and labels so that they pay labels in a way that allows labels not to credit artists for nearly 50% of all streams meaning the label gets to keep it.
Chokepoint capitalism by Cory Doctorow is a great book that goes into detail about how it works
Anecdotally, about 25% of my circle have moved to various other services, so maybe not a huge disruption but they're definitely losing some customers to competitors at least
What other services?
I like Deezer.
I'm experimenting with Synology music without subscription.
I moved to Tidal.
I've been using Tidal for a couple years and I don't miss Spotify ever. Same price, higher quality, and they don't pollute my screen with endless recommendations.
If you ask support they will tell you that they're recommendations, not ads. 😂. Like fuck off. I don't want full screen ads. I want music. Also forget podcasts. God damn.
Tbh I prefer the different play sessions between devices of device A is offline.
That way I have my work playlist at work and my home playlist at home ready to play.